A US tech company says its chief executive has quit after he was apparently caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing a female co-worker, in a clip that went viral.
The clip showed a man and a woman hugging on a jumbo screen at the arena in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.
The pair were identified in US media as Mr Byron, a married chief executive of Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s chief people officer.
Compulsory heterosexuality has been the standard of our society for centuries up until very recently. It was common for closeted gay men to marry women in order to fit into society and then have secret affairs with other men on the side to satisfy their homosexuality. That’s changed over the last few decades but even now it still happens. Would you have told a gay man from 50 years ago that compulsory heterosexuality is nonsense? That nobody is forcing them to fall in love with and marry a woman? Despite the fact that every social normality and structure was oriented towards heterosexuality and fiercely rejected homosexuality to the point where homosexual people closeted themselves out of fear for their own lives.
I’m not saying non-monogamous people have it as bad as homosexual people did in the previous era. But you can’t deny that our society strongly encourages monogamy and strongly discourages non-monogamy through social norms and structures. Similar to homosexuality in the previous era, there are little to no widely available resources for non-monogamous people to help them understand that part of themselves and the vast majority of them don’t consider it to be an option due to the stigmatization of non-monogamous relationships; in other words, compulsory.