At Pepco, we recognize it’s been a tough year in so many ways for our communities. Discrimination and hate crimes affected Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), new forms of anti-transgender legislation emerged across the nation, and we anxiously awaited the sentencing of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. In the midst of all these extensively covered events, the everyday reality for many – including some of our employees – meant teleworking and participating in virtual meetings and activities. To realign, revitalize, and reunite ourselves, Pepco re-energized our 2021 Pride programming. This June, we, along with our sister companies Atlantic City Electric and Delmarva Power, proudly showcased inclusivity, openness, and ways to reaffirm our commitment to our diverse local communities. 

Realigning Ourselves. Pepco is one of three utilities that make up Pepco Holdings, a company providing electric and gas service to portions of southern New Jersey, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and Delaware, in addition to the District of Columbia and nearby Prince George’s County and Montgomery County. Historically, there were two separate Pride employee resource group (ERG) chapters serving our LGBTQ+ employees and allies, one for our northern region and one based in Washington. In January of this year we combined the two chapters, ensuring employees have access to the same events and resources, no matter their work location. The new, rebranded Pepco Holdings Pride ERG gives employees the space, safety, and support needed to feel empowered at work and to help foster professional relationships. 

The newly combined ERG also rotated in a new employee leadership team with highly enthusiastic representatives from all over the company. The diverse board includes employees from IT, HR, Engineering, Finance, Regulatory, and field-based operations, who were at the forefront of planning fresh events for June. 

Revitalizing Our Communities. Whether we’re providing essential services, or volunteering our time, supporting the communities we serve is a critical part of our everyday work – and we were excited to finally be able to engage with our customers in person. We renewed our annual sponsorship with The Capital Pride Alliance and were honored to be the advocate sponsor of the “Paint the Town Colorful with Pride” month-long event. You may have even spotted a few of our electric vehicles and bucket trucks rolling downtown with the rest of the PrideMobile parade, or our Edison Place headquarters decorated with rainbow LED lights at night. We greatly missed the energy of the annual Capital Pride parade, and we were thrilled to be back in person showing our support for our LGBTQ+ customers, families, and friends. 

We also acknowledge the many men and women who haven’t been able to work from home during the pandemic – including those who continue serving our communities at healthcare facilities, and our very own field workers. So, we wanted to pay homage to our local heroes by delivering hundreds of Ben’s Chili Bowl lunches to employees at Whitman-Walker Health. 

Reuniting the Workforce. We wanted this Pride month to be memorable for both our communities and our employees, so we pulled together a variety of virtual events for our employees to celebrate Pride. From joint events with BGE (part of our larger Exelon family of companies) where we discussed Netflix’s Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson film, to a special AAPI and LGBTQ+ intersectionality panel featuring the Blade’s publisher Lynne Brown. Both events served as a forum for participants to share stories about the struggles that people have faced and how they prevail to live their true, authentic lives. 

To round out our employee events, our Pepco Holdings Political Action Committee recently hosted a panel featuring Sarah McBride, senator, Delaware General Assembly; Luke Clippinger, chairman of the Maryland House Judiciary Committee; and Jeremy LaMaster, executive director, FreeState Justice. The trio showed immense dedication to expanding protections and removing barriers for LGBTQ+ individuals in our region and nationally. 

What’s Next? Reflecting on the past year we’ve had, we’ve found there is a silver lining. Had these events not occurred, would our employees be as open to sharing their stories? Would we take such pleasure in being outside with our neighbors on a hot June afternoon? And would we be as quick to offer thanks to those who work each day to keep our communities safe? While Pride month may be coming to a close, we don’t believe the advocacy, discussions, and celebrations should be limited to June. We’ll continue powering Pride for our employees, customers, and communities, with a drive that is just beginning to re-energize.

Megan Clark is senior communications specialist at Pepco Holdings.

During his campaign and in his first few months in office, President Biden has spoken often of the need to get back to bipartisanship in government. He recalls his time in the Senate when that was how he liked to work but recognizes it was much more possible back then. 

It is widely accepted that what was once the Republican Party is now the Party of Trump. It is a party controlled by hardliners who have no desire to compromise on anything. Their leaders in Congress, Senate Minority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are beholden to and behave as sycophants of Trump. So the fact that Biden appears to have reached a bipartisan agreement on a hard infrastructure bill with Republicans in the Senate must be seen as a major step forward. He is right when he said in an op-ed regarding the hard infrastructure bill: “The bipartisan agreement is a signal to ourselves, and to the world, that American democracy can work and deliver for the people.”

But the country could still end up without any progress being made if progressive Democrats, through their intransigence, manage to screw-up the infrastructure deal because they aren’t willing to compromise. If that happens they will also be showing a total lack of understanding of how the Founding Fathers intended our government to work. 

President Biden made a big mistake suggesting he wouldn’t sign the deal on hard infrastructure he had just accepted from the group of Democratic and Republican senators he met with in the White House unless it reached his desk in tandem with a separate soft infrastructure bill. He has already walked that comment back and the bill appears to still be alive. 

So as the bipartisan deal moves forward it is important to recognize not only Republicans but Democrats could sabotage it and cause it to fall apart. Just reading Jamaal Bowman’s (D-N.Y.) quote is an indication of how that could happen. He said, “If it’s not where it needs to be, we’ll vote it down and see where it goes from there.” Well Bowman and his colleagues shouldn’t be shocked when it goes nowhere and they, not Republicans, are held responsible for hurting all those who could have benefitted from the bipartisan bill President Biden agreed to. 

The ball is now in the congressional Democrats’ court. It is up to them to work together to reach a deal on a soft infrastructure bill that can be passed with reconciliation both in the House and then get all 50 Democratic votes in the Senate allowing Vice President Harris to cast the tie-breaking vote. That won’t be easy and it means every Democrat, including more moderate ones like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-Maine) among others have to be on board with such a bill. 

Progressives need to face facts, the first being the $6 trillion reconciliation bill Sen. Sanders (I-Vermont) and some others are talking about will not happen. Even a progressive stalwart like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has shown she understands that and wouldn’t specify a dollar figure she would agree to when appearing recently on Meet the Press. 

In the best of all worlds, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) would get the most left-leaning Democrats along with the more moderate ones in the Senate, lock them in a room, and not let them out until they have an agreement on a soft infrastructure bill they will all support.

There is broad support for the bipartisan bill. According to a new poll even, “6 in 10 Republican voters say they favor the new $1.2 trillion infrastructure package negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators and endorsed by the Biden White House.” There is also broad support among Democrats for President Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Family Plan. It has been reported, “An overwhelming majority of Democrats back the plan (86%), while 54% of independent voters support it.” So congressional Democrats across the political spectrum should be able to get behind some form of this bill and pass it through reconciliation without any Republican help. 

If that happens, President Biden gets to show bipartisanship can work and Democrats get to move forward on a host of issues they campaigned on. It would be a tremendous win-win for the American people.

Coming out is undoubtedly part of the essence of contemporary queer culture. It represents a point in one’s journey to complete self-actualization where they fully accept themselves, their body, and also demand to occupy space in an insidiously cis-heternormative world. 

This concept/journey has become such a treasured part of queerness, so much so that National Coming Out Day is celebrated every year on Oct. 11, not only to commemorate the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights which demanded civil rights and legislation for LGBTQ people, but to also allow queer people to be visible, unabashedly live in their truths, and inspire others who may be fearful to do likewise. 

On this day, millions of people around the world take to social media to pen heartfelt posts that usually include a picture of the individual (most probably displaying some iteration of a Pride flag) coupled with a paragraph about their journey “living in the closet” and how they’re elated to be free. By letting the world know that they aren’t afraid to fully be themselves, queer people are claiming space where their presence has intentionally been ignored.

Albeit the power of “coming out” has to accent personal self-autonomy and challenge the pervasive nature of gender and sexual conformity, it ultimately does what queer liberation exists in contrast to: Appeasing cis-heternormative culture, or quite simply, making cis-straight (to be loosely referred to as “straight” for the rest of this piece) people feel comfortable. 

When LGBTQ people come out, they participate in a kind of performance that requires them to explain themselves to straight people. Queer people dig deep into their past experiences, which are often traumatic struggles, and in the process present what often translates into a chronology of why straight people should accept them, and more importantly, be “comfortable” with them. This is wrong.

Queerness should never center on straightness or straight feelings. By giving attention to straight people in queer journeys, we relegate undeserved power to straight people and allow for them to feel as if they need to be placated. 

Contemporary coming out culture indirectly uplifts what we are so vehemently fighting against — practices that prioritize being straight over being queer. So, as we continue to come out, employers will feel as if they have the right to know of one’s queer identity and terminate their employment upon learning of it.

Parents will demand to know of their children’s identity to “protect” them, which has more to do with managing their own appearances rather than caring for and empowering their queer children.

Friends and acquaintances will fight tooth and nail to decipher one’s queerness so they can gauge what this entails for their personal and religious beliefs, and ultimately whether the friendship should continue because they feel as if they may be courted by their queer friend (which mostly likely will never happen), thereby unsettling their perception of themselves. 

Random strangers may also physically abuse and/or kill someone who reveals their sexual and/or gender identity on the basis of feeling as if they’ve been “lied” to or intentionally deceived. 

So, if coming out is not the serve we think it is, then how to LGBTQ people live in their truth and show the world it’s okay to be queer? Well, the answer is simple: The culture surrounding gender and sexuality must change.

With regards to gender, we must get rid of both the “sex” and “gender” markers. Sex, in simple terms, refers to the genitals you were born with. Gender is the norms and behaviors that your parents and community around you project on you based on your sex. 

Time and again, it has become clear that, sex and gender simply cannot exist in binaries (yes, there are people who are born with both a penis and vagina simultaneously, or even neither.) The culture we function under has prescribed behaviors to people with certain genitals and expectations to people who identify with either of the two genders. This should stop. 

When it comes to health, medical professionals should be able to care for patients adequately and efficiently if they conceive of a person’s sexual organs as just being and not in relation to society’s faulty prescriptions. You might ask, what does this mean for science and research? Well, we can be inclusive in medical research by drawing on the experiences of all possible sex identities instead of just narrowing it down to just male/female. Intersex people exist too! 

We should also abolish the notion of gender. When children are born, we should raise them as non-binary. Non-binary identity is the pinnacle of liberation because it rebels from the traditional boxes that confine identities. It allows people to be whoever they want, whenever, and on their own accord. 

By encouraging children to socialize into nonbinary identity, we allow them to fully discover who they are and allow them to exist at any point in the identity spectrum without feeling the pressure to contort into a specific, one-dimensional mold of behavior. There is no one way to be anything. Identity is subjective and shifts and changes with time. Let children grow into themselves without being told from an early age that there’s a right and wrong way to be. 

We should also set boundaries on how to have conversations about sexuality. Oftentimes, the people most interested in a person’s sexuality have no business knowing about it. Sexuality and sex is intimate, and therefore, people should respect that boundary. What someone does during intercourse and with whom they do it should be no one’s business. It should have no repercussions on one’s social capital. Quite frankly, with whom someone sleeps affects no one but themself and the sexual partners involved. You won’t die if your friend didn’t tell you they slept with someone who has the same genitals as them. Your company won’t go bankrupt if your employee doesn’t disclose that they’re transgender. 

We should move past caring about representation and work towards actualizing our liberation. Representation is good; it is important to see yourself reflected in society. However, representation is not the end goal. 

We should work to give poor queer people access to stable food, shelter and money. We should push for more queer-friendly mental health facilities. We should establish free universal healthcare that allows transgender individuals to medically transition at little to no cost. We should actively become anti-racist and create an environment where queer people of color never have to live under the shadow of racism.

Finally, we must stop worrying about straight people. The truth is, no matter how much we may try to create space for ourselves at a straight table, we’ll never be truly welcome. If we want to liberate ourselves we have to center ourselves, experiences and feelings. We have to fashion our own tables. 

Appealing to straight people will never bring the acceptance and freedom we yearn so much for. If anything, it places us in an unending cycle where queerness is othered and never the norm enough for it to not matter. 

So should queer people stop coming out? Not necessarily. However, it is imperative that we create a world where queerness is normal enough that we don’t need to come out.