Human Side Up: Dr. Joel A Davis Brown on culture and who gets to tell the story

Dr. Joel A. Davis Brown is an author, educator, and speaker. He is also the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Pneumos LLC, a worldwide management consultancy that provides organizations with leadership training, organizational development, and fostering a diverse, creative environment where people can thrive. He is an adjunct professor at the IESEG Management school, where he teaches executive MBA courses on emotional intelligence, strategic storytelling, and story listening.

Dr. Davis Brown sat down with CLARA Founder & CEO Natasha Nuytten to CLARA Founder & CEO Natasha Nuytten for a conversation about his book The Souls of Queer Folk: How Understanding LGBTQ+ Culture Can Transform Your Leadership Practice.

More than a label

Coming into his own as a queer man, Dr. Davis Brown felt frustrated by the narrow portrayals of LGBTQ+ identity. “I realized that for most of my journey as a queer man, who I was being told to me was by people who had no connection to the community, were not part of the community and had no familiarity with my life.”

His academic and personal inquiry led to his book, The Souls of Queer Folk, where he writes: “The lion’s story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it.” In conversation, he expands on the danger of that dynamic. “The singularity of the stories is done on purpose, is done with intention,” he says. “Because [...] if I can characterize you in a way that makes you seem inhuman, then it becomes easier for me to repress you, to oppress you.”

What started as a search for self-definition became a deeper cultural study. “I said to myself, there has to be—I know it in my bones, I feel it in my soul—that being a member of the LGBTQ+ community has more to do than just same sex attraction, pronouns, bending the binary. Flipping traditional norms on their head. There's something more there.”

He began digging into values: what people say, what they show, and what lives underneath. “For example, people would say being gay means that you have sex with someone of the same sex. And I said that's an expression of the culture. That is a manifestation of it, but that's not the core value.”

Culture is not sameness

As both a scholar and a practitioner, Dr. Davis Brown argues that culture is more layered than many frameworks allow.

“When we think about culture, what we're essentially referencing are those norms, values, customs and practices that are shared by a particular group. Some people refer to them as the collective programming—the ways in which we operate in the world, the ways in which we see the world, the ways in which we experience ourselves in relationship to the world.”

To Dr. Davis Brown culture isn’t about uniformity. It’s about alignment and expression. “It's not about being the same,” he explains. “It's about having some correlative behaviors or values that are linked and aligned with each other, but allow for people to express them.”

This nuance matters. Without it, people start to internalize the limitations of reductive stereotypes. “I think for years I struggled thinking ‘I'm really not LGBTQ, I'm really not gay, I'm really not queer,’ because what was portrayed was very, again, narrow, very focused, a very focused definition that didn't really apply to me.”

The paradox of inclusion

Part of the challenge in broadening cultural narratives lies in the tension between inclusivity and authenticity—a dynamic Dr. Davis Brown refers to as “the inclusion paradox,” a term he credits to his mentor, Dr. Bernardo Ferdman.

“The inclusion paradox is the idea that as you promote facilitating inclusion, there will become a point where inclusion is no longer possible because some of the people who you're including perhaps do not support the inclusion or support some of the ideas of the people that you're trying to include.”

In these moments, protecting the integrity of the community may require setting boundaries. “I can't include you, for example, in the workplace if your aim is to not only question the existence of queer people, but to harm queer people.”

This is not about gatekeeping for its own sake. It’s about responsibility. “I think that's where there could be some danger if people don't realize the responsibility and the care with which you have to maintain and honor the community and the culture that you're a part of.”

Culture as inheritance and action

For Dr. Davis Brown, culture is not a static object to preserve—it’s an evolving force to nurture. “Culture is a fluid thing. It's a dynamic thing. It's a growing thing. And so whether we believe it or not, each of us I think is entrusted to expand and to help it grow and to help nurture that culture so that it can be passed on to future generations.”

He gives the example of survival teachings handed down from his grandfather. “Something as simple as my grandfather passing down the knowledge, hey, if you get pulled over by a white police officer, here are the things that you need to do. That's going to ensure survival of me, but it also should ensure survival of the culture.”

This intergenerational awareness is a key part of what drives him. “That's where it comes up. And so I worry when people are being very fast and loose with this whole idea of culture... it's not something that you just choose into or you just opt into. It's something that is part of your being and part of your essence, whether you acknowledge it or not.”

To hear more from Dr. Joel A. Davis Brown on culture, inclusion, and the power of narrative watch the latest episode of Human Side Up here.