He approached Dresdner’s personnel department, asking whether the firm could extend the same health benefits to the domestic partners of gay employees that it provided to the spouses of straight ones. The situation festered for nearly a year, until the following April, when Daniel, emboldened, decided to force the issue.
Instead, Daniel says, he was relegated to a kind of purgatory, shunned by his boss and many of his colleagues. Though Daniel had assumed the duties of a vice-president, Fugelsang never got around to signing the papers that would make the promotion official. But beyond the superficial correctness, something was very wrong. Suddenly he seemed more careful about his language. In the past, says Daniel, Fugelsang, a gruff, fiftyish executive who heads Dresdner’s North American division, had made crude anti-gay jokes. A memo announcing his new position was distributed to all departments.īut according to Daniel, gossip about the Fire Island remark quickly reverberated through the office and soon reached his boss, George Fugelsang. The firm had printed new business cards and stationery and even fabricated a new signboard for the door of his office. His boss complimented him regularly on his work and, Daniel says, rewarded him with a big promotion a few days earlier. Until then, Daniel’s career had been proceeding according to plan. His beach house was on Fire Island, he replied. But after four years at the firm, he was tiring of the charade. In the past, he would have constructed a plausible cover: a particular Hampton that he could bluff some knowledge about, the name of a fashionable restaurant or two. Like most other gays on Wall Street, he had lived a strictly closeted existence at work. For Daniel, it posed a dangerous dilemma.Ī quiet, button-down executive with master’s degrees from both Harvard and Yale, Daniel was hardly an activist. Where’s your rental? asked his co-worker.įor most of his colleagues, the question would have been an innocuous one. When a colleague remarked on his suntan, Daniel explained that he had spent the weekend at his beach house. It was a Monday in late June, and Daniel had reported for work at the securities division of Dresdner Bank, Germany’s second-largest. But something was about to sink his career on Wall Street: He couldn’t bring himself to lie. Joe Daniel’s salary had broken the six-figure mark, and he had just received a promotion to vice-president.