Former BP CEO John Browne on Corporate Life in the Closet

Lord Browne: I was born a long time ago, 1948, and while I was at university, it was still illegal to be gay and actually have gay sex. You could go to prison. The law changed halfway through my time there. But before then, people were terrified to be anything other than totally straight, otherwise you could be blackmailed or you could find yourself in terrible trouble. So the law changed, and nothing actually happened. The behavior of many years was still there—that basically people did not approve of people being gay. They thought they were weak. They thought they were unreliable. They thought they were people that really shouldn’t be part of a business world, an academic world, a commercial world. So everyone pretended to be straight, and, indeed, so did I.

I was, you know, the son of an Auschwitz survivor. She told me two important things: One is, never tell anyone a secret, because they’ll surely use it against you. And the second is, never be a member of an identifiable minority, because when the going gets tough, the majority always hurts the minority. And in her experience, that was spot on. So I [had] a straight public life and a deeply secret gay life, which I rarely indulged in. I kept two lives separate, like many people, and I made sure they never collided.