COLLEGE NEWS

Gay in government: Humanitarian overcame challenges

Amanda Oglesby
@OglesbyAPP

WEST LONG BRANCH – Before Thomas Gallagher graduated Monmouth University in 1962, his psychology professor at the school told him that homosexuality was a mental illness.

"I later met that professor at a gay cruising area on the boardwalk in Asbury Park," Gallagher recalled to an audience of hundreds Wednesday afternoon, as he addressed the changes in society that have happened in the 52 years since he received his university diploma.

Gallagher, who lives in Tinton Falls and has worked as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department and on a number of humanitarian causes, was honored by university officials with the Distinguished Alumni Award. Over his career, Gallagher spent 20 years running a mental health clinic and helping AIDS patients in San Francisco, worked to ensure the delivery of food to 1.5 million starving Sudanese people, and was the first civil servant to voluntarily come "out of the closet" as gay in 1973.

At the time he graduated, the American Psychiatric Association recommended using electroconvulsive therapy and frontal lobotomy as a cure for homosexuality, Gallagher said. When he went to work for the federal government, homosexuality was a criminal act and it was illegal to be gay and work for the government, he added.

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Gallagher served in the Peace Corps, worked for the State Department, later served at Consul General to Ecuador and American Consul in Belgium and Spain, and was an officer to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

During his Peace Corps service, "my fellow volunteers and I all had security clearances that were designed to ferret out queers, drunks and commies from federal service," he told the Monmouth University audience.

During his Peace Corps service, he entered the palace of Haile Selassie I, then emperor of Ethiopia. At the time, he could have been killed in the country if he been discovered to be homosexual, Gallagher recalled.

Monmouth University officials honored him for his service and courage during the school's Founders' Day ceremony, which commemorated the institution's creation and 81-year history.

In 1968, Gallagher said he reconnected with a former Peace Corps colleague Don Kilhoefner who was then working as a gay activist in Los Angeles.

"The State Department sent me on two assignments in Los Angeles, and needless to say I made a beeline for Don's Center," he recalled. The center "was populated with lesbian hookers from Hollywood Boulevard and transvestite prostitutes from Sunset Boulevard. There were bearded hippies wearing lipstick who had names like Morning Glory and Strawberry."

Gallagher resigned from the State Department when his sexual orientation became public, but he went on to run a mental health clinic in San Francisco that helped AIDS patients during the early years of the epidemic. In various roles, he spent the next decades helping to combat other international health and humanitarian crises.

"Being gay still merits the death penalty in a dozen or so countries around the world," he said.

Next year, he said he plans to go to Ireland to advocate for gay marriage.

Read: "What you need to know about gay marriage"

"We still have a long way to go," said Gallagher.

Amanda Oglesby: 732-557-5701; aoglesby@app.com