Celebrating Love and Acceptance at Speechify

What does acceptance mean and look like to you? 

The first thing that comes to mind for us at Speechify is that it should be for everyone. It might sound simple, but history has shown that winning acceptance hasn’t always been so easy. Countless communities across nations, genders, ethnicities, races, religions, abilities and sexualities continue to fight for this basic right. We live in societies that are obsessed with expecting people to fit into boxes based on narrow ideas of who belongs. 

At Speechify, we firmly believe the opposite—that there’s no reason for everyone to try to fit in these boxes. Not anymore. 

This Pride month, we talk to two members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community who also work with the Speechify team. Join us as we learn more about their coming out journeys and how they fully express who they are in their own words. As Billy Porter said, “We are at the forefront of telling our own narrative. It's not at the hands of other people who are outside the community anymore. It's so dreamy - I just feel so blessed to have lived long enough to see this day.”These journeys have come with their own challenges, and we deep dive into them and learn how our team members  successfully overcame them. We also discuss what diversity in a workplace truly means and their perspective of the continuous evolution of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.

Brian Casey, Recruitment Manager

I am a technical recruiting manager with Speechify, managing the process for roles such as software development, quality assurance and support. I also manage product recruitment along with a small team of recruitment coordinators.

I came out of the closet around 20 years ago. It was a different landscape than the world that we live in now. So much has changed since then. Back then, it was rare for me to have a safe space where I felt like I could fully be who I was. Pride has always been about that for me. Pride has now evolved into a space where it is necessary for us to talk about the change that we still need to see, and help bring up other members of the LGBT community who maybe aren't as safe as I am as a gay man.

If we talk about the colours of the pride flag, I'm colorblind, but I am also gay. I identify with a lot of the aspects of the rainbow flag and especially love that we added the black and brown to it to represent people of color in our community who still need our support in a lot of ways.

I realized I was gay when I was around 5 years old—more than 30 years ago. At that time, I knew it was something that I wasn't supposed to be, or at least what society was telling me I shouldn't be. So I kept it all in until I was around 15 or 16. I started to realize that this is really who I am and there was no going back from it. I started out by telling my best friend. We were in my Jeep Wrangler. I was driving her to school and I turned to her and I said, “Hey, I like somebody new.” And she was like, “Oh, what's her name?” And I told her the boy’s name, which I don’t even remember anymore. And all she said was, “That's a boy's name.” And it felt so good to say it out loud. I still remember that whole journey and it's amazing to me, especially later when I came out to the rest of my friends and my mom. I just think about how it was so different. 

When I came out to my mom, she was actually worried for me. We were in rural Michigan and the time frame we were in was much more socially conservative. She told me I had to be careful about coming out at work because they could fire you for being gay. I had to be careful who I shared this with as they could really hurt me for being my true self. I remember a notorious incident from that time, and it happened only two or three states away: Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay. This was right around the time I came out. My mom also had a friend that died of AIDS. So of course, she was worried and asked me to be super careful. We have treatments for it now, but back then my mom was really worried about my safety. It's wild to think about all those times and the scary things and incidents that were included as a part of my coming out. I still think there's a lot of work to do, of course, to make everybody feel included. But I'm so glad that some of those things are safer for people and a lot of people are feeling more comfortable coming out earlier and are being supported by their community and their loved ones.

I am thankful to have a really good support system with my mom and with my friends, and they enabled me to be where I am today. There were also support groups and communities throughout college. All of it really helped me. I am a musician, so I had my music to calm my brain. I played a lot of violin and saxophone during that time as well. 

I just moved to Chicago, the third largest city in the United States, and I'm absolutely going to attend Pride here. It will be my first time. I have heard it's quite a big celebration here. We should always remember the roots of pride, how it started as a rebellion against how queer people were treated at the time, especially trans people. There's still more work to be done and to be dealt with. It feels good to be around other people who are a part of the same community, to be a part of celebrations where everybody else is queer just like you. It really makes you feel at home and I'm very much looking forward to that. Some of my favorite drag queens are coming up to Chicago for the event and I can't wait to watch them perform, too.

Speechify is a great place to work as a part of the LGBT community. Everybody's really supportive. I think I've worked in situations for and interviewed at companies before where they ask really heteronormative things of people, especially men. Once, during an interview process, they were trying to gauge my competitiveness to be a successful recruiter and asked me about my extracurriculars in college. I talked about our orchestra and how I was the second violin section leader, my marching band, and the fact that I was one of the only freshmen on the block my first year, etc. I also talked about being a part of the governing committee of my school and the budget committee for my school board. My time in Japan. The response to this breadth of experiences in my life was a simple question: What about sports? Sports was the only extracurricular that they understood or considered. They were not very comfortable with me not being in sports. Even though I did get that job, I always felt that I didn’t fit the norm. I've never felt that way at Speechify. Here, I can be successful in my own way and tap into my strengths to be a leader. I don't have to follow any norm that has been placed on me by society. As a gay man, I have always wondered if I should be lowering my voice, do I have to present myself in a certain way to be taken seriously. It's something that's always on the top of my mind. But here, I've never felt like that.

Having a diverse workforce means that you have people representing diverse ideals from different backgrounds, from different cultures, and from different ways of thinking. A lot of us perceive the world differently, and having that spectrum of different understandings of the world is what will make any sort of business successful. To be a good, successful and diverse company, you need to be inclusive in your hiring practices. You need to hire people from all different backgrounds and walks of life, and you need to make sure that your company culture keeps and supports those people, taps into their strengths, and doesn't try to force them to fit some sort of norm to be successful. I think it's all about realizing that different people's strengths can be tapped into as opposed to focusing on places where they fall short. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. We can absolutely nurture those weaknesses to become better at what we do, and we should, but I also believe that we should really focus on how we can utilize our strengths and tap into those to be successful.  

Samuel Hirishhorn, Video Editor

I'm a video editor and I have been working with the growth team at Speechify since June of 2021. I work on our performance marketing, as well as some original ads for social.

Pride Month is a time to recognize an important part of my identity and a lot of my loved ones’. To me, it's a time to create space for people in the LGBTQ community where not only do they feel seen, but also appreciated. To me, Pride's not about anything except simply celebrating the LGBTQ community.

I identify as pansexual. When I was younger, it wasn't something I gave a lot of thought to simply because I saw sexuality and queerness as binary: you were either gay or you weren't. And then I realized that just as gender can be a spectrum, sexuality is also a spectrum. I had spent many years existing without a label and this realization honestly relieved a lot of pressure for me, knowing that I didn't have to identify in any certain way. Towards the end of college and after long conversations with my long term partner, I was able to find a label that worked for me and I felt comfortable with. My coming out story was very much about going at my own pace and not pressuring myself to fit into a box. Having a lot of people in my life who are gender non-conforming and queer, witnessing their journeys and experiences really helped me come into my own and find my own path.

When I am walking around in the world, people generally assume I am straight. Given my external appearance, people don’t always assume I am queer which I think is lucky for me because I didn’t have to worry for my safety in public. A lot of challenges I've had to face were related to self acceptance and realizing that other people can believe that being queer is wrong, but their point of view doesn't have to impact the way I'm expressing myself. I also have a queer partner who is fashionable and doesn't restrict themselves to traditionally feminine or masculine clothing. I've been able to overcome my challenges through fashion in a huge way.

What I love about Pride Month is witnessing queer spaces really light up, whether it's TV shows or queer icons, and there's this general sense of camaraderie and recognition among people in the community and also allies. This month is a time to recognize and celebrate. Also, this is my first pride parade after coming out, which is very exciting.

It's been really great seeing the community open up towards our trans members. In the past, queerness was thought of as gender binary, restricted to being gay or not, or identifying as male or female. Now, the community is increasingly accepting of trans people, and this has really been great to see because I have trans friends and some people I went to school with. Seeing how much the community has evolved and made them feel safe, especially considering how some states in the USA are still very unaccepting, is really cool to see. They deserve a space in this world, and I think the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community deserve more concentrated efforts to accept and welcome them. 

With Speechify, I work in a very creative aspect and I feel very comfortable sharing my experiences and my ideas because there's an inherent lack of judgment and an openness to new ideas and concepts. My sexuality doesn’t come up much in conversations at work and it doesn’t have much to do with my job. But at the same time, the openness and creativity that everyone in my team shares has been super beneficial. It has made me feel a lot safer participating in this blog, knowing that it would be accepted, just like an ad idea that is based on my experience being queer would be. It wouldn't be swept under the rug. Being queer in the workplace is definitely a smoother experience for me because of this acceptance.

It is not easy to define a diverse workforce. It pulls from more than one group of people. In a team, you cannot have people who are homogeneous, who come from the same background, who look the same and who have the same experiences. You need to pull from all diverse areas based on experience, race, ethnicity and even age. 

Diversity in the workplace means that instead of trying to just look in one group or one area of people who maybe are more similar to you or more in line with your experiences, you actively seek out and hire people who are from a different background or might have different experiences than yourself. This way, you end up with a more accurate representation of our current and potential customers. As a truly diverse workforce, your people bring their own perspectives, skills, talents & personalities. When you have this kind of diversity of thought and background, it ends up paying its dividends and really benefits you in the long run.