Tone It Down

This happened on two fronts at once, and I’m not going to flatten them together.

A note before you start.

This is the first of two essays about the same year of my life. Part One is about what he did to me for being queer. Part Two, next week, is about what he did to me for being Deaf.

I’m splitting them on purpose, and I want to tell you why up front, because the split is the point.

He came at me from two directions at the same time. And each attack made the other one harder to name, because whichever one I tried to talk about, the other was sitting right there as a plausible alternative explanation. Maybe it wasn’t homophobia. Maybe it was about the accommodations. Maybe it wasn’t ableism. Maybe he just doesn’t like theatrical people.

That’s not an accident. That’s how it works.

So: two essays. Two fronts. One year.

Let’s start with the phrase.

“Tone it down.”

He said it to me about my facial expressions. He said it about my hands when I talked. He said it in private meetings, casually, the way you’d tell someone their fly was open. A small helpful correction. Just a note.

Tone what down, exactly?

He never said. He didn’t have to. We both knew.

My face. My hands. The way I move through a sentence. The specific, unmistakable, twenty-years-of-therapy-and-a-Broadway-childhood way that I am visibly, audibly, structurally queer.

Tone it down means: be less of what you are, in a way I can’t be held accountable for asking.

That’s the whole genius of it. He never once said “stop being gay.” He’d never be that stupid. He said tone it down, which sounds like professional feedback, which sounds like something a good manager says about presentation skills, which sounds like it could mean anything.

Ask me to prove it. Go ahead. Ask me to walk into an HR office and explain that “tone it down” is homophobia.

I know exactly how that sounds.

So did he.

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And then there was the other place he told me to tone it down.

My hands.

Not the hands I talk with. The hands I was learning to sign with.

I’m late-deafened. When I got there I was still new to ASL, learning it as an adult, which is exactly as humbling as it sounds. Everyone knew. It was known when they hired me. I was building a whole new language in my mouth, or rather out of it, in my hands and my face and my shoulders, at an age when most people have long since stopped building new anything.

And ASL is not a quiet language. It lives in the face. Expression isn’t decoration in ASL, it’s grammar. Your eyebrows carry syntax. Your mouth shape changes meaning. The size and speed of a sign is the difference between a fact and a feeling.

So imagine being told to tone that down.

In private, more than once, he told me I “signed gay.”

Let me spell out what that actually means, because I think people who don’t sign will skate right past it.

He was telling me that the way I was learning to speak, the language itself, coming out of my body, was too femme. Too expressive. Too much. That I was doing it wrong, not grammatically, but in the way that I am always doing everything wrong to men like him: too visibly, too gladly, too much like myself.

I was a beginner. I was trying. And the man in charge of half my work was watching my hands and grading me on masculinity.

He laughed at my signing, too. My mistakes. My fumbling. The way a new signer fumbles.

He found that very funny.

I want you to understand the mechanism, because this is the exact place the two campaigns braid together, and it’s why I’m writing two essays instead of one.

He used the deafness to attack the queerness.

The thing that had made me a stranger everywhere, the thing that took my music, the thing I was finally, at last, in a building full of people who understood it, he took that, and he turned it into one more surface on which to tell me I was too gay.

He didn’t have to choose which one of me to go after.

He’d found the place where they touched.

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Here’s what else he called me.

His secretary. As a joke.

A good little lady to have around. As a joke.

He told me, more than once, that he loved that he could treat me as “one of the girls.” As a joke.

And when I did my actual job, the job I have twenty years of experience doing, the job I was hired at a director level to do, he’d tell me that my role was to “make things look pretty.”

Not a joke. Just a summary.

That was his term for marketing. For strategy. For the work. Make it pretty. Which is, if you’re paying attention, the exact same insult as one of the girls, wearing a business suit.

It’s all one idea: the work you do isn’t real work, because the thing you are isn’t a real man.

He’d say something like that, and then he’d laugh, and then, this is the part I need you to see, he’d wait.

Because the laugh is the trap.

If I laughed along, he won. He’d established the terms. I’d agreed, out loud, in front of witnesses, that this was funny.

If I didn’t laugh, I was the problem. Difficult. Humorless. Can’t take a joke. Not strong enough for this job, which, incidentally, is a phrase he used on me directly.

There’s no third option. That’s the design.

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So here’s what I did, and I’m not proud of it, and I’m telling you anyway.

I laughed.

I laughed for a year. I got very good at it. I developed a whole toolkit: humor, deflection, gentle redirection, the light self-deprecating comeback that lets everyone move on. I told myself I was managing him. Setting boundaries subtly. Being strategic.

I have organized a thousand people to protest a mayor. I have stood at a podium behind a city seal and taken a microphone away from a man who wanted to spend a quarter million dollars keeping people like me out of public bathrooms. I have been spit on in a grocery store and gone back on television the next day.

And I sat on a Zoom call and laughed at a man calling me one of the girls, because I was scared of what he’d do if I didn’t.

Both of those people are me.

I need that on the record. Not because it’s flattering, it isn’t, but because I think a lot of people are carrying some version of that contradiction and quietly deciding it means they’re a fraud.

It doesn’t. It means the person doing this to you knew exactly which pressure to apply, and applied it, every day, for a year, until the thing you thought was load-bearing in you turned out to be a wall you could be worn through.

Courage isn’t a personality trait. It’s a resource. And resources run out.

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He had a method, and I want to describe it precisely, because I think it’s more common than anyone admits.

He was cruel on video calls and kind in writing.

Never the reverse. Never once.

The abuse lived on Zoom, where it evaporated the second the call ended. The record lived in Slack, where he was warm, funny, generous, a delight. He’d tear me apart in a meeting, hang up, and post something complimentary in the channel within minutes.

And I’d play along, because I was afraid of what happened if I didn’t.

So if you pulled our Slack history, if you did a records request, if you looked at any documentation that survives, you would find a perfectly pleasant working relationship between two colleagues who seemed to genuinely like each other.

That’s not a coincidence.

He told me, out loud, in a meeting, that he had “learned not to leave a trail that could be misinterpreted.”

He said it like a joke. Everything was a joke.

But sit with what that sentence actually means. Learned. Past tense. From experience. He knew what a complaint looked like from the receiving end, and he had adjusted his methods accordingly.

He wasn’t hiding it from me.

He was telling me. He was letting me know that he’d already thought about the part where I try to prove this, and he’d handled it.

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The isolation was surgical, and I didn’t see it while it was happening.

He told me not to work with the internal marketing team. They were sloppy, difficult, low quality. Don’t use them. Go around them.

None of it was true. I found that out later, they were excellent, and when I eventually explained to two of them what position he’d put me in, they were kind about it in a way that still gets me a little.

But by the time I knew, the damage was structural. He’d severed me from the only people in that building who did what I did, who would have recognized what was happening to me, who might have said he does that to everyone, you know.

Then he came for my reporting line.

He told me to always come to him before I went to my actual boss. Including our CEO. Anything I made, he saw first.

So when my actual boss asked me to show him something directly, which is a thing bosses are allowed to do, I’d show him. And then I’d get pulled onto a Zoom, and asked why I was sabotaging him.

That word. Sabotage. For showing my own boss my own work.

I want you to notice what that does.

He’d built a structure where doing my job correctly was, by definition, a betrayal of him. Where every normal professional interaction became a potential offense. Where I was always, at every moment, either loyal or a traitor, and he alone got to decide which.

You cannot win in that structure. There is no correct move.

That’s not a bug in it.

---

I did try, once, early. I went to my boss.

He was kind. He said something I still think about:

“He’s hard to work with. I know.”

I know.

He said he’d talk to him.

It’s a small division. It took about a day for the man to figure out who’d gone to my boss.

He pulled me onto Zoom immediately and berated me for “snitching.” He told me it proved I wasn’t “strong enough to do this job.” I tried to explain, gently, in that ridiculous careful way, that I’d tried to raise it with him first, that I’d used humor, that I’d tried to draw a boundary quietly.

He kept yelling. I left the meeting.

And three things happened inside me that day, and they happened permanently.

I learned that reporting him was dangerous.

I learned that reporting him didn’t fix his behavior, it made it worse.

And I learned that the man who was supposed to protect me had said I know, and then nothing had changed.

That’s the moment the door closed.

Everything after that, every joke I laughed at, every Zoom I sat through, every year of my professional life I spent making myself smaller in a company I had applied to three separate times because I wanted to work there so badly, all of it happened on the other side of that door.

---

I want to be precise about something, because I’ve spent this whole essay describing a building I was miserable in, and that’s not the whole truth.

I loved that job.

I applied three separate times before they hired me. Three. That’s how badly I wanted to be there. And when I got in, I did some of the best work of my entire career. I helped build something that had never existed before, a thing that made real people’s lives measurably better, and I am proud of it in a way I don’t have adequate words for.

The mission was good. The mission is still good. There were people in that building I would go to war for, and a few of them will read this and know exactly who they are.

This isn’t a story about a bad organization.

It’s a story about a bad man, and an institution that knew what he was.

Because that’s the part I can’t put down.

He didn’t slip through. He wasn’t a surprise. Complaints had been made before I ever got there, by women, by others, more than once. Leadership knew. People told me they knew, casually, in that particular tone: how are you holding up with him?

And, memorably: come to us when it gets bad.

When. Not if.

They knew. They watched. They put me on his portfolio anyway.

An organization can do genuinely good work in the world and still fail the people inside it. Both of those are true at once. And the second one doesn’t get canceled out by the first, no matter how good the mission is, no matter how much the mission needs defending, no matter how much you personally believe in it.

Especially then, actually.

---

I don’t have a clean ending for you.

That’s on purpose.

There isn’t one yet, because you’ve only heard half of it. This is the front he attacked me on for being queer, and I’ve told you what it cost, and it’s not a complete story, because it wasn’t happening alone.

At the exact same time, in the exact same meetings, from the exact same man, there was a second campaign running.

And that one took something from me that I genuinely did not think could be taken.

Next week: Not Really Deaf.

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YOU FOUND YOUR WAY HERE

Messy Reinvention is for people rebuilding a life that no longer fits, without pretending the demolition was beautiful. New essay most Saturdays. Come get the next one.

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👁️ THIS WEEK’S SILENT HORRORS

In Silent Horrors: Nico has spent his life knowing what a room wants before it says so. Graham opens the door before he knocks, laughs in exactly the right place, and never makes him rescue the silence.

Nico knows something is wrong. He goes back anyway.

Book Him Under Another Name.