In June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn on a liquor-license pretext and beat patrons with nightsticks. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black, gender-nonconforming woman in the crowd, was among the first to push back. She was arrested more than 100 times over the years that followed, and her life ended after a Pride parade — ruled a suicide by police at the time, under circumstances that have never sat right with the people who knew her.

I've faced harassment in my career too — a colleague's inappropriate joke, a direct report asking to be reassigned to a straight-identifying manager. Every time, colleagues called it out before I even knew it happened, and the company acted. That's a genuinely different world than the one Marsha Johnson organized in, and it exists because people with far less power than I have ever had chose to fight anyway.

As a white man, I've had the option to blend into rooms where my LGBTQ status was never really on display, and my career moved faster because of it. That's not a reason for guilt. It's a reason to spend whatever influence it bought on the next person who doesn't get to blend in.