Sexuality and the experience of sexual minorities in the workplace are under-researched areas. The research reported here - a case study in one government department in the UK - utilizes a discursive research method to uncover a theme that is at the centre of this experience - silence. In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with individuals eliciting their stories on their experience as lesbians and gay men in the workplace, and these stories were then used to promote more general discussion within focus groups. Understanding silence in the research process with relation to both the researcher and the respondent was found to be vital for research in this area, and the article raises issues to do with uncovering previously silenced voices. Silence also emerged as a recurrent theme in the research and found that there were many ways in which this silence can play an integral role in organizational discourse and the creation of social identity. We have therefore suggested that silence could be referred to metaphorically as ‘negative space’, as this term helps to emphasize the multifaceted nature of silence. The research highlighted reactive silence and the absence of response, silence as a form of suppression, of censorship and of self-protection and resistance. It also concludes that silence, in all its changing forms, influences and contributes to the creation of social reality and gay identity for lesbians and gay men in the workplace.

This paper is about 'coming out' and the process of disclosure and non-disclosure of minority sexual identity in organizations. The process of 'coming out' is important for the individual lesbian or gay man since it is concerned with the discursive recognition and renegotiation of their identity. The study uses storytelling and a double narrative approach, where 92 individuals were interviewed to produce 15 stories of coming out, which were used for discussion in focus groups. The research took place within 6 organizations -2 emergency services, the police and the fire service, 2 civil service departments and 2 banks. A conceptual framework is developed to explain the process of disclosure, showing it to be a continuing process rather than a single event. The concept of performativity is used to explain how in coming out the discursive practice and the telling of sexuality performs the act of coming out, making it an illocutionary speech act, and one which is made as an active or forced choice. The performative and perlocutionary speech acts interact with available subject positions thereby impacting on the individual's subjectivity. Sexuality is an under-researched area of diversity in work organizations, as well as being one of the most difficult to research, so the level of access afforded by this research and the framework it produces provides a significant contribution to our understanding of minority sexual identity at work.

This empirical study in one UK Fire Service explores the experiences of sexual minorities in the workplace, an under-researched area of diversity, but one that has a growing focus of interest. The article aims to show that the organizational culture has an impact on sexual minorities in a number of different ways. The UK Fire Service is an organization which is fragmented into regional brigades, fire stations and watches (shifts) and it is at the level of the Watch that firefighters interact very closely. This article shows the complexities and dynamics of sexual minorities living and working in the Watch culture in the Fire Service. In particular, it highlights the different dimensions of the Fire Service culture which have an impact on sexual minorities. These are: the work environment, discourse, ways of working, rules, association, signs and symbols.

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