TAUNTON STATE HOSPITAL doesn’t have the look and feel of haute cuisine surroundings. The DMH facility, which provides long-term psychiatric care to adults and adolescents, sits at the end of a quiet, residential street dotted with Victorian homes. Tucked behind rolling fields and wooded groves stands a series of stark, four-story brick buildings. On a recent Friday afternoon, people wandered the grounds in a slow, lackadaisical manner. A hefty, balding man hunched over a picnic table and bellowed an indecipherable tune, his voice echoing for miles. Beside him, perched on a bench, a thin, disheveled woman stared, blank-eyed, smoking a cigarette. It was, to say the least, a sleepy scene.

But for Linda McGarry, Taunton State Hospital represents the pinnacle of career success. A small spark plug of a woman, McGarry has delighted in the frenetic pace of a kitchen ever since she was 16, when she landed her first job as a prep cook at the now-defunct Gary’s Restaurant, in Bridgewater. Born in Brockton, the youngest of two children, she grew up in what she calls an "easygoing," blue-collar household. Her father painted power boxes for Boston Edison Company; her mother worked as a dental hygienist. As a young teen, McGarry attended Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School, in South Easton, where she enrolled in cooking courses by day and toiled at Gary’s by night. "I enjoyed the rush," she recalls. One minute, she’d be preparing soup; the next, flipping burgers. "You have to be on your toes in the kitchen. It’s a challenge. I love it."

McGarry’s love for kitchen life, however, has yielded little material wealth. As she worked her way up the ladder, getting promoted from prep cook to line cook to sous-chef at restaurants and cafeterias in and around Brockton, she always struggled to make ends meet. After 22 years as a cook, her hourly wage had peaked at just $10. Her jobs rarely came with such employee perks as health insurance, paid vacation, and retirement plans.

So in February 2000, when McGarry heard about an opening in the Taunton State Hospital kitchen, she seized the opportunity. "As soon as I heard the word ‘state,’" she says, "I thought ‘benefits, retirement, my future.’" Within days, McGarry applied for the position and submitted eight letters of recommendation from previous employers. She underwent a criminal-background check and three on-site interviews. On April 16, 2000, she was hired as an entry-level cook, earning $10.68 per hour with full benefits — including sick leave and personal time, holidays, two weeks’ vacation, medical and dental coverage, and a pension. "I was so excited," she says. "I thought, ‘Now all I have to do is work hard, settle down, and retire.’"

Things, however, didn’t go as planned. According to McGarry’s complaint, little more than a month into her employment, she discovered that some of her fellow workers weren’t as enthusiastic about her as she was about them. The news came in the form of an e-mail message from a veteran staff member, Janet Marshall, with whom McGarry had become friends. One evening in early June, while she and Marshall were exchanging e-mails, Marshall asked McGarry a personal question. "She said, ‘Linda, you can tell me it’s none of my business,’" McGarry recounts. "She asked if I’m gay."

McGarry, who is openly lesbian, considers herself discreet. "I don’t wave the flag around in people’s faces," she says. Yet she wasn’t exactly fazed by her colleague’s query: "People could figure out I’m gay just by looking at me." Her manner is more manly than womanly. A slight, bespectacled woman, she wears her brown hair styled in a mullet, tucked under a cap. When she’s not dressed in white kitchen garb, she prefers sweats. Her motto might best be summed up as "what you see is what you get."

"I don’t do myself up," she explains. "I’m just me." So with characteristic candor, McGarry, according to her complaint, answered the e-mail in the affirmative, to which she says Marshall replied: "It doesn’t matter to me. But it bothers me the way people talk about you when you leave work."

Marshall, a Taunton resident who is married and has one child, confided that some of the hospital’s food-service employees — who dish out the meals in the cafeteria — often whispered about McGarry’s sexual orientation. According to McGarry’s complaint, employees were saying things to Marshall like, "Don’t go in the walk-in refrigerator with Linda. She’s a lesbian," and, "Don’t associate with Linda. She’s a lesbian." The news dealt a heavy blow to McGarry, who says she had never experienced such prejudice before. "It hurt," she adds. "I couldn’t believe people would be so closed-minded." (The Phoenix’s efforts to contact Marshall for comment were unsuccessful; McGarry and her lawyer declined to reveal contact information for her former co-workers, including Marshall, citing their desire not to speak to the press.)

McGarry resolved to seek help. The following day, she contacted her supervisor, Patrice Levesque, who oversees the hospital’s 32-member Dietary Services division. "I told Patrice about the e-mail," she remembers. "I said it wasn’t right. It made me uncomfortable." According to her complaint, confirmed by the DMH’s response, Levesque reacted by calling the DMH’s Boston office, which houses the affirmative-action and equal-employment-opportunity departments. Several days later, the office sent down a representative, Georgette Tanner, who met with McGarry. Tanner requested names of the co-workers who were remarking on her sexual orientation, at which McGarry balked. "I didn’t want to make waves," she explains. "But [Tanner] said, ‘Linda, I guarantee it will stop.’" Later that afternoon, after McGarry had gone home, Tanner held a meeting via speakerphone with 12 or so employees. She directed staff, according to the DMH response to the MCAD complaint, "not to spread rumors, to focus on work at hand, and to avoid sexuality-related discussion on the job."

Still, it didn’t take long for the whispers to stir again. According to McGarry’s complaint, some six weeks later, in early August 2000, word spread that she and Marshall had been spotted in the women’s bathroom, in the same stall, engaging in sex — a charge that both women vehemently deny in sworn legal statements. DMH filings don’t appear to take issue with McGarry’s story. In a journal that McGarry had kept at the time, which she shared with the Phoenix, she describes an increasingly hostile environment:

Ward attendants were asking co-workers about me and janet, that we were together, in a stall, having sex, etc.... A patient actually came up to me and said what’s with you and that other girl in the kitchen. Things have really got uncomfortable for me. I wouldn’t walk thru the cafeteria when it was lunch or dinner. I would walk ... out of my way because of the looks, snickering, staring.

The rumor persisted for days before Dietary Services manager Levesque approached McGarry, on August 17, 2000. According to McGarry’s MCAD complaint, Levesque explained that a food-service worker named Maria Banana, a long-time employee, had reported the bathroom incident, which was circulating throughout the hospital by now. Banana, according to the DMH response, "entered a women’s bathroom at the Hospital, heard a shriek of surprise at her entry from Complainant [McGarry], and observed what she thought was Complainant and co-worker having sexual relations in one of the stalls. Reportedly of religious conviction, she became very upset."

When Levesque confronted McGarry, she denied the allegation. Evidently, however, the conversation didn’t end there. "Patrice suggested that I try to stay out of such situations to keep the rumors down," she says. The MCAD complaint charges that Levesque advised McGarry to take certain steps to calm the gossip. Those steps, as laid out in the complaint, included:

Not to be alone with any females.

Not to be associates with Janet Marshall.

For Complainant to stay in groups.

For Complainant to take lunch with a group of people instead of one person.

Not to talk to females if only one female was around.

Not to go into the locker room if another female is in there.

Not to go into the bathroom ... if another female was in there.

Not to take walks with any female while on break.

The suggestions stunned McGarry. "I was dumbfounded," she says. "I felt like I was being treated as a second-class citizen." Levesque declined to comment for this article through DMH spokesperson Anna Chinappi. DMH employment counsel Wagner acknowledges that Levesque did offer such advice: "Levesque indicated that, if she were in this position, she would avoid trips to the bathroom with other women, etc.," he wrote in the DMH response to the MCAD complaint. Wagner insists, however, that Levesque did not actually demand that McGarry carry out these actions.

Some experts in discrimination law question whether Levesque could even offer these suggestions. Boston attorney Jennifer Levi, who handles discrimination cases for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, considers it "an inappropriate response" for an employer to restrict an employee’s behavior because of harassment. Any "reasonable employer," Levi explains, knows the responsibility for ensuring a harassment-free workplace rests with the employer, not the employee. To combat harassment, an employer must take prompt, adequate, and immediate action. But if he puts the burden on the employee, Levi says, "That’s different. That potentially gives rise to a second claim of discrimination."

Bridgewater employment attorney Daniel Clifford, who represents McGarry, puts it more bluntly. "The response is not only inappropriate, but I think it’s illegal," he says. "No other employee there was singled out and told not to do these things. Clearly, Linda faced disparate treatment."

McGarry began noticing "other little things" on the job that made her think things were getting worse. In early August, right around the time that the bathroom rumor surfaced, Tex Holloway, the hospital’s head cook, developed a peculiar way of addressing her. One day, for instance, she and a fellow cook were on break. Holloway approached them and, while looking at her colleague, said: "Tell Linda I want her to clean the drains," as if she weren’t there. McGarry says she tried to laugh off the incident. "I said, ‘Tell Tex okay.’" Yet the exchange left her feeling as small as a green pea. She says this pattern of ignoring her presence continued.

As the month progressed, moreover, she was being pulled into various managers’ offices with greater frequency. One day she was scolded for leaving a kettle soiled with macaroni, even though no one had seen her cook the dish in the first place. Another day she was called down for claiming 13 hours’ worth of sick time in two months, even though she’d earned 40 — more than enough to cover it. She was also repeatedly reprimanded for failing to heed Holloway’s instructions. "I was told, ‘Respect the chain of command,’" she says. "But sometimes, Tex was not there. So if I had a question, what was I supposed to do? Not ask?"

McGarry’s lawyers suggests his client was set up. "Look at the timeline," Clifford says. McGarry didn’t encounter any problems until August, at which time she got into a whirlwind of trouble. "In two and a half weeks," he maintains, "she did everything wrong. We believe the DMH made a decision to get rid of McGarry and generated paperwork to show cause."

In retrospect, McGarry might have seen her termination coming. Yet on that August 2000 day, even after weeks of escalating tension, she was shocked when Levesque and Chmiel informed her that she’d been fired. According to her August 25, 2000, termination letter, the DMH let McGarry go because of "many job-performance issues" — specifically, because of the dirty kettle and for failing to follow the head cook’s orders. In the letter, Ronald Dailey, the hospital’s interim area director, portrayed the dismissal as inevitable: "Despite the numerous efforts made to correct your job performance," he wrote, "areas of concern still exist. Therefore your employment with the Department of Mental Health Taunton State Hospital will be terminated."

Witnessed workplace discrimination? Share your experiences here in the Phoenix Forum.