Audio Interview, Emily Jones, April 17, 2012

EVELYN BAILEY: So Emily, were you born in Rochester?

EMILY JONES: No, I was born in Canton, New York.

EVELYN BAILEY: And when did you come to Rochester?

EMILY JONES: When I was twenty-eight.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were you out?

EMILY JONES: No.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were you well, why did you come to Rochester?

EMILY JONES: I came to Rochester because my husband had gotten

a PhD graduate scholarship at the U of R

in chemical engineering.

And I was going to attend the U of R as well

and get my PhD in chemistry.

But I didn't like the professors so much.

And so I applied for a job, a couple of jobs.

And I interviewed at Kodak.

And I thought it was really fascinating.

So I chose to go to Kodak with my master's degree

and not get a PhD.

EVELYN BAILEY: And was your master's degree

in science or chemistry?

EMILY JONES: Yeah, my master's degree is in chemistry.

I had the first master's degree from Plattsburgh State

in chemistry.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK, so you were a chemist?

EMILY JONES: Right.

EVELYN BAILEY: And when you went to work at Kodak,

what was your position?

Were you

EMILY JONES: I started in the nuclear magnetic resonance

laboratory as an analytical chemist.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

That's high powered (laughs)

EMILY JONES: Well, my master's degree

was in electron paramagnetics resonance imaging.

And I actually had to build a multifrequency spectrometer

for my thesis, which was a PhD thesis, by the way.

But since I was the first master's degree, you know.

EVELYN BAILEY: (laughs) OK, how did you

get from there to Lambda Kodak? (laughs)

There In three sentences or less, no I mean, you

EMILY JONES: Well, I was married and I had a son.

When we came to Rochester, he was three.

And you know, my famous story is the one

where United Way was extraordinarily strong

at Kodak.

Because George Eastman founded the Community Chest,

which became the United Way.

So it was expected that you donated

a particular portion of your salary to the United Way.

And they gave you suggested guidelines.

And so I was reading the United guidelines

and saw how much I was supposed to give.

And then, I looked at all the agencies.

And I noticed that the Gay Alliance

was one of those agencies.

And I went up and talked to my boss.

And I said, if I give money, does my money

go to the Gay Alliance?

And he said, no, it just goes to the United Way.

The way money goes to the Gay Alliance

is if you select it as a specific receiver

of your money.

I say, good, because I don't want to give them any money.

EVELYN BAILEY: You don't want to give the Gay

Alliance any money?

OK.

EMILY JONES: That's my famous story.

EVELYN BAILEY: So how did you get

from not wanting to give the Alliance any money to Lamda

Kodak?

EMILY JONES: Well, so that was in 1975.

And (pause) long story, my marriage wasn't the best.

And I kept struggling with why.

I didn't know.

And then (pause) I discovered, when my son was thirteen

that I was attracted to women.

And that was very scary.

Because (pause) I was Catholic.

And you were married.

And you were married forever.

And I was always very proud of the fact

that our marriage was actually working,

when so many of our friends' marriages

were ending in divorce.

And the whole thing really was very difficult

for me to understand.

So of course, you have to go to therapy.

And the marriage was really bad at that point.

And so one was a trigger to go to therapy.

And the other was a trigger to go to therapy.

And then, it just sort of evolved.

And it took me about three years to convince myself

that I really wanted to end the marriage.

Because it wasn't good for me.

And it wasn't good for my son.

That was a really difficult journey for me.

Because I didn't have the support of my mother.

She just kept telling me that I had to work harder at it.

My father, on the other hand, was

very supportive of my needing to move forward.

So then, I finally ended the marriage.

And then, I finally came out to myself.

And then, I met a woman in Boston,

who used to be a good friend of mine in high school.

And then, we had a relationship, long distance, for about four

and a half years.

And during that time, because she was such a clear voice

for gay rights, human rights, and women's rights,

I got crystallized about what it meant

to be discriminated against, as a woman,

and as a person who was gay.

And it was also right at the crescendo of the horrific AIDS

crisis.

And we were seeing the quilts.

And we walked through the quilts on the Washington Mall.

And all of this was incredibly overwhelming,

for someone who had lived a very sheltered life in upstate New

York, in a town of 20,000 people that didn't even

have any black people.

The first person I met, who was a person of color,

was when I was in college.

And we had two Jewish people in my high school.

That was it.

I mean, you're talking about a Catholic town,

very white, and very, very, very,

clearly if you want to call it family values.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK.

(music playing)

Let me stop you and get some dates.

When did you graduate from college?

EMILY JONES: 1972.

EVELYN BAILEY: So actually, Stonewall had already happened.

EMILY JONES: Right.

But I didn't even know what Stonewall was.

EVELYN BAILEY: And when did you come to Rochester?

EMILY JONES: '75.

EVELYN BAILEY: And when did you start at Eastman Kodak?

EMILY JONES: '75.

EVELYN BAILEY: And then, when did

you have this awakening, this

EMILY JONES: 1984.

EVELYN BAILEY: And so you were at Kodak.

You had gotten divorced.

EMILY JONES: Not yet, not in 1984.

I didn't get divorced until 1988.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK.

But in '84, you were intensely aware of

EMILY JONES: No, just mildly aware.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK.

So when did this (pause) did you meet the woman in Boston

before or after you got divorced?

EMILY JONES: Before.

EVELYN BAILEY: And so it was during those two or three

years that your understanding of oppression,

and understanding of liberation, and coming

to know what it was to be a woman in 1984,

'85, '86, and a gay woman that catapulted you

into becoming an activist?

EMILY JONES: I would never call myself an activist.

EVELYN BAILEY: Well, you are, so (both laugh)

EMILY JONES: No, I actually wouldn't.

What happened, there's several things.

If you think about it, I was a scientist without a PhD.

I was a woman in a predominantly male field.

I was the only woman leader in my division.

At that time, I had moved very quickly

to becoming the assistant to the director

in that division, which was never ever held by a woman.

I was the only woman on the leadership team.

And then, I find out I'm gay so we've

got three things going here and soon to become a single mom.

So what I tried always to do was to learn and understand

what you needed to do to be successful.

What did we need to do?

So anyway, so I went off to the Gay Games in 1990.

I think that's when it was.

Or was it

EVELYN BAILEY: There were Gay Games in 1990.

EMILY JONES: And I met a few people there.

And this one guy's name, which I'm still trying to find he

was a minister, who had been kicked out of his faith.

And he was working at Kodak.

And he knew David Kozel and Gary Gray,

I believe, and told me there was a group downtown at Kodak.

And then, there was himself and me in Kodak Park.

And we needed somehow to come together

to create some kind of an entity to talk to one another

at Kodak.

At the same time, Joe Moliere David Kozel

had done a talk in California at a (pause)

human resources conference on what

it was like to be gay in the workforce,

to a closed audience.

It was very well articulated and crafted.

And so that was happening.

And we were having these conversations

about the corporate closet in Kodak Park.

And then, there was this Vice President, which

I can't remember her name, but I'll

get because David will probably remember who actually brought

the two groups together and said, you guys need to talk.

At the same time, we were recognizing

that, in other companies, there were these things called

Employee Resource Groups.

And we noticed that, when we were at the Gay Games

and there was also a march on Washington

following that we noticed they were marching.

And we said, why can't we form an Employee Resource

Group at Kodak to educate Kodak about what it's like to be

gay in the workplace?

What is it like?

What does it feel like?

What does that look like?

What is it?

What is it like for us to come to work every day?

And there was a very famous movie

called Friday Morning Pronouns.

EVELYN BAILEY: Friday Morning

EMILY JONES: Pronouns, (pause) which I've never seen,

but I've heard about.

And

EVELYN BAILEY: It's a movie?

EMILY JONES: Yeah.

And that movie is how one transforms from the weekend

to work, where all of the pronouns are nondescript.

They're they, we, you, them.

But there's nothing about he or she.

And we decided to create this Employee Resource Group,

as two others had formed at Kodak.

The very first was for people of color, which was North Star.

And the second was the Women's Forum.

So we were the third.

And

EVELYN BAILEY: Do we have a year?

EMILY JONES: Yeah, we do somewhere.

And K. Whitmore approved it, right before he retired.

Now, that's significant too.

Because he was a Mormon.

But he understood, at some level,

why it was so important to educate Kodak's leadership

about all of their employees and what

they needed to be successful in the workplace.

So then, we got the approval.

And, the we had these bulletin boards,

electronic bulletin boards where employees

could write to get answers.

And each one of the Resource Groups had one.

Ours went live.

It was up not even a day and was taken down,

because of the horrific response that the ERG got.

I mean, it was really people said they

were going to kill some people.

They took it down.

There was a bit of stupidity here.

All the people who wrote, they had

their names attached to them.

They were each met with and talked to.

EVELYN BAILEY: By who?

EMILY JONES: By the Vice President of HR staff at Kodak.

And they were told that you can have whatever belief you want.

But everyone at Kodak deserves to be treated the same

and with the same respect when they come to work.

So then, the bulletin board went back up again.

And that all disappeared.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK, go back to when the vice president brought

the two groups together.

EMILY JONES: All she did was say, there's a group downtown.

And you guys ought to meet.

And we just that's all she did.

She didn't actually bring us physically together.

She just made us aware that we existed to create one group.

EVELYN BAILEY: And so you took it upon the people

in these groups took it upon themselves

to come together and meet?

EMILY JONES: Mm-hm.

EVELYN BAILEY: What was that like?

What was it like for you to recognize

that there were other people at Kodak

who were gay, who were looking to form support,

to find support?

EMILY JONES: Well, what was it like?

It was like a well, for me, it was just

like meeting other people who had

the same sense of want of safety and the ability

to be themselves at work.

I mean

EVELYN BAILEY: Did you know other people

who were gay in the community, in Rochester?

Or were you closeted?

EMILY JONES: Not many.

Because the person I sort of really

came out with lived in Boston.

So I mean, a few, but not many.

And there wasn't really a way to find out easily.

EVELYN BAILEY: So information even,

and we're talking 1987 to '88.

EMILY JONES: It would be '88 now.

No, it would be 1990.

EVELYN BAILEY: 1990.

Information about gay resources, or where

EMILY JONES: Oh yeah, that was all in these little bookstores.

There was a bookstore on Monroe.

It had a funny name.

It was a woman's bookstore.

EVELYN BAILEY: Silkwood.

EMILY JONES: Silkwood.

No, that wasn't was that Silkwood?

What was the one where Edibles is?

EVELYN BAILEY: Oh, that wasn't Silkwood.

EMILY JONES: There were two.

EVELYN BAILEY: Lori Matoka and

EMILY JONES: There were two.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes, Wild Seeds.

EMILY JONES: Wild Seeds.

Those two bookstores became sort of my font of knowledge.

So I just did a lot of reading.

I never went to a library.

I just went to those bookstores, and got lots of books,

and read, most of which are sitting in this library

here now.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were computers I mean,

the computer age had come, (laughs) obviously,

by 1990, right?

EMILY JONES: Right.

Yeah, (pause) right, and the first movie

came up during that of time as well.

What was that called?

What was that woman's movie?

Something hearts.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes, hearts.

EMILY JONES: Dear hearts, I don't know, something hearts.

EVELYN BAILEY: It's probably behind you somewhere.

EMILY JONES: Yeah, and so I don't

think we had the search capability, though,

on the computer.

No, we didn't have the search ability

that we have now, to go to and stuff.

It was still books.

Anyway, so yeah, but what we did, I thought.

We had a couple of things we did.

It was we met over the winter.

And we put together a business plan,

an actual corporate business plan

of why we were necessary to the corporation.

And actually, we talked about before this ever became

sort of this mainstream thing about recruitment,

and retention now, and productivity we actually

wrote the business plan around that.

And we also wrote about the fact that we did a marketing plan

that we knew where the company could market directly

to this demographic.

And we could open up those doors.

And we actually started very, very early conversations

with Witeck-Combs Communications in Washington DC.

And they worked with one of our famous laboratories

on the west coast to really start marketing

to the gay community in the San Francisco Bay Area (pause).

So we wrote a business plan.

EVELYN BAILEY: You became indispensable.

EMILY JONES: And then, because George Fisher was the CEO,

all the rest of these ERGs would have these management events,

you know?

Where the different strata of leadership

would come and hear about this particular demographic

in the company.

And so we presented the first one in 1990 something or other,

five, I think.

I don't know.

I can find that out, too.

But It was held out at the Burgundy Basin Inn.

And you could have heard a pin drop in that.

There was so much electricity in that room.

If you'd thrown a match in it, it would have all burned up.

The leaders were afraid to be there.

The gay people were afraid to be there.

And we did three skits on what it

was like to be a gay person in the workplace, different things

with talking heads behind them.

It was so powerful that the VP, Mike Morley,

of human resources, went off and put domestic partnership

benefits in place in the following year.

People got it.

And the other thing is, we did that skit with members

of all of the other networks, the African American network,

the woman's network, and then the Hispanic network

had been formed.

And so they all took parts in those skits.

So we had as many straight allies in those skits

as gay people.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow that's incredible.

EMILY JONES: And so the speaker at that first management event

was Elizabeth Birch, on her way to HRC

to become the president and an executive director.

And she's the person who actually shifted HRC

to a business focus, with the work place

project and the whole CEI.

She knew that, if you could shift business,

you can shift the United States.

Because once business gets it, once business advertises

to any demographic, the most important thing

is that they become legitimate in the eyes of the population.

They are a legitimate demographic.

You can no longer ignore them.

And you can no longer discriminate them

or displace them.

They are a reality, when business recognizes.

Now, so Elizabeth sat at the table

and tested her whole speech with George Fisher,

before she got up and gave it.

We told her she was not to talk about domestic partnership

benefits.

She was to talk about what her story was,

when she was Chief Legal Counsel at Apple,

to get Apple to transform and to embrace the gay community.

And before she left, she got domestic partnership benefits

in place.

But she was not to, you know, say to the CEO,

we want this for Kodak.

Because we weren't asking for anything.

What we went there with was, again as I was saying,

education and why this is good for business.

There are really two reasons.

And we wanted to keep that always.

This wasn't about a personal, I'm being hurt,

I'm being discriminated against, I'm being it wasn't about that.

It was about why it would make a difference

if I could come to work completely and fully as myself.

Why it would a difference to the bottom line of this company.

And so she did.

And she got up there.

And she said, George Fisher, there all these companies

that are your peers.

And they have domestic partnership benefits.

And you should put them in place.

And I just fell on the floor. (EVELYN BAILEY laughs)

EVELYN BAILEY: Did he fall on the floor?

EMILY JONES: No, he just looked at her.

Now, you have some great footage,

as I told you on those DVDs, of him talking to this audience.

And he read a poem.

And he cried during that.

You can feel it, you know, the emotion in his voice.

Because he really believed.

He understood the discrimination.

And he believed that this community really

needed to be affirmed.

Now, before we did this management event,

David Kozel and myself had to go to every one of his vice

presidents and personally invite them and tell them what we

were going to do at the event.

That was not easy.

Some of the secretaries said, you're who?

And you're doing what?

And no, there isn't such a thing at Eastman Kodak Company.

And I had to suck it up and say, well, George Fisher

asked me to call and set this up.

Would you please call his secretary,

and please clear this up?

And I'd get a call back in a couple of days and say,

you are correct.

Oh, in this haughty tone of voice, you are correct.

You will be meeting with someone so and so at x time.

EVELYN BAILEY: But he knew what he was doing.

EMILY JONES: Of course, he was.

He was getting us to engage them.

He wasn't telling them to do it.

He said, the only way they'll come is if you invite them.

And you've got to get them there.

So do whatever you need to do to get them there.

I'll get you the opening.

But you've got to do the work.

He didn't say that verbatim.

But you know, I made that up.

EVELYN BAILEY: No, that was the message.

EMILY JONES: One of the vice presidents

said there were no gay people in Pittsburgh Well,

we kind of said, well, maybe.

EVELYN BAILEY: (laughs) Oh my God.

So how scared were you through all of this?

EMILY JONES: I didn't eat my dinner, I remember that.

I was more afraid of I remember, I

went to pick up Elizabeth Birch.

And I was sitting in her anteroom at the Strathallan

while she was getting dressed.

She's babbling away, as she does.

You know, she's just a high energy woman.

And I was doing yoga breathing.

Because I thought I was going to either pass out,

throw up, or do something.

And then, we got to the event.

And you know, you made sure all the pieces of the puzzle

were in place, and the name tags, and this, all that crap

that you have to do.

And oh, by the way, when you do something

for that level of management, it has

to start on time and end on time precisely, precisely.

And so we had done that over, and over, and over again.

But it was amazing.

And from then on, it took on a life of its own,

as being the event, the management

event to attend every year.

At the height of the event, when we

had the Glisten Kids come in and talk

about what it was like to be gay in high school,

we had six-hundred people attend, six-hundred leaders

attend that event.

EVELYN BAILEY: So let me take you back to

before that first event.

And you're meeting with all of these vice presidents.

How concerned were you for your own job?

EMILY JONES: I wasn't.

I've never had that.

I've never had that in anything I've ever done.

I don't think about it.

I think about it later.

But I do not think about it.

I am driven from a place that's inside of me that I

don't know where it came from.

My father used to say he couldn't figure out

why I was trying to take care of the world.

But that was my need in life.

And he said, you just go do stuff and just do it.

I've never been afraid.

It's more of a it becomes (pause) like a puzzle.

How can I create an opening for understanding?

What can I say?

Who can I bring into the room?

And I don't know where it comes from.

But it's just inside of me.

EVELYN BAILEY: Have you ever felt

threatened because you are gay?

EMILY JONES: Never.

EVELYN BAILEY: When you were working

through this process of this first education event,

how did you deal with the negativity or the secretary who

said to you, your group doesn't exist, and you said,

call George Fisher?

EMILY JONES: No, no his secretary.

EVELYN BAILEY: How did you deal with that obvious negation

of not only Lambda Kodak were you called Lambda Kodak then?

EMILY JONES: Uh-uh, Lambda at Kodak.

EVELYN BAILEY: Lambda at Kodak.

EMILY JONES: Never Lambda Kodak, Lambda at Kodak.

EVELYN BAILEY: So that was your name then?

EMILY JONES: Mm-hm.

EVELYN BAILEY: How did you respond to all of that?

EMILY JONES: It's just kind of like I've always

been the kind of kid that, if you tell me I can do something,

I'll try so much harder.

And I will show you that it can be done.

It's something inside of me.

It's like my boss when I came to Kodak said, you have a child.

You're a woman.

You're never going to make it here.

Because you don't have enough time to spend on the job.

I was his boss in five years (pause).

Don't tell me I can't do something.

EVELYN BAILEY: That's very much an intellectual process.

EMILY JONES: That's right.

And that's where I go under stress.

I go way out of the feeling zone and right into the head zone.

EVELYN BAILEY: But your Employee Resource Group, at the time,

had how many members, approximately?

EMILY JONES: twelve.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were they all in the same ballpark?

EMILY JONES: No, no, a lot of them

wanted domestic partnership benefits.

They also wanted a social group.

And we very clearly said, no, this is part of the business.

We are here to improve the business.

That's why the Employee Resource Groups were formed.

We cannot represent any group.

We can't be like a union.

We are individuals always.

All we can do is educate management

about this demographic, so that we

can improve the business of Eastman Kodak Company.

That was clear.

We just stayed on that game.

And people who wanted to have bowling leagues

and, you know, all that stuff, go do it.

EVELYN BAILEY: But within these twelve people,

was there anyone who wanted to say,

(pause) go and tell whoever that they were hurting you,

that they were not being fair, that they were not

being open to people who were gay, and that damn it all?

EMILY JONES: But that's how you did.

What you did was you started to educate people

about what it was like to be gay in the workplace.

What was the corporate closet like for you?

That's what we did with those skits.

We showed people.

And then, we created the opening to have

what we called these Can We Talks with small leadership

groups, maybe twenty leaders at a time.

And we would do this Can We Talk,

where we would talk about what it

was like to be gay in the workforce.

We'd just have a conversation led by a facilitator.

And people would sit around us.

And they were not allowed to interrupt us.

They were allowed to listen.

People would on the outside, those leaders, some of them

would break down in tears.

They couldn't believe that people were treated

like this in the workforce.

EVELYN BAILEY: So how were people

treated in the workforce?

EMILY JONES: The same as they were treated anywhere else.

They were jokes.

They were left out.

They were not included.

They were made fun of, all of the same things that, you know,

happen.

I don't know what all the stories were.

Because I never heard all the stories.

But I can tell you those that were in manufacturing,

especially in the dark rooms, had

a lot of issues with being gay, didn't want to be there,

always were fearing for something that may occur.

Things did occur.

I know that.

But I don't know exactly what.

But I know we had people transition at Kodak

very early on.

So people with this, then we set up,

as a result of that first management, a safe place.

Or maybe it was the second one, I don't know, safe place zones.

So we had magnets outside of offices.

And then, people, if they had concerns,

if something was happening to them they were worried about,

they could go talk to those leaders.

Those leaders would connect them with the right HR people,

so that they could get their situations handled or whatever.

I'm sure there are hundreds of people

that never told their story.

I'm sure there are hundreds of people that never came out,

especially the women in the trades.

The women in the trades never came out.

That was a place that was really tough to work.

EVELYN BAILEY: What (pause) changed?

Kay Whitmore was a Mormon.

And he allowed the group to begin.

George Fisher encouraged you to bring people on board

at the highest level of the organization

to create an environment which would allow your group

to do the education necessary (pause).

What caused them really to buy in to what you wanted to do?

EMILY JONES: People telling their stories.

They would move management.

Management couldn't believe some of the stories they heard.

And they felt nobody should be treated that way.

And the passion that the group had for

creating an environment where everyone could

be treated as a whole person, they

could hear it in the stories.

We had a meeting at one of the senior leader's homes

with the entire leadership team under it was after Fisher,

I think.

But the CEO and president was there and all

of his key leaders.

They invited us to come talk.

They wanted to know how we did it.

How did we create such awareness and such open conversation

with our peers, with our leaders, and with them?

They wanted to know how we did it.

So that it's so funny we could help other Resource Groups

do it.

It was fascinating.

EVELYN BAILEY: So tell me why Eastman Kodak

corporate leadership would be in the least

bit interested in helping you or other groups create a dialogue?

EMILY JONES: Oh, because of the productivity.

You needed productivity.

You were fighting the Japanese.

You had to create quality and productivity.

And the only way you were going to do it

is have everybody on the team at the same time.

Nobody could be sitting in the stands watching the game.

Everybody had to be playing, not at 100 percent,

but at 110 percent.

So you had to know everybody on the team.

And everybody on the team had to be

able to contribute fully and not be afraid, not

be afraid to take an assignment, not

be afraid to attend a particular dinner, and so on, and so

forth.

You had to have everybody in the game.

You wanted everybody's knowledge,

everybody's full participation.

EVELYN BAILEY: So really, the hearts and minds

of the leadership were not changed

by (pause) hearing the stories, they

were changed by the necessity of keeping Kodak moving

in the right direction and making the profit that it

needed to make?

EMILY JONES: No, I disagree completely.

It's because their hearts and minds were shifted.

They got their head around what they

needed to do to support their people,

so they could be profitable.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK, I wanted to push that.

Because the bottom line is, for most businesses,

the ultimate reason why you make change

you don't make change necessarily to help.

You make change because, without doing that, you're not

going to survive.

You're not going to grow.

You're not going to be bigger and better

EMILY JONES: Well, I think here's the issue.

The issue was all of corporate America was changing,

from a very predominantly white male led society

to one that was one that had many, many

different ethnic demographics.

It now had more women than it had ever seen before.

And they had no experience of that, none whatsoever.

All these companies had no experience

of what it was like to work shoulder

to shoulder with a woman in the laboratory,

or in a business mode.

They had even less working with a Jewish man

or an African American man.

And now, let's put in the Asians and the gay people.

They were all there.

They didn't know how to talk even.

They wanted to learn.

Because they knew, if they didn't know how to engage,

create relationships with all of their people,

they could never shift to create the change they wanted.

They may see the change.

But they can't move the ship if they

don't know how to engage with, you know, the people

sitting there with the oars at the bottom.

They had to learn.

It's like Excellus created a Gay and Lesbian Employee Resource

Group without gay and lesbians asking for it.

Because they couldn't get to these people

any other way to find out what they needed in their workforce.

And they wanted their workforce to be the most productive.

There's another thing.

If you look in the financial community,

it's a very, very highly competitive community

for personnel.

And there are a lot of people who are gay and lesbian

in the financial community.

They took this on with a vengeance,

to make sure that they were open, inclusive companies.

They moved so fast in the late '90s,

early 2000, to make sure that people weren't stealing them

away, and that people were coming out of,

you know colleges would start seeing the ratings.

They wanted to be competitive.

In fact, you have the first career fair

for master's students called the Gay MBA.

And that's been going since the '90s.

It's that population.

And they want the best talent.

They want to retain the best talent.

But again, you can't engage unless you know it,

unless you can speak the language,

unless you can affirm the people and not push them off

by saying something what you think is totally harmless

and it becomes totally offensive.

So it's like learning a whole set of languages.

So that's what the whole diversity thing was about.

Most people thought it was about numbers.

It wasn't.

EVELYN BAILEY: So after that first educational event,

in which you fell on the floor because Elizabeth told

George Fisher

EMILY JONES: To put domestic partnership benefits in place,

right.

EVELYN BAILEY: How did you feel?

EMILY JONES: Well.

EVELYN BAILEY: Aside from relief that it was over.

EMILY JONES: Well, we knew we had a lot of work to do.

And I felt really proud of being associated

with the company and the people that

showed such incredible courage and passion to put this

together.

And it was remarkable (pause).

The assistant to George Fisher was in the closet, not out.

And she came out about two months later in an elevator

at Kodak Office, as a result of the event.

She knew she couldn't stay in the closet any longer.

Because there was this courageous group.

They know she's gay.

And he spoke to everybody in the company.

George Fisher thanked her and said, let's move on.

This is a good thing.

That was the only thing he said.

So we felt pretty proud.

And we also felt pretty lucky that we

had this incredible leadership team that really cared.

We'd get called down to Kodak Office.

Like on the domestic partnership,

we got called down to sit through a thought

process of whether we should make it just for same sex

or should we make it for same sex and different sex.

Because in the future, more and more people

may not want to marry.

So should we put it in place for all people?

That was like, well, I don't know.

But you know, we all kind of was,

like, we haven't thought about that problem.

But it makes more sense to make it inclusive than not.

So I think Kodak was the first to do that.

Kodak was the first to testify on the Employment

Nondiscrimination Act, first company to have a VP there.

We signed on the Tax Equity Benefits Act.

We were the first to sign on that.

We received every single award there was at Out

and Equal, every single one.

We had a 100% on the Human Rights Campaign, CEI,

since its inception.

So we were a pretty amazing entity,

in terms of transformational change across the United

States.

Disney was waiting for Kodak, to see what Kodak would do.

And then, Disney followed Kodak.

Because they were in the same business basically.

EVELYN BAILEY: What was the group's response

to the success of that first event, in terms of

did they think they had arrived and everything would be OK?

Or did they have a similar response as you

that you recognized there was a lot of work

to do, even though certainly the management and leadership

team was obviously supportive?

EMILY JONES: Yeah, it was probably the same

as it is always in a company, that senior leadership says

stuff.

But it's the middle leadership's behavior

that people pay attention to.

It either translates through or stops.

So there's a lot of skepticism as to

whether mid-level management would actually follow.

EVELYN BAILEY: But Lambda at Kodak (pause)

I want you to say this.

I don't want to say it.

Was the level of commitment any different after

that first event than before?

EMILY JONES: Level of commitment by whom?

EVELYN BAILEY: By the Employee Resource Group?

EMILY JONES: I don't think so.

It was the same people with the same passion.

And so we just started thinking about what we were

going to do for the next year.

This was successful.

Now what are we going to do?

And that was not trivial.

EVELYN BAILEY: Did more people come into your group?

EMILY JONES: Yeah, well, there's an interesting question.

Because we had a distribution list.

But it was you couldn't see it.

So people could sign up.

Only a few people knew who the people were on that list.

Yeah, there were more people on the distribution list.

Were they visible?

Not so.

But more people were interested in finding out

what was going on.

Yeah, there were still I mean, it was so long ago.

There were still meetings, you know.

The meetings were held in a way that anybody could come.

And they were held in places where, you know,

people felt they weren't being watched.

Like, they would be held at Kodak Office,

as opposed to out in the park, so nobody could associate you

with blah, blah, blah, I guess.

That was important to a lot of people.

But you know, it's like any other group.

A lot of people are watching it.

But the people who really worked on it about the same 12 to 20

people every year, a few new ones, a few dropped off.

But we had an enormous amount of support,