Beyond the Purple: Courage, Culture and Being Queer in Construction

I learned how to read a room long before I ever walked onto a construction site. Growing up queer, you become remarkably good at noticing the things other people probably don’t think twice about. You listen to the way people talk when they don’t know someone like you is in the room. You hear the jokes and the casual comments. You work out who feels safe and who doesn’t, and somewhere along the way you learn how to edit yourself accordingly. Which parts of yourself you can show, which parts you should soften and which parts are probably better kept to yourself.

By the time I found construction, I was already pretty good at fitting in. I had spent much of my life learning how.

Construction, as I quickly discovered, has its own version of fitting in. There are the rules written into policies and procedures, and then there are all the rules nobody ever writes down. How you’re supposed to talk, what you’re supposed to find funny, what you’re allowed to care about and what makes you tough enough to belong. There has always been a fairly narrow picture of what a construction worker looks like, but there is also a narrow idea of who they are supposed to be.

When I first entered the asphalt industry, I was already stepping outside one of those expectations simply because of my gender. I was focused on proving that I could do the work, that I was strong enough, capable enough and that I deserved to be there. What I probably didn’t recognise at the time was how much energy I was also spending trying to understand the culture around me and work out where I fit within it.

For queer people, that calculation can follow us everywhere, including to work. Can I mention my partner without thinking about how the person standing beside me will react? Can I correct someone who uses the wrong pronouns, or is it easier to let it go? If someone makes a joke, do I challenge it? If I challenge it, will I become the problem? If I don’t, what does staying silent say about me?

These might sound like small decisions, but there is an exhaustion that comes from constantly calculating how much of yourself is safe to reveal. Putting on hi vis doesn’t suddenly make those calculations disappear. In an industry like construction, where the culture has historically been built around a very particular idea of masculinity and toughness, sometimes they become even louder.

We talk a lot about diversity in construction now, and we should. We talk about attracting more women, more queer people, more non-binary people and more people who don’t fit the traditional image of who belongs on a construction site. But getting different people through the gate is only the beginning. If the culture waiting for them on the other side still requires them to hide parts of themselves to belong, we haven’t really changed as much as we think we have.

That is something I have come to understand through building Amarapave.

When we started Amarapave, so much of our purpose centred around creating opportunities for women and non-binary people in asphalt. We wanted people to see themselves in an industry where they had rarely been represented. We wanted to challenge the image of what an asphalt crew looked like and prove that there was another way to build one.

But over time, I realised we were building something much bigger than representation.

We were building culture.

And perhaps without realising it at first, I was also helping to create the kind of workplace I had needed throughout my own life.

A workplace where being different wasn’t something you had to manage. Where you didn’t have to constantly read the room before deciding whether you could be yourself. Where people could talk about their partners and their families. Where pronouns weren’t a political debate. Where you could be loud or quiet, masculine or feminine, queer or straight, and none of those things determined whether you were respected as a tradie.

That doesn’t mean we always get everything right. Building an inclusive culture isn’t something you finish. It is something you have to keep choosing, particularly when it would be easier not to. Culture is built in the moments nobody puts on LinkedIn. It’s built in the crew truck, at pre-start and around the lunch table. It’s built when someone says something they shouldn’t and in what happens next. It’s built in whether people feel safe enough to speak up, and whether the people around them are willing to listen when they do.

This year’s Wear It Purple Day theme, Colours of Courage, has made me think a lot about what courage has looked like throughout my own life.

As a queer person, courage hasn’t always been loud or particularly inspiring. Sometimes courage was hiding enough of myself to feel safe. Sometimes it was walking into a room knowing I didn’t quite fit. Sometimes it was staying quiet because I wasn’t ready to speak, and other times it was finally deciding that staying quiet was costing me more than speaking up.

When I entered construction, courage took on another form. It became proving myself in an industry that wasn’t designed for someone like me. It became challenging behaviour I had once learned to tolerate. It became refusing to accept that “that’s just the industry” was a good enough explanation for a culture that was hurting people.

Eventually, courage looked like building Amarapave.

There is something deeply personal about that for me. Amarapave is a business, but it is also a response to so many of the things I experienced before it existed. It is our attempt to prove that you can build a successful construction business without asking people to leave pieces of themselves at the gate. That you can have high expectations, work hard, take pride in what you do and still create a culture where people feel safe enough to be human.

When I think about Wear It Purple Day, I think about the young queer person who might be considering a career in construction right now. Maybe they see our purple paver or our crew online. Maybe they see someone who looks like them doing a job they had never imagined was an option. Maybe, for the first time, they can picture themselves here.

Visibility matters because you cannot be what you cannot see. But I also know now that visibility without support isn’t empowering. There is no point encouraging queer young people to enter construction if we aren’t willing to do the work required to make sure they want to stay.

I want the next generation of queer tradies to inherit something better than we did. I don’t want them to become experts at reading rooms. I don’t want them to have to decide which parts of themselves are safe enough to bring to work. I don’t want courage to be a prerequisite for simply existing in our industry.

Perhaps that is what Colours of Courage means to me.

It is recognising the courage of the people who came before us and had to hide. The people who fought to be seen. The people who walked into spaces knowing they were different and stayed anyway. It is recognising those who are still finding that courage today, in whatever form it takes.

But it is also a challenge to those of us who are now in a position to shape the culture around us.

Our job isn’t to keep asking queer people to be brave enough to enter spaces that weren’t built for them. Our job is to change those spaces.

Because maybe the real measure of progress will be the day a young queer person walks onto a construction site and doesn’t feel courageous at all.

They just feel like they belong.

Written by: Ash MacMahon (Co-Founder & Field Director)