There's much press about partnership benefits. But few companies offer them, and even fewer gay men and lesbians dare step forward to claim them. What's important is that partnership benefits are just the tip of a melting corporate benefits iceberg that may cause streams of many other benefits to flow to lesbians and gays for years to come.

The December 1995 report of the Hawaiian Commission on Sexual Orientation and the Law identified more than 450 rights and benefits now withheld from same-gender couples; many of these are from corporations. Lesbian and gay boomers in their 40s are beginning to realize there's no place like the corporate home, whether they own it or work for it. That's the bigger context.

The corporate form can offer benefits that are in reality assets we'd be hard put to amass by age 40: medical, disability, life and tax-deferred pension benefits--not to mention the whole raft of new corporate benefits created in the last 2 generations.

AIDS and the diseases of the second half of life have shown us vividly that these benefits in fact are assets unmatched by any real estate, stock portfolio or collectibles. Gay Men's Health Crisis reports several cases a month where medical costs have gone above lifetime maximums of $l million. Poor reimbursement also equals death. Remember: A million dollars is about what the average middle class person earns, and spends, in a lifetime. Without disability insurance and without biofamilies to rush in to support them, PWAs see their necessary but out-of-pocket medical expenses skyrocket towards $15,000 a year. A standard $1,000/month disability policy would chink that gap. But the cost of individual coverage is high. I have clients with good corporate coverage--i.e., the company pays their low disability premiums--who get 60-70% of their incomes tax-free as a result, nearly equal to their prior after-tax incomes.

In the corporate nest, upon hiring, we can elect incredibly inexpensive life insurance many times our salary usually without underwriting. And as with medical benefits, we can take it with us. PWAs are discovering that those policies are cash in hand, paying up to 80c on the dollar at a time when they need it. That's increasingly true for other major illnesses as well.

The true value of partnership benefits is that they're turning the spotlight on corporate benefits in general. With proper design this can be as true for the private corporation as for the standard public one.

All companies are not the same, and benefits are a key factor. Larger companies tend to have better benefits. High-tech companies, especially computer firms, are embracing gay & lesbian affirmative benefits because they have to scramble for high talent. Companies like Levi Strauss are affirmative because they know their markets: 70% of gay men specify Levis when buying jeans.

Why do gays need tailored benefits? Gays have income curves different from the rest of America. We have the freedom to build lives and friendships--not families and careers--in our 20s and 30s. If we saved our extra discretionary income at this point, tax-deferred, we'd be set for life financially. But instead, we often choose to travel, experiment and change during these decades, when the rest of the country is pressing themselves into various molds.

Then, ironically, when the rest of the country is ripping themselves out of their family fabrics and corporate caskets, we begin to make choices and settle down. We start to earn major incomes when heteros are often reeling from the costs of college, divorce and new careers. Yet in our later years we can hit glass ceilings and lose the extra discretionary income of our earlier years.

Because of our tendency to spend and not save we're often deprived of the momentum of compounding our financial assets over the years. This is why benefits are so critical. They are instant assets worth potentially millions over a lifetime. We can rebuild financially in our second 20 years if we have that protection; without it we're increasingly subject to ruin.

This is not to say we're wise to seek it all inside that corporate nest. A glance at the newspapers during the Reagan/Bush era was sufficient to indicate how secure that nest is. Yet downsizing and displacement by computers simply means our task of securing employment and better benefits is that much more important. It's time to secure the home front.

While we've been in the streets fighting AIDS issues a quiet revolution has occurred on the public corporate front that bears mightily on our future: the diversity movement.

A few years ago the Department of Labor delivered the American Corporation a bombshell no demonstration could match: By 2000 over 85% of all employees will be non-white and non-male. Corporate America suddenly woke up. The implications are startling. Corporations have zoomed way past affirmative action philosophies and methodologies. They're no longer playing legal games with the government. They're facing demographically determined futures where their staffs and markets are going to be decidedly different and where their staffs and markets must be diverse.

At the same time, computer technology suddenly made the dream of 'cafeteria' benefit plans' a genuine reality. Today's technology permits even a modest-sized corporation to handle the complexity of theoretically 39,000 benefit plans for 39,000 employees. 10 years of hard work with regulators to approve these new approaches has just recently born fruit. These breakthroughs are not to be underestimated. It is no longer necessary to gear all benefits to the hetero married-with-children mold; it is now possible to tailor benefits to the panoply of backgrounds from which gays hail.

Suddenly, in the human resources and corporate benefits crowds, 'Diversity' has become the hot topic. Conferences, trainers, and consultants are all zeroing in on how to meet these impending new realities. Corporations are realizing that in tomorrow's fluid international environment they must be responsive--and that only internal diversity assures them that diverse response.

Corporations are realizing that tomorrow's changing non-white, non-male markets require them to be creative--and that only creative staffs could meet that market challenge.

This is why concrete advances in equality for gays in the 90s will be won in business, not politics. Shareholder and employee initiatives can convince corporations it makes good business sense to nurture diversity by assuring equality to their many sub-groups of employees. With e-mail and the net it's even possible to align entire industries with principles of equality for gays.

Here are the Equality Principles on Sexual Orientation formulated by the Community Lesbian & Gay Rights Institute in NYC. Only just recently these principles turned a homophobic Fortune 100 company into a gay-equal company when used as an alternative to a shareholder action. (The company sells to gay-sensitive markets.)

1. Explicit prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation (s.o.) will be included in the company's written employment policy statement.
   
2. Discrimination against employees with HIV or AIDS will be strictly prohibited.
   
3. Employee groups, regardless of s.o., will be given equal standing with other employee associations.
4. Diversity training will include s.o. issues.
   
5. Spousal benefits will be offered to domestic partners of employees regardless of s.o. on an equal basis with those granted to married employees.
   
6. Company advertising policy will bar negative s.o. stereotypes and will not discriminate in media choices based on s.o.
   
7. Companies will not discriminate in the sale and purchase of goods and services on the basis of s.o.
   
8. Written non-discrimination policies on s.o. must be disseminated throughout the company. A senior official will monitor corporate-wide compliance.

Who are the masters of diversity and life creativity? You guessed it: lesbians and gays. We are the multiversity people. Each of us is gay--and something else: ethnic, differently abled, different ages. We cross all boundaries. We spend our lives reinventing each and every social convention. We're born with environmental monitoring that makes the military seem amateur. We've been forced to create from scratch our own notions of friendship, family, esteem, ego, all manner of social customs, and a whole different set of approaches to life.

Who would you hire when faced with the diversity challenge? Now do you see the meaning of partnership benefits? Now do you see why corporations are lining up to offer us such benefits?

Yet less than 1% of the employees at Lotus (the first public company to offer domestic partner benefits) signed up for them. We've been too long just in the streets. It's time to fill the corporate corridors. They're ready for us. We're getting recognition for gay & lesbian employee caucuses. We're getting corporate protection through policy changes. We're making the corporation safe for lesbians & gays. We're bringing in insurance companies such as Consumers Union of Washington, DC, which offers partnership benefits as standard in its corporate health benefits package. We're organizing on workplace issues with representation from Chevron, Pacific Bell, Pacific Gas & Electric, Oracle and Levi Strauss.

We're selecting our corporate nests carefully, looking at benefits much more closely than immediate salaries offered. Salaries can change--or not change. Benefits have a way of staying there, solid, assured.

What's exciting about partnership benefits is that this is the first time corporations are embarking on the right path, not because they're being forced to, but because they see opportunity in our unique qualities, social position and training. We are attractive corporate assets in this brave new world. And this is the first time that corporations can design benefits to fit each individual in his or her full diversity.

Let's wake up to that fact. There's a whole iceberg of benefits for gays & lesbians that's ours for the asking if we will only come forward, claim our own and realize not only that we're no longer second class citizens, but also that we're part of the future of this country. We are no longer the problem. We are the solution.