Interviewing While LGBTQ: The questions and issues you should think about on the academic job market; Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/6/15

Richard D. Reitsma, Chronicle of Higher Education; Interviewing While LGBTQ: The questions and issues you should think about on the academic job market:

"When I entered the academic job market I made a personal choice to be open but not chatty about my sexuality. That was partly necessitated because my teaching and research focuses on LGBTQ issues. I never hid my sexual orientation on my application materials, yet neither did I state it directly. I left it to search committees to infer.

Over the years, I have spoken to LGBTQ colleagues who took a variety of approaches on the academic job market. Some chose to be even more direct than I was, mentioning their sexual orientation and their partners in their cover letters and during interviews. Others chose to be discreet — and discrete — presenting a professional self neatly divorced from the personal. They had both a regular CV that listed everything about them, and a "closeted" CV on which all references to anything remotely LGBTQ-oriented (conferences, workshops, courses, publications) were scrubbed from the professional narrative.

Being LGBTQ on the academic market was a far more sensitive issue 10 years ago, yet it remains dicey for candidates in large swaths of the country. To help other LGBTQ people struggling through the interview process, I’d like to offer the following tips."