LINDA MCGARRY USED to quip that state employees enjoy so much job security, they’d have to kill someone to get fired. Ironically, the day that McGarry was terminated from her job at Taunton State Hospital, a psychiatric facility run by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH), she felt an awful lot like a criminal.

On August 25, 2000, just four months into her tenure as an entry-level cook in the hospital’s kitchen, McGarry stood across the desk from her supervisors, shocked at what she was hearing. Dietary Services manager Patrice Levesque, McGarry says, refused to make eye contact. She sat in a chair and stared at the floor. The hospital’s chief operating officer, Katherine Chmiel, did look at McGarry, but her face betrayed no emotion. She simply handed McGarry a single piece of paper.

"She said, ‘Linda, you need to read this,’" remembers McGarry, who felt a wave of panic sweep over her when she spotted the words: "Re: Work Performance/Termination." She pictured the stack of bills piling up at her two-bedroom Brockton apartment. "I begged them. I said, ‘Please, don’t do this to me. I need this job.’"

But Levesque, McGarry says, stayed silent. Chmiel, she adds, ordered her to relinquish her employee badge, as well as her hospital keys. The two DMH supervisors then escorted McGarry out of the office, past the curious patients lining up outside the cafeteria, and to the hospital’s front door. Levesque and Chmiel watched as McGarry walked to her car and drove away.

Nearly two years later, the 38-year-old McGarry has yet to shake the sense of shame that comes from being treated, in her words, "like a prisoner." The incident remains particularly painful because McGarry contends she did nothing to warrant the dismissal. After all, she had received a sterling job evaluation, and many fellow cooks considered her valuable. She had never been reprimanded at a job before, let alone fired. The only thing she did wrong at Taunton State Hospital, she claims, was to admit she’s a lesbian.

And so, in November 2000, three months after she was ushered out of the state facility, McGarry filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). Last June, after conducting preliminary depositions, she submitted a 10-page legal memorandum, in which she alleged the DMH not only wrongfully terminated her, but failed to address the widely circulated offensive rumors among her colleagues about her sexual orientation. Her feeling of injury is unlikely to be resolved soon; MCAD has yet to conclude its investigation. A recommendation on whether McGarry has probable cause has been made, but it requires supervisory review before it can be made public. If MCAD finds in her favor, it could hold a hearing as early as June. Currently, the notoriously backlogged agency faces as many as 6400 pending cases.

DMH officials, meanwhile, have stood by their decision to terminate McGarry. They say she was fired for no reason other than "poor job performance." The DMH decision to get rid of McGarry helped her supervisors solve a problem that had dogged her tenure at Taunton State Hospital — a problem referred to by DMH employment counsel Robert Wagner as "questionable co-worker gossip" about McGarry’s sexual orientation. Which explains why she doesn’t buy the DMH’s explanation. That she would be dismissed for sloppy workmanship strikes McGarry as "absolute bullshit." She says, "I was an excellent employee until they found out I’m gay. Suddenly, I became a problem."

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