Don't ask, don't tell, don't be gay: Roger Garford & Jean MacDonald

Jean MacDonald and Roger Garford have finally got some media coverage (thanks to Kris Jepson at Channel 4 News) for the injustice they suffered from the UK Ministry of Defence.

Two years ago, in March 2008, they also got a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights saying the MoD was wrong to expel them both for being gay.

Their story has come out as the U.S. votes to repeal it’s so-called ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ laws which allowed gay soldiers to serve in its military on the basis they kept their sexuality quiet.

But just ten years ago in Britain, the law was far more repressive. There was nothing about asking or telling, just a clear stipulation that to be a soldier you had to be straight. If you weren’t, you were liable to get the treatment Roger and Jean received.

Bear in mind, the government has still not apologised to either of them.

A stolen retirement

Just before he was due to retire, the Royal Air Force (RAF) began a witch hunt against Roger, to find out if he was gay.

They hauled in the Chief Technician for four long rounds of interrogation. They made him name and shame his partners. They humiliated him with graphic questions about his sexual encounters. He broke down and confessed all.

He told Kris Jepson at Channel 4 News: "Their investigation went into very personal details. They asked me was I still having sex with my wife, what sort of sex? They got me down on my knees – I was in a desperate state and I was forced to give names of men I had been with, which I regret to this day.”

They discharged him just over 100 days before he was due to stop work with a full army pension. A career that had begun in 1960 with high hopes ended in shame two days before Christmas in 1983.

"I was a real mess, psychologically, mentally and I suppose physically. The first few months after I'd lost my job, I lost my wife, my home. Those first few months of drinking I was in a real mess…I lost everything that was important to me, even recalling it now upsets me."

A career cut short

Jean was 20 when she joined the Royal Women’s Army Corps, which she hoped would be the beginning of a lifelong career. Four years later she had been dishonourably discharged for being gay.

In April 1981 an investigation began into Jean’s sexual orientation. She says she was interrogated by military police for 6 hours and not allowed toilet breaks or refreshments. Once again, the questioning was graphic and humiliating.

She tells her story to Channel 4 News: "They threatened me by saying they knew my twin sister was gay and said if I didn’t sign the discharge papers they would get her. They threatened to tell my mother. They said if I agreed to certain things that I would be safe. They said things like 'if I was in the same situation I would have experimented...' They basically convinced me I would be OK.

"They threatened to take me to the medical block because they claimed I had love bites down my back. They asked a lot of very sexual and intimate questions, including about sex toys and stimulations. It was just very crude and disgusting really.

"I got to the point where I would have done or said anything to get out of the room. I was very young and I just felt I had no other option but to sign the bit of paper. All I admitted was having a drunken fling with someone – I'd ended up in bed with another woman and we both had our underwear on and that's why they discharged me. I never admitted to being a lesbian because then I simply didn’t know."

In a desperate attempt to buy time to launch a legal challenge, Jean says she asked a friend to break her wrist so she would fail the army medical. After drinking heavily, they tried, but an Army X-ray showed it was not fractured.

She was discharged soon after. Later, her local hospital X-rayed the wrist again and said it was broken.

Discrimination in compensation

Both Jean and Roger had to rebuild their lives and start new careers. Jean still suffers from depression 29 years later. Roger is still working when he could have retired in the 1980s.

In March 2008, Roger, Jean and two other former members of the armed forces won their legal battle against the MoD at the European Court of Human Rights.

The decision is made quickly. Lacking resources, the ECHR simply makes a ruling and leaves it to the parties involved to decide upon compensation. The MoD would decide how much compensation it would pay for its breach of human rights.

What it offered the soldiers is, lawyers say, only a fraction of what they would have received in a UK employment tribunal.

Roger was offered around £88,000, less than the value of his pension and lost income, not to mention the impact his dismissal had on his personal life. Jean was offered, £35,000.

Bear in mind that Kerry Fletcher, a lesbian soldier who successfully sued the MoD in the UK for unfair dismissal on the grounds of sex discrimination and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, won £187,000 in 2008, on the grounds she intended to continue in the army for another 12 years.

But for Jean, the MoD based their calculations on the assumption that a typical, heterosexual female soldier served for only 6 years.

That does not take into account the fact that lesbian women served for longer in the armed forces, or that at the time the MoD had a policy of dismissing any women who got pregnant, which was later ruled illegal.

Ironically, the MoD used a discriminatory method to calculate Jean’s compensation for being discriminated against.

There was no apology. There seems to be no further legal recourse.

***

Watch this 1997 film starring Helen Baxendale about a Military Police officer assigned to rooting out lesbian soldiers, only to find out that she too is gay.