For LGBQ employees, the disclosure and management of sexual identity in the workplace are likely to cause additional identity work. In this paper, we explore how such identity work is undertaken collectively by gays and lesbians on internet forums. Drawing on the literature on discursive identity work and social media affordances, we conduct a netnographic study of two internet forums, and analyse the ways in which these forums enable gay and lesbian employees’ identity work and guide their identity management processes. Overall, our study advances knowledge on sexual identity disclosure and management in three main ways. First, by shifting the focus from the identity disclosure accounts of individual gay and lesbian employees to online peer discussions around the topic, it sheds light on the broader context of identity management beyond the workplace. Second, our findings elucidate particular types of collaborative identity work – consulting, legitimating and questioning identity work – enabled by the affordance of interactivity of internet forums that inform and guide gays and lesbians’ identity management practices in organisations. Third, we identify and elaborate on specific discursive identity threats – the ‘falsehood’, ‘incoherence’, ‘exaggeration’ and ‘outdatedness’ of identity – which gay and lesbian employees are likely to encounter when reflecting on and performing specific identity management strategies, such as concealing or revealing their sexual orientation at work.

Dear reader, we are writing this piece as a collaborative collage based on our experience of our ongoing PhD journey in a "top" business school, on self-compassion and the inner saboteur, all saturated by the unpredictable developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to the linear argumentation of academic writing, collage writing works by opening up "new possibilities for understanding" what is written (Herrmann, 2020, p. 298). This introduction is where we manage your expectations, by letting you know that what follows below does not replicate the structure or the form of a conventionally organized paper.

This autoethnographic essay addresses microaggressions and normativity of gendered performances in relation to gay employees' and their sense of organizational belonging.In my puzzled account, through retrospective fragments, I explore my daily experiences in an organizational context as a homosexual person: the story includes reacting to intentional and unintentional microaggressions, navigating my sense of belonging, and finding my way through symbolic boundaries of gendered normativities. In particular, this paper sheds light on microaggressions as symbolic expressions of iterative gendered norms, which repeatedly lead to some employee experiences being cast as 'normal' and some as 'the other'. Methodologically, this paper furthers scholarly discussion on the use of autoethnography in understanding the daily struggles of lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer employees, whereas theoretically it elucidates the harmful effects of both microaggressions and iterative gendered norms on one's sense of belonging and the performance of the self, as well as discusses the difficulty of reacting to discursive violence.