Hello, Friends. It's June again — and a year ago this month, something happened that I mostly kept to myself. We start here.
I was at my desk in the middle of an ordinary workday when I caught myself waiting for something. Two of the banks I'd spent a career around — Bank of America and Wells Fargo — had, in past years, changed their logos to the colors of Pride for the month. I wanted to see it again, so I pulled out my phone and went looking for them on LinkedIn.
Neither had.
For a few years, those logos had been everywhere. Every June, the same banks, the same brands, the same wash of color across the same profiles — so common that by the end it barely registered. You could call that saturation, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. But the stranger truth is that the more routine it became, the more it came to mean to me — which is the opposite of how these things are supposed to work. When something is everywhere, it stops being a statement and starts being ordinary. And ordinary was a thing I hadn't known I'd been waiting my whole life to feel.
I've spent a career as something people quietly adjust to — and even now, married, I still run a quiet calculation before I say “my husband” to someone new, still watch for the way a face resets once it knows. To watch the institutions I'd built a life inside begin to treat my existence as ordinary, even cheaply, even for a month, was to glimpse a world I'd mostly given up expecting: one where being like me wasn't a special occasion. I learned a long time ago that when someone is willing to go first, everyone behind them breathes easier. The logos, hollow as some called them, did a small version of that. They went first, so that on an average Tuesday I didn't have to.
LinkedIn was where I went looking, because LinkedIn is where work lives — and work, of all places, was where I'd started to feel it. Never completely, but for a while now I'd been feeling something at the office I hadn't expected to: ordinary-ish.
And then, over a handful of months, it came apart. First the DEI programs — not only at my two banks but across hundreds of companies, all of them reading the same wind, all of them folding once it was declared illegal. Then the leadership programs meant to bring people like me forward went quiet. And then it was June, and the logos didn't come.
I don't think anyone decided to hurt me — that's almost the worst of it. No one was thinking about me at all. They went because they'd become a liability, the colors went because they were no longer free, and the frictionless speed of it was its own answer.
Almost overnight, I felt less ordinary than I had in years.
I put the phone down and sat with it for a while. I didn't say anything to anyone — there wasn't anyone in that moment I could have said it to, and even if there had been, I'm not sure I could have explained it without sounding like a man undone by a logo.
I had been shown what ordinary feels like, and then I watched it pulled quietly back — not out of malice, but because it had stopped being convenient to leave it there. For months I'd been quietly doing the math: the programs, the language, the slow subtraction of one thing after another. The empty profile on my screen wasn't a single blow; it was the last number added to a column I'd already been adding up. And the sum of it had a name: my erasure, for someone else's comfort.
And here is where I want to call it silly. After a career spent managing other people's comfort, every instinct I have is to wave it off — to tell you it's a small thing, that I'm fine, that no grown man should be thrown by something this small. I know how that sounds. But it was never the logo, and calling this grief silly would only finish what the withdrawal began: erasing myself a second time, from the inside. So I won't. I sat at my desk that day and I grieved, and it was the right size for what had been taken.
It's a year later now, and June has come round again — with even less this time. Fewer companies, fewer colors, one more quiet subtraction in a year full of them. The signals of safety are disappearing.
The people who made these decisions will never sit at my desk. They'll never see the version of this that matters — a man with his phone in his hand, doing math, going quiet. They ran the numbers and decided that standing up for something important wasn't worth what it might cost them, and so the price was paid somewhere else, somewhere they'll never think to look. That's the part that stays with me: not that they decided I was negotiable, but that they'll never know they did.
I didn't say anything that day, and for a long time after, I didn't say anything at all. When I finally did, I found I hadn't been alone — others had run the same quiet calculation in their own offices, each of us privately sure we were asking too much just for noticing. So I'm saying it now, out loud, for all of us who did the math and said nothing. When institutions stop being willing to go first, the going-first falls to the rest of us, and the smallest act of refusing to disappear quietly is to name what we lost. This is the story I'd have wanted to read — the one those who made these choices will never be in the room to hear.
"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB