In July 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission reversed long-standing policies that effectively prohibited gays from working in government. There had been no explicit ban, but reportedly hundreds of men and women over the decades had seen their careers ruined on the grounds of “immoral conduct” at the first hint of their sexual identities being exposed.
Gay activists hailed as a victory the commission’s ruling, which followed a federal court decision, but it did not cover such agencies as the Secret Service, the FBI or the Foreign Service, which are administered separately. Gays in those bureaus were believed to be more susceptible to blackmail — security risks given the sensitivity of their jobs, especially in an era when psychiatrists had only just declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.
Three months after the commission’s ruling, amid his increasingly difficult struggle with being forced to muffle his sexuality, 35-year-old Foreign Service officer Tom Gallagher attended a Washington gathering of the Gay Activist Alliance. He served on a panel titled “Gays as Federal Employees” and that included Franklin Kameny, a gay Army Map Service astronomer who had been fired in 1957 and subsequently spearheaded the Washington-area gay-rights movement.
The panel proved to be what Gallagher, who died July 8 at 77, called his “coming out party.”
“I didn’t want to lie and hide anymore,” he said in a 2012 oral history with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. “While I was not interested in publicity, on the other hand, if my homosexuality became an issue in any relationship for the rest of my life, I wanted to be honest about it and not lie.”
At the same time, he added, “I was absolutely scared to death” by appearing in public as a gay man at a time when a stigma was still very much attached to homosexuality in the public realm. Media coverage, he said, tended to focus on the “prurient” aspects of the movement.
“I was terrified of finding my picture on the front page of Time,” he said in the oral history. “I was concerned for my mother, a conservative Catholic who would have been mortified if she found herself the object of pity at St. Mary’s Church in Deal, N.J., because her son had humiliated her in the national media. I also didn’t want to lose my job. I had no other career prospects, and very little money in the bank.”
Nevertheless, when he was asked as a panelist what his colleagues at the State Department said about his sexuality, he said no one yet knew. ” ‘I guess this is a coming out party,’ I said, and the whole room stood up to give me my first standing ovation,” he recalled. “Great fun; but when I went home that evening I was still scared witless.”
After a decade-long diplomatic career that took him from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria to Ecuador, Gallagher left the State Department in 1976 rather than submit to what he imagined would be an arduous and humiliating security-clearance renewal.
He moved to Los Angeles and later San Francisco to pursue a career as a social worker. He spent nearly two decades providing support and services to AIDS patients and mentally ill senior citizens before returning to the State Department in 1994 — a year before President Bill Clinton signed an executive order lifting the Cold War-era practice of preventing gays from obtaining security clearances.
Before retiring in 2005, Gallagher worked as country officer for Eritrea and Sudan and as regional adviser for Europe in the Office of International Health.
In 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton singled out Gallagher as an example of the progress made for gay State Department employees. “He risked his career when he came out and became the first openly gay Foreign Service officer,” Clinton said at the 20th anniversary of GLIFAA, the agency’s LGBTQ personnel association. “I don’t want any of you who are a lot younger ever to take for granted what it took for people like Tom Gallagher to pave the way for all of you.”
While Gallagher was not involved in helping end bans on gays inside the federal government, his coming out was significant because it came at a pivotal moment in the struggle for gay employees, said David Johnson, who wrote The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.
“It was courageous of him to come out publicly while he was a Foreign Service officer,” said Johnson, an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida.
Thomas Patrick Gallagher was born in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 1940. Both his parents worked for a wealthy family in New Jersey – his mother, who was an Irish immigrant, as a maid, and his father as a chauffeur.
Gallagher and his mother lived over a garage on the estate in New Jersey, and Gallagher caddied at a nearby golf club as a boy. Educated in Catholic school, he said in the oral history that he yearned as a child to become a church missionary “mainly so that I could go to Africa and look for Tarzan.”
Within days of graduating in 1962 from Monmouth College (now University) in New Jersey with a bachelor’s degree in political science, he joined the nascent Peace Corps and was sent to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
He entered the Foreign Service in 1965 and married the next year. While based in Saudi Arabia, he planned the evacuation of Americans during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. He was also in Nigeria during the Biafran secession conflict that sparked a civil war, served as consul general in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and held various postings in Washington and California, working in the passport offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He became increasingly radicalized, he said, by gay acquaintances he met on the West Coast and news of the gay liberation movement following the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Gallagher visited the Gay Community Services Center in Los Angeles, one of the country’s largest gay counseling programs (and which later became the Los Angeles LGBT Center), and was captivated.
The center was “populated with lesbian hookers from Hollywood Boulevard and transvestite prostitutes from Sunset Boulevard,” Gallagher said at a 2014 address at Monmouth University. “There were bearded hippies wearing lipstick who had names like Morning Glory and Strawberry. I had never seen anything like that at the State Department and I absolutely loved it.”
Around that time, he divorced his wife, the former Carolyn Worrell, and received a master’s degree in social work from the University of Southern California. In 2017, he married Amin Dulkumoni, his only immediate survivor.
Gallagher died at a nursing home in Wall, New Jersey. The cause was cardiac arrest, said Dulkumoni.
In a career shadowed by moments of fear, Gallagher said Hillary Clinton’s public mention of him was exhilarating. “I thought what a wonderful way to say goodbye to State Department at the end of your career,” he said in the oral history. “The room full of people giving you a standing ovation after the Secretary has called you a hero.”