A Queer Understanding
Weekly conversations about all things queer. A space for members of the LGBTQIA+ community to share our stories, struggles, and triumphs, and talk about how we're breaking glass ceilings and making an impact on society.
A Queer Understanding
From Personal Struggle to Global Advocacy: Michael Bach Reshaping Workplace Inclusion
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Michael Bach’s journey from childhood activist to global DEI leader shows how personal struggle fuels powerful advocacy. His story is especially compelling because his public work mirrors a private journey toward authenticity—proving that effective advocacy often begins with learning to advocate for ourselves.
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Michael Bach is a nationally and internationally recognized thought leader and subject matter expert in the fields of diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility. With nearly 20 years of professional experience, he has made significant contributions to advancing these critical areas. As the founder of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, ccdi and Pride at Work Canada, michael has dedicated his career to fostering inclusive workspaces. He previously served as the CEO of CCDI and CCDI Consulting and held the position of National Director of Diversity, equity and Inclusion at KPMG Canada, along with being the Deputy Chief Diversity Officer for KPMG International.
Speaker 1Michael's work has garnered numerous accolades, including recognition as one of Women of Influence's Canadian Diversity Champions and receiving the Catalyst Canada Honors for Human Resources slash Diversity Leader leader. He was also honored with the Inspire Award as LGBTQ Person of the Year and recognized by the Toronto Region Immigration Employment Council with the IS Award. In 2023, cio Views Magazine named Michael as one of the 10 most influential DE&I leaders revamping the future. His influential publications include his best-selling book Birds of All Feathers Doing Diversity and Inclusion Right, which received the Silver Nautilus Book Award in 2020, and Alphabet Soup, the Essential Guide to LGBTQ2 Plus Inclusion at Work, released in March 2022. Michael has shared his insights on various platforms, appearing on podcasts such as Alchemy of Ascension, happy Space, the Element of Inclusion, the Growth Guide, hr Works and the Recruitment Flex, as well as being featured in Forbes magazine, among others. His passion for promoting diversity and inclusion continues to inspire organizations to create equitable environments for all individuals. Here's our conversation, hi Michael.
Speaker 2Hi, how are you?
Speaker 1We are doing well. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 2Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1So, michael, you are largely into advocacy work. What first got you into that?
Speaker 2My mother. She taught me that I should use my privilege to the advantage of others, that I had an obligation as a white cis-presenting man to help make the world a better place, and that was ingrained in me from just such an early age. I remember, at the age of four, going on a protest of Nestle and if you know the history of Nestle there's good reasons why we protested and that sort of started my journey around advocacy and it's been a lifelong passion. It's sort of what gets me out of bed every day.
Speaker 1So was your mom into. So it sounds like she actually was an advocate as well, and I didn't see you as a little boy being there on front lines with her. So what's? Where did her passion come from?
Speaker 2It's a good question and I don't think I ever asked her. She passed away a couple of years ago, but it was always an aspect of her life. She was always advocating for others. I remember her being very involved in the church and helping newcomers getting settled, and she then went on to run a center for street youth and advocating for them, and it was just always part of her world, nice, and so you grew up in Canada. I did, yeah, I grew up in Toronto.
Speaker 1Okay, and how long have you been here in the US?
Speaker 2I've been here since May of 2024.
Speaker 1Oh wow, Very new it. I've been here since may of 2024.
Speaker 2Oh wow, very new, very fresh. Yes, now, over the course of my adult life, I have lived in the us multiple times okay, in new york and la and nashville which is a whole long story involving a boy, and but this is kind of the. My husband and I moved down here to Palm Springs, california, in May of 24. And that was this is the last move.
Speaker 1Okay, all right.
Speaker 2I don't want to pack up my shit anymore.
Speaker 1That is very tiring.
Speaker 3It is so, Mike, as an advocate, what's one of your proudest moments? Of something that you advocate for? And saw some changes.
Speaker 2The thing that immediately comes to mind is a guy I worked with when I was at the accounting firm KPMG, and when I was at KPMG, in addition to working in diversity and inclusion, which was my day job, I was also actively involved with the Pride at KPMG employee resource group. Before I started at the firm, there was zero mention of anything related to sexuality and gender identity. It was a guy who was gay and one day we were out for drinks one day and he said to me I stay at the firm because of you, and what he meant was he stayed at the firm because he could be gay.
Speaker 2He was also indian, so he was south asian. He could stay at the firm and not experience racism, and that was one of the sort of special moments in my life where I go. I did that. I made this space a better place for him and I really valued that over any award, any recognition. That in itself is what I do this work for.
Speaker 1Nice, oh, have you always been out.
Speaker 2No, but it's a bit. I paused because it's a bit of a story. So I came out of the womb singing show tunes Like there was nothing butch about me. My mother had many stories about me and like she had this dress, this fabulous silk kind of Japanese inspired dress that I used to wear. And yet I tried desperately not to be queer and I had girlfriends and I in fact had a wife and I fought it and fought it and finally I was like, okay, enough, I'm, this is not on. And I officially came out as queer.
Speaker 2I had come out as bisexual, which in the 80s was what you did when you were just sort of in the waiting room for gay and people. No one believed me that I was straight, like it just was not something people were going to actually accept. And I battled it for a long time and then, thanks to some good old-fashioned therapy, started to accept myself for who I am and be proud. But I also didn't come out at work until 1999, which, long story short. I was working for a politician who happened to be the first openly gay member of provincial parliament in Ontario and I said, well, if he can do it to the province, to everybody, then I can do it, and I ended up coming out and from then on I was always out in the workplace. But you know, I lived in New York in the 90s and I could have been fired for being gay. So it was just the climate we were in.
Speaker 1So where did you get this message? You said you tried not to be gay. Where did you get the message? That wasn't okay, okay.
Speaker 2I am a little older Until Just. Well, that's the Botox. I, being a little gay boy in the 1970s and 1980s, was not such a good thing.
Speaker 1Even in Canada.
Speaker 2Oh, absolutely Keeping in mind that homosexuality was only decriminalized in Canada in 1967. Okay, was only decriminalized in Canada in 1967. Okay, and it was. So we were still really going through a change experience around people's attitudes, and on top of that, we were at the beginning of the HIV AIDS crisis, and so particularly gay men were being vilified, and it was a scary time I had also experienced from as early as kindergarten. I had been called some pretty unfortunate terms, pejoratives by other students, and I experienced bullying my whole childhood, all the way through high school and into college, and it wasn't like people were ever sending me the message that it was okay. I was either being abused or being told to hide my identity, so the message was not a positive one.
Speaker 1Right, right. So I'm interested in your in the story of you being having a wife previously. We've actually heard a lot of different versions of this story, some where the man knew that he was gay but repressed it and told his partner and she accepted it as something that this is just your struggle. We can move forward with this. Some they didn't admit it to themselves, much less their partner. What was your situation?
Speaker 2Nothing so fun like that. I was very 90s new age couple. I was living in New York, met a woman and we both at the time identified as bisexual, okay, and so we were together. But we also had a bit of an open relationship where I could be with men and she could be with women, okay. And then we got married.
Speaker 2And in retrospect, getting married was really about trying to kind of push down my sexual identity and and sort of say to my family well, look at me, I'm married to a woman and now we have kids and now we and it was just that continued denial and feeling the need to fit into a box that girl. She just didn't fit into and yeah, so it was a. But we were very new age about it, right. We were like, oh yeah, it's cool bisexual couple and we're open and and she's lovely. And she subsequently got married and had kids and took married to a man and lived a very, by all accounts, straight life. But it was for me it was really about denial as much as anything right and you mentioned you have children.
Speaker 2We don't. I don't have children, not that I'm aware of at least. Well, you don't come out of the 90s as a man without a little concern that someone might knock on the door one day and say are you, my daddy. But no, we didn't have kids, which was a blessing. I think it would have been just a hot mess to bring kids into that situation.
Speaker 1Yeah, and how long were you married?
Speaker 2Technically we were married for 10 years, but we were actually only together for two. Oh wow, Okay. And we split up and then it was sort of the process of divorce. Yeah, and we split up and then it was sort of the process of divorce and at the time I couldn't. Same-sex couples weren't allowed to marry. So I was like, whatever, I'm not going to marry another woman, so I don't really care. And it wasn't until she was getting remarried that we actually had to go through that process.
Speaker 1Okay, okay, gotcha. And did you split because you accepted that men really were your jam and you were just pretending with her or it was just typical relationship things that happened.
Advocacy work and recognition
Speaker 2Yeah, it was mostly that. It was a lot of me recognizing that my attraction to men was more than just physical and while I could have a relationship with a woman, it was more like a deep friendship and truly a romantic relationship for her. I loved her deeply but I never got the vapors because I was thinking about her, whereas my husband like the first time he kissed me, you had that kind of moment of oh my goodness, that was.
Speaker 1Remember that moment, cassie, she remembers.
Speaker 2Yeah, I bet she does.
Speaker 3I do, I'm messing with her.
Speaker 1So I totally understand that. And so how long after you're separating?
Speaker 2from your wife. Did you meet your husband? Oh, quite a bit of time. So Beth and I separated in 1990. One, two, three, six, and then Mike and I met in 2008.
Speaker 1Okay, okay.
Speaker 2That's not to say there weren't some gentlemen callers in between.
Speaker 1Right, of course.
Speaker 2But nothing marriage worthy, shall we say.
Speaker 3Right, right.
Speaker 1So I find it interesting that you have been an advocate for others but did not advocate for yourself in that way until you know much later. Can you talk a little bit more about that in that?
Speaker 2way until you know much later. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, I definitely got that from my mother. She was the person who was always advocating for others and not for herself. And it seems hypocritical almost that is what I would do, but I learned the behavior from somewhere, as unhealthy as it was. And my mother was an amazing woman and I love her dearly. But you know, I often would say to her like you know how's the weather up there? On the cross she was perpetually pardon the word, but martyring herself. This is a perfect example. She would cook dinner and let's say she made chicken and one of the chicken breasts would be burnt. She would have to take that chicken breast. She could not. It was like physical for her. She could not take that. That was who she was and it took me, I would say, until her death to learn to advocate for myself first, and it was a wonderful therapist that I was seeing because we were and my sister and I was not having time to mourn myself.
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 2And my therapist said to me put your mask on first. You know what they say on airplanes put your mask on first. And I was notoriously bad at putting my mask on first and that was really the first time someone pointed it out and I really took that to heart and started to put my mask on first, nice.
Speaker 3So, michael, this ties into the question that Dr Thompson just asked. So I saw you got an award for Women of Influence, canadian Champion. Can you talk to us a little bit about what led to that award? Because that really stands out You're not a woman but you get an award for that, so I'm sure you did some amazing work.
Speaker 2That led to that Well, I mean, I'm a big advocate for women, and Women of Influence is a wonderful, prominent organization in Canada and they were very kind to honor me for my work. What led to that is I created a program that specifically targeted women into leadership positions and not just white women, not just straight white women, but applied an intersectional lens. And it came with a whole development program. That it's one thing to say, ok, we're going to set a target for the promotion of women into the leadership. It's another thing entirely to actually execute that and make it happen. So I had developed an entire plan that laid out how we were gonna get there, and it's a plan that's still in operation today and is making progress towards rebalancing leadership roles. It was very humbling to be recognized like that. I have a very big personality but I'm not somebody who loves to necessarily be the center of attention. But it was a huge honor for me to be recognized like that for something that's outside of who they are.
Speaker 3It really stands out to me to see that, hey, you did something, not because it's for your own self-gratification, but to help someone that doesn't look like you or someone not like you. So that's where it comes in, the one amazing.
Speaker 1Yeah, and as both being women in leadership we recognize the difficulty of navigating that space, a space that has traditionally not been a place where you have felt like you belong or been respected, and there's all kinds of things that women have been indoctrinated to believe that it's difficult to really balance, like for me even there's probably less so for my wife, but she can speak for herself but for me I find it difficult to balance being authoritative in a role and delegating and things like that and having to correct people about things and doing it in such a way I feel myself overthinking often, because I want to do it in such a way where I'm not coming off as a bitch but men don't have to think about that.
Speaker 3So yeah, you're still gonna come off as a bitch, so you might as well do it well, I think we need to redefine what it means to be a bitch exactly like let's change the language.
Speaker 2I don't think being assertive as a woman makes you a bitch exactly right I mean don't get me wrong I think there are plenty of women who are bitches, but I think there are also plenty of men who are bitches, and that is absolutely a struggle that a lot of women face, and particularly Black women.
Speaker 1Yeah, because there's also the angry Black woman.
Speaker 2Angry Black woman. Right, and how do you avoid that? It's something that I certainly I've become aware of in my career over the past 20 years, that I have opportunity that others don't and I can be in rooms and say things that people will listen to differently rooms and say things that people will listen to differently and I've always said it's my job to make sure that the next time that, for example, either of you walked into a room, that people listen. That's not to say that I changed anything you said. I just changed the room so that people are actually paying attention.
Business case for diversity
Speaker 1Right, yeah, I see birds of all feathers on your wall there, and is that a book you authored?
Speaker 2Yes, it was my first book Came out in August of 2020. It was planned for like a year prior and then, of course, george Floyd had been killed in May of that year and it my objective with writing it was to help particularly small business entrepreneurs with doing work in diversity and inclusion without having to spend money on some really expensive consultant. I just wrote all. It's a how-to guide. I wrote, I gave away all of the secrets and I, first of all, I don't think they should be secrets. I think we should just not try to democratize or capitalize on this work. We should just give it all away. So I wrote it all down. And then, of course, when George Floyd was killed, the demand for all the things in diversity and inclusion went through the roof and it became a bestseller and started me on that journey.
Speaker 1Oh, wow. So what else have you written?
Speaker 2Alphabet Soup, the Essential Guide to LGBTQ2 Plus Inclusion at Work, came out two years later, in 2022. It was more of a personal passion. I wanted to make sure that workplaces were more queer friendly and then I wrote a book. It's a bit off topic, but if you're a fan of RuPaul's Drag Race, I wrote a book called All About Evie Into the Oddity, which is the biography of Evie Audley, who is the winner of season 11 of RuPaul's Drag Race, and that came out last year.
Speaker 1So why Should employers care about diversity, particularly at a time when they're being told they don't need to and being punished for it if they do? Why is diversity in the workplace important?
Speaker 2Simply put, it's about money. It's about hiring good talent, keeping them. It's about hiring good talent, keeping them. It's about higher levels of engagement and productivity and innovation and lower safety incidents and higher sales. I mean, look at Target. Right now there has been a fabulous boycott of Target for withdrawing from their DEI commitments and they sort of tacitly made the statements that they didn't want the black dollar and they didn't want the queer dollar, and they have lost billions of dollars as a consequence. Conversely, a commitment to diversity and inclusion Costco drives sales.
Speaker 2I would love to live in a world where we all understood that this is the right thing to do, right, and we operated from the heart. Unfortunately, we don't all experience that opinion and, as we're seeing now more succinctly than ever, people just don't buy in. So we have to focus on what incentivizes people, which is the pocketbook, and I can fill this office with reports and studies from really reputable organizations like McKinsey and Deloitte and Harvard that show the positive impact on the top and bottom line to a focus on diversity and inclusion. That's the reason why employers should focus on it. You want to increase your market share? You have to look at different markets If you want to decrease your voluntary turnover rate. You got to make people feel included. It's just that simple, right.
Speaker 3Yeah, it's very important and, unfortunately, even the current climate that we're going through now. A lot of companies are feeling scared and pulling back their initiative and start it, but you know there are several others that's doing it under the table and try to. Well, we're not really pulling back. We're still going to practice, but we're pulling back, but we're not pulling back.
Speaker 1It makes you wonder did they just do it?
Speaker 3because they wanted to put on a front, which a lot of them did, and they were just waiting for an opportunity like this to say, well, it's not something that we need to do, so let's just pull it back. So quickly, target pulled that back so quickly.
Speaker 2They didn't wait for the ink to dry and then it was like, okay, well, yeah, it's interesting how something that was such a huge commitment to them was undone in a matter of minutes. Yeah, like it did. That did not take long. So it really does beg the question were you actually committed? Did you really believe this? And the answer is no and the answer is no. I think Facebook and Instagram meta is another example of that, where last year Mark Zuckerberg was talking about the importance of diversity and inclusion and this year he's talking about the importance of returning to a quote more masculine work culture.
Speaker 3Yep, I'm people what Facebook.
Speaker 2Right. So if it was really that important, if you really understood the business case pardon the expression I know people get really cranky about that one but if you, if you totally understand why this is important to your business, then you would not have made any change. Apple is a perfect example. Apple is not doing that because their heart's in the right place. Apple is a capitalist, money-making machine and they understand that their commitment to diversity and inclusion is good for their business.
Speaker 3Right, you moved here from Canada and you see the trade war and all the back and forth that's going on with Canada and the US, based on what we have in this country versus what you all have in Canada, and so we know diversity is affecting a big part of it.
Speaker 1But how do you feel as a?
Speaker 3Canadian living in America right now. I mean, you're still a white cis man but you know, as a Canadian I'm sure you're experiencing if you go to certain places you may experience some bias. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2Afraid. I've spent a lot of time since that infamous day in November being afraid. And yes, I am cis-presenting and I'm white, but I'm gay, I'm gender non-conforming, I'm an immigrant who's here because of his same sex marriage and I also work in DEI. So I feel like this is for myself. I fear for my community, my particularly my trans and gender nonconforming, gender diverse cousins within the community. It's a bit of a scary time and I feel like we're being scapegoated as a community.
Speaker 2I heard a number during the election that the Republicans had spent $65 million in anti-trans advertising. $65 million that's the GDP of a country, and all for a community that is maybe one or two percent of the population of the country. Is this like? Couldn't we just have brought down the cost of eggs? This was just a bizarre thing to do, but they needed an enemy and, and particularly the trans community, has become public enemy number one for the republicans, and particularly the far right republicans, and it's just a bit of a scary time for us but the sad part is, unfortunately, republican men are always known to be on grinder a lot of these politicians.
Speaker 2Seriously. Yes, I mean talk about the hypocrites. I mean really like some of them, and I won't name them, but some are very well known participants in things like Grindr, and yet they stand up in the house and say some pretty homophobic and transphobic things.
Speaker 3Right. And not only are they on Grindr, most of them are married men as well, with children, that are on Grindr, seeking a same-sex relationship, and nine states also are fighting to reverse same-sex marriage, sex marriage. And it's been a little over. Not it's not even two months yet since this administration has been in office and there are so many targets towards the lgbtq plus community, especially transgender, because I think they said sometime this month they're gonna I think they're gonna expel transgender member from the military unless they have some form of paperwork. I'm not sure what that paperwork is, so it's crazy and it's just a lot going on.
Speaker 1But with all that's going on.
Speaker 3I'm going to say it is. If it's one thing that is showing is that people really don't care about no one but themselves. Because if you listen to all these people, that the stuff that this current administration is doing, that it's affecting them. That voted for him that for trump and they're like oh, I didn't know it was gonna affect me so it just shows the level of racism, homophobic and hate that people offer each other, so they can be like oh well, I thought it was just gonna affect them.
Speaker 3Just today I was watching something and this man he said oh, I voted for trump, I'm a vet, I work at the IRS, but I didn't know it was for people like me. This is an older white man. He was like I didn't know it was going to affect people like me. So he's a straight white, cisgender man and he thinks OK, it wasn't for me, it was for them. Others that are minor artists right, yeah, it is.
Speaker 2It is astonishing to see how people were blind to what he was saying during the election and just willfully didn't, either didn't hear or didn't think it was going to happen. Think, oh, he's, he's just shooting his mouth off. No, this is a dude that has been proven to do what he says, the ridiculous things that he says. I had a guy walk up to me in the dog park the other day and I have a hoodie that has a big maple leaf flag on it and he apologized and he said oh, I'm from Ohio and what he's doing is just terrible. I voted for him, but you know he shouldn't be doing this. And I thought he said during the election that he was going to institute 25 percent tariffs on day one. Right, what did you think was going to happen? He said he was going to do it. This is not news, but still there's that blind belief that I made the right decision of voting for him. Well, I have to disagree.
Speaker 1Exactly, yeah, yeah, I think. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans lack education and they don't. They didn't know what that meant and how it was going to affect the country. One, right and two and or two. They also were so united in, united in feeling disenfranchised, especially white men, and they were just on this. I'm sick of DEI, I'm sick of this agenda, that agenda, so this is what's making me want to vote for this man. I'm ignoring all his other things. He's just going to take care of this huge thing that I hate, when it's not even a huge thing. So so, yeah, there, there's a lot of different motivations for it and it's just sad. But also, on the other side, we have felt, like a lot of people, that same expression of empathy and trying to let you know that they're not for what he's doing. We have felt that right and like a day to day life. Yeah, it was like I was telling.
Speaker 2Dr, Thompson.
Speaker 3it was like I feel like white people are getting so nice, cause everyone you think, oh, I'm not a part of that. They are so nice I got you got white people open the door, for you know they're letting you go ahead of them in lines.
Speaker 1I'm like what?
Speaker 3And we're living in Georgia, so, and we're not in Atlanta, we're in Georgia and I'm like okay, well, hey, you know what Be my servant.
Speaker 1It's little things that you don't really think you hadn't really thought about before. But when you see a shift, you're like oh wow, I like just as like somebody bumped, bumped into you or something, or no, you bumped into him, he apologized. He's like are you okay? And we're just like this is weird, stop it. No, but I love it I love it.
Speaker 2well, maybe some good will come of it. Like, maybe people are all right, it's uh, this is a bit of a stark comparison, but you know, when george floyd so brutally murdered, people could not deny that anti-black racism and abuse by police was happening. And so we got some change not enough and it's kind of going backwards, but maybe that's one of the benefits that we will see is people coming together and starting to be more humane and civil and treating people with respect, because ultimately, that's all we want. I don't care if people like that, I'm queer, just be respectful.
Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion
Speaker 1Yeah, I do believe that when more and more people start to feel this sense of uncertainty who have never felt that before, they start to have a little bit more understanding and empathy for other people. So you know, maybe some good will come of this, right? Well, I'm going to ask you about one more thing, michael the Canadian Center for Diversity and Inclusion. Tell us about that, yeah.
Speaker 2So CCDI is a nonprofit a 501c3, we would say here in the States, with the objective of educating Canadians on the value of diversity and inclusion. Most of the work is done supporting employers 65% of Canadians are in jobs of some form and that was a way to impact, have impact and educate, while not trying to kind of boil the ocean of the entire country. So it was. I saw a gap in the market. There wasn't a similar organization and I really felt like we needed to sort of create a center of excellence for lack of a better word that like some one, a single organization that would wrap its arms around the entire conversation and not necessarily do everything, but be that one point of contact that could then send people off into different directions. But started it in 2012, and it is the largest diversity and inclusion organization in Canada. Oh wow. It supports, I think, over 750 employers, now staff of 50, 50 couple offices. It's grown quite dramatically. I left it in 2022, but it has continued to grow since then.
Speaker 3That's amazing.
Speaker 1You can say the same thing at the same time. So what's next for you?
Future projects and closing
Speaker 2So what's next for you? Oh well, I have been working on a new book. It's not going terribly well. I just got a block. I think it's just all the shit that's going on in our space that I'm like I can't. I can't get the words out. My business partner and I launched a new platform in November of last year called Idea Content, and it is a digital library of all things diversity, equity, inclusion and so we're continuing to grow that and focus our energy on that. We tried to create something that would again be a bit of a center of excellence and knowledge, so that we would kind of stop reinventing the wheel in the DEI space. How many articles do you have to write on Black History Month? So here's one. Everybody can use the same one, edit it how you see fit, but you don't have to just keep doing the same thing over and over, so that we can then spend our time and energy on those activities that really do change the landscape, really do help to move things forward, and that's where my energy is focused right now.
Speaker 3Okay, Okay, all right, thank you, michael. So, listeners, here you have it, michael Bach, a proud Canadian advocate who focuses on helping others that are less fortunate, and a promoter of DEI. He's a husband and, unapologetically, himself. Michael, thank you so much for being on A Queer Understanding, eh? Oh, my God, stop it.
Speaker 2Thank you for having me. Eh, it has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.