Anna, good person, was fired

Anna

Kind, Good Person, Was Fired!

Anna was a great employee at the telephone company. She was eager to learn and very bright. Anna was happy to have a decent job with benefits and she was determined to do her best to keep this job for many years.

When I first met Anna she was walking into my classroom and I liked her. I could sense there was something special about her. She carried herself differently and she had a determination that I could feel as she walked up and introduced herself to me and to others in the room. 

By lunchtime I had a sense of everyone in the class. There were 12 new hires and most were keepers. I had doubts about a couple of them as they struggled with some basic information that was provided. Anna was one of the brightest in the class and I knew she would be with us for a long time. 

As an instructor or facilitator, it makes the job so much easier when you have people like Anna in class.

It didn’t take but a few days for me to realize that Anna was homosexual. She did not do anything that was inappropriate or sexual in nature. It just seems to me that I have a keen sense for detecting those things. The little things that a person does tells so much about them. The fact that Anna was homosexual had no bearing on anything for me. She was kind, smart and a great person who was eager to learn and do the job she was  hired to do. In the back of my mind I was aware of the policy concerning homosexuals but I had never been instructed to face that issue or to report it, so for that I was thankful. 

I had known of 2 others over the years that had been terminated solely on the basis of their sexual orientation. I guess we had our own unspoken “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy long before the military adopted it. Everyone has their beliefs and opinions about these things but I feel unless a person is acting inappropriately it is not my business or concern. Who am I to judge someone who is just living their life and being who they were born to be? 

In those days people were a lot less tolerant of differences and they were a lot more judgmental about differences. That was not the “good ole days” to me. People still used the “n” word regularly in my presence and of course they used the “q” word too.  In those days homosexual people were called “queer”. The word gay was not  used until many years later. All of that changed while I was working my 31 years at the phone company, but I was there when people were fired because they were “queer” and no black people were employed (except janitorial or cafeteria help). That was how it was for my first few years I was there. 

Anna made a couple of friends and went through her days at work with no problems. She did not make waves and kept her opinions to herself for the most part. I saw her a couple of times when people were telling jokes about “queers” and even though she did a good job of disguising it, she looked hurt or afraid to me.

As I write the story of this young lady named Anna who worked with me over forty years ago, my heart goes out to her and what she was going through. One of my co-workers who was closer to Anna told me of her life. Her parents, upon learning that their daughter was gay had taken her to church and had the entire congregation pray for her to be fixed. It was humiliating for Anna and she could no longer bear to attend church. By this time she had her own apartment and had little contact with her disappointed family.

I thought how very alone she must have felt. How very difficult it had to be for her as she had to walk in someone else’s shoes and pretend she was heterosexual. I remember thinking how fortunate I was that I was “normal” as my mother called it.

A couple of years passed and Anna won a couple of awards for exceeding all of the benchmarks and for perfect attendance. She was proud and I was happy to see her receive the recognition.

Then the day came when it all came tumbling down. A person named Stephanie that Anna had befriended, told one of the supervisors that Anna was gay. 

I remember the meeting and the discussion about her. It broke my heart to hear the words that were used. Bottom line is that it did not matter about her excellence on the job or her sweet disposition. It did not matter that she never complained and always did the job she was paid to do. All that mattered was the fact that Anna was homosexual.

She was fired. I felt so sad that day. I was sad for Anna because she did not deserve this and I was sad because she really needed this job to survive. I was even sad for those who terminated her because I felt they were ignorant and had no compassion for this young lady.

As the years passed by and policies such as this one were deemed to be illegal and oppressive, I was so thankful.  I wonder all of these years later as I remember Anna, is she ok?