Fortune Archives: Former Ford executive Allan Gilmour on climbing the corporate ladder while concealing his sexuality

When Allan Gilmour, a former CFO and vice chairman at Ford, was asked in the 1980s why he had no wife, he’d reply with a go-to quip: “I married Ford Motor Co.” 

In his moving first-person Fortune article in September 1997, Gilmour tells of having to conceal his gay identity as he rose through the ranks of corporate America. He describes finding havens of LGBTQ life in places such as Provincetown, Key West, and San Francisco. When he would occasionally run into colleagues from Ford there, he writes, he was “cautious” in their interactions to avoid “detrimental” effects at work.

“As time has passed, business has become more accepting of homosexuality,” Gilmour wrote almost 27 years ago. “But it is still a controversial subject. And businesses in general don’t want their executives to be controversial.”

In 2024, there are many more openly LGBTQ people in the upper echelons of the U.S. business world—the CEOs of Apple, Dow Chemical, and Land O’ Lakes among them—as well as investors such as Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. But as companies across the Fortune 500 roll out their rainbow flags for Pride Month, it’s worth recalling that not so long ago, coming out would have been career suicide even for such high-level executives.

Gilmour discusses, without bitterness, the fact that he was passed over for the role of chief executive of Ford despite being told he was the favored candidate. “Whether being gay hurt my chances, I honestly don’t know,” he writes. “I’ve heard some people say it did, but I doubt it. I may be naïve, but the way I feel won’t do any good one way or the other now, anyway.”

In 1997, Gilmour wrote that he worried increasing tolerance in the business world might create backlash—a concern that looks prescient today, as companies find themselves contending with boycotts and other pushback to LGBTQ visibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts more broadly.

After his retirement in 1995, Gilmour returned to Ford in 2002 at the request of the great-grandson of Henry Ford, William “Bill” Ford Jr. By then out of the closet, Gilmour served for three years as CFO and vice chairman, becoming one of the first openly gay corporate executives in America.

Five years ago, my colleague Ruth Umoh interviewed Gilmour for Forbes at his home in Birmingham, Mich., where he and his husband, Eric Jirgens, support various charities, including LGBTQ causes, through their philanthropic organization, the Gilmour-Jirgens Fund.

“In the 50 years since Stonewall, we old people look back and think that enormous progress has been made,” Gilmour told Ruth in 2019. “The younger people look back and think enormous progress needs to be made. Both are right.”