Dear Chick-fil-A, from a Queer Team Member

Chick-fil-A, please listen, learn, and be better.

First off a little background around my Chick-fil-A career: I started when I was 14, and am now 22. When I started I was deeply in the closet and hadn’t even accepted the fact that I was gay. As I started to accept myself as gay I also began to love my job and the people I worked with. As the years went by I saw the employees at Chick-fil-A become more progressive, I saw the leadership within the restaurants become more progressive. I have worked under queer people at Chick-fil-A and I have had queer people work under me. I have seen the change on the ground where we are interacting with the guests, the change is happening in (some of) the restaurants and it needs to happen at a corporate level. It’s great that you stopped donating to organizations that have anti-LGBTQ+ policies, but now support organizations that support your LGBTQ+ Team Members and guests, supporting them will show that you are truly the most caring company. 

You need to show the change you said you will make and if you don’t soon you will continue to lose: guests, sales, team members, and you will lose me. You will not be remembered as the worlds most caring company, you will be remembered as a company that supported organizations that hurt the people that make your business possible. By supporting those organizations you enabled people; enabled them to call me a f*ggot while serving them and you, enabled people to say that they are praying for me while I am at work just because I am gay, you enabled people to make your team to feel unsafe in the workplace whether that was from guests or coworkers. This is the company you will be remembered as, you will not be remembered as caring as you wish to be. 

So show us you care, you said you would donate to any organization, faith based or not. So do it, donate to organizations like the HRC, like The Trevor Project, like GLSEN, like PFLAG. Donate to organizations that help your queer Team Members, that help your queer Operators, that help your queer Support Center staff, that help your queer guests. Doing this will make you the worlds most caring company. We are not asking you to stop supporting organizations like Junior Achievement, Covenant House, Feeding American, etc. We want you to continue supporting organizations that help all people regardless of sexual orientation.

If your curious why I still work at Chick-fil-A please feel free to ask! The answer is more complex than it may seem.