Allan Gilmour, the former chief financial officer of Ford Motor Company, looks back on his life as a gay top executive by ruthumohnews
Share to linkedinric designed this entire place,” says Allan Gilmour, gesturing to his spacious home in Birmingham, Michigan. At 85, he is enjoying a comfortable and contented retirement with his husband, Eric Jirgens, after decades of struggling with being a closeted Ford Motor Company executive in the 1980s and 1990s, then leaving the company, and later returning in the early 2000s as one of the first openly gay corporate executives in America.
After obtaining an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan, he accepted a job offer as a financial analyst at Ford, and he quickly scaled the corporate ranks. By 1984, he was overseeing public relations and governmental matters as the vice president of external and personnel affairs, a role that would significantly boost his odds of getting into the C-suite. At the time, his highest aspiration was to become chief financial officer. He had the job within two years.
By 1976, he had accepted his sexuality and over the next 20 years came out to half a dozen close friends. Their reactions, he says, ranged from “Oh!” to “I’m not surprised” to “How are we going to keep this a secret?” Rumors started to spread throughout Ford, and he tried to ignore them, though he says he came close to being outed once. “I was not scared that I was going to be fired,” he says. “I didn’t think Ford would toss me out on my ass.
Not that he had much time on his hands: He was on the boards of Whirlpool and U.S. West, a now-defunct telephone company. And he was soon asked to join the boards of Prudential, Dow Chemical, Henry Ford Health System and DTE Energy, formerly known as Detroit Edison. He briefly considered an offer to be the CEO of a smaller industrial company, but by then he had met Jirgens, the man who would become his husband, and he didn’t want to disrupt their lives.
In 2001, Ford was going through leadership shakeups. Jacques Nasser had retired from his position as CEO, leaving the great-grandson of Henry Ford, William “Bill” Ford Jr., as president and CEO. “Pretty soon, Bill Ford wanted to meet with me,” Gilmour says. “He said, ‘I’d like to have you as CFO.’” There was always the question of how to refer to his significant other. Most of the time, especially in professional settings, he was simply “Eric Jirgens,” with no explanation. Sometimes he was “my partner,” but never “my boyfriend” or anything of that sort.
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