Guardian article relating to Lord Browne :-)

[ Updated 13:40, 3-May-2007 ]

As a result of the resignation of Lord Browne as the chief executive of BP this week for lying about his relationship with Jeff Chevalier, I got an e-mail from The Guardian newspaper. They were looking for "a gay executive who works in the City to write about their experiences", so I wrote a small piece for them. It's nice to see something that I've written published on a respectable web site :-).

Originally they forgot to attribute the article to me, however I was pleasantly surprised that they were able to rectify this in their online edition within a couple of hours, once I'd pointed it out :-). They were also happy to donate my fee for writing the article to charity. As I said in my posting about adverts and sponsorship a few weeks ago, I don't need any income from this blog at the moment, so donating any revenue it can produce to charity makes sense.

In their brief, one of the questions was "What happens on stereotypical City bonding occasions such as taking clients to a lap-dancing club"? Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised to learn that I was able to write something about that! Although they ended up cutting that bit out today, it may get used in another article which is due out on Saturday, which will look at being gay in the City in some depth. If not, I'll post it here :-).

Update 5-May-2007: There's a small quote from me about lap-dancing clubs in today's Guardian article Outed in the City. But for readers who're interested in what I originally wrote on this subject, the original submission that I sent to the Guardian for last Thursday's article has the following section:

Anyone who reads my blog will know that I don't believe in monogamy, although that doesn't stop me from loving my main boyfriend and being very committed to him. However it's clear to me from experiences on business trips with my heterosexual colleagues that they don't believe in monogamy either! I always find it interesting to watch the kind of things they get up to in places like "Top Ten" in Singapore, although I have no interest in participating. In that situation, in case someone doesn't know that I'm gay, I've got my standard response

"Hmmm, I think I fancy a dance with one of those two girls over there GB," says one colleague, "you're one doesn't look very pretty though!!"

"Oh don't worry about me," I reply, "I'm just a voyeur".

Somehow the mention of a word like 'voyeur' in the sexual context of a lap dancing club always gets me off the hook. But these days, most colleagues know that I'm gay so the issue doesn't usually arise.