Todd Sears ’94 Addresses Community

Mr. Sears came out privately to a small group of his Woodberry teachers during his senior year, and then came out publicly his freshman year at Duke University. His decision to be true to himself was based on the integrity he learned as a Woodberry student.

 

After graduating in 1998, Mr. Sears went on to work at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he developed a business model for catering to the specific needs of gay couples that jumpstarted his career. “I put together a profitable business plan for how to actually serve [the LGBT community]," Mr. Sears says. At the time, married gay couples were deprived of over 1,000 rights — many of them related to financial matters — because their marriages were not legally recognized by the federal government. Mr. Sears’s financial model proved to be an incredible tool in empowering those deprived of these rights, and in just four years, he and his team pulled in $1.4 billion in assets. "People were optimistic about my model," says Mr. Sears. "Just like a lot of sports, it's about numbers, and numbers earn you respect."

 

Now, the self-proclaimed "gayest man on Wall Street" is building on a community of allies in the business world to integrate the LGBT community with some of the largest international corporations and markets. With the creation of the OUT program, which has branches such as OUT Leadership and OUT Next, Mr. Sears has been able to host major international forums that tie the business world and the LGBT world together, opening business leaders' eyes to the cost of discriminating against LGBT individuals. "Being anti-gay is bad for business," says Mr. Sears. "Discrimination is fundamentally irrational, and it also has financial consequences."

 

"It is much easier to argue a business case than a religious or ethical case," Mr. Sears told Woodberry’s journalism class. "It's better to say that someone's business is wrong as opposed to saying their religion is wrong or their culture is wrong."

 

However, not everything was quite that easy in the beginning of Mr. Sears's career. One of the biggest moments in his life was coming out as gay. "Coming out to myself was a pretty traumatic experience. I had to change my vision who I was and who I thought I was going to be," Mr. Sears said. He refers to the people who support and help gay individuals as “allies." Allies, Mr. Sears stresses, are critically important to making coming out a positive experience. "Without allies," he says, "I wouldn't be who I am today." He urged members of the school community to commit themselves to becoming allies to the LGBT community and to practice the integrity the school teaches.  He closed his assembly talk with the words, “You’ve got to be yourself because nobody else can.” 

Thank you to Andrew Jacobs ’18 for this article.  Andrew is a student in Woodberry's journalism class.