LGBTQ plaintiff: The fight isn’t over
He’s fighting to get unspecified damages and his old job back
Gerald Bostock was working as an advocate for kids in the juvenile justice system when he joined a softball league to help him deal with the physical and emotion toll of battling cancer.
The league was gay. Bostock was fired.
“It was the most difficult day of my life, aside from my cancer diagnosis. I barely remember driving home,” said Bostock, 56, now the sole surviving plaintiff in June’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that deemed it illegal to discriminate in employment against gay or transgender workers. “But I never gave up. I always stood by the fact that I did nothing wrong.”
In an interview before addressing a recent Orlando symposium sponsored by the Contigo Fund, formed in the aftermath of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, Bostock spoke of his seven-year journey to the highest court in the nation and the fight still to come.
Despite the ruling, Bostock’s case against his former employer — Clayton County, Ga., south of Atlanta — still has to be litigated. He’s fighting to get unspecified damages and his old job back.
“If you’d asked me seven years ago if would we be sitting here talking today about this, I’d have thought you were crazy,” he said. “But you know,
seven years ago, I never expected to be fired because I joined a gay recreational softball league. I’ll tell you this, I don’t regret any decision I made along the way. And I wouldn’t change anything. I was proud of the hard work and success that I gave Clayton County and, more importantly, how that impacted the kids in that community.”
Bostock had just finished treatment for prostate cancer at the time he joined the Hotlanta Softball League. He wanted to prove to himself that he could do it, he said, both physically and mentally.
It was 2013. When Bostock was suddenly fired from his job of 10 years, he was stunned. And he quickly had to find another type of work. No one in child welfare was give him a job.
An Atlanta-area hospital hired him to be a mental health counselor for adult patients. He still works there.
“I was having to pay for COBRA [health insurance] coverage, and that’s extremely expensive,” he said. “So that added to my debt category. I had my mortgage and other bills that had to be paid. But I was very honest on my application. They were aware that there was an [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] investigation, and that, per instruction of the investigator, I was not to discuss the specifics of the case.”
He’s grateful for the job, though he earns less than he once did, he said.
He’s more grateful for all the support he received from the Human Rights Campaign, Georgia Equality and other LGBTQ civil likely to rights advocates — both leading up to the decision and in the weeks since.
The court, on a 6-3 vote, ruled that a key provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — known as Title VII — that makes it illegal to fire or refuse to hire a worker on the basis of sex also applies to sexual orientation and rally outside the gender identity.
The decision was based on Bostock vs. Clayton County as well as two other cases, one involving Donald Zarda, a New York skydiving instructor who claimed he was fired because of his sexual orientation, and Aimee Stephens, who lost her job as a funeral director in the Detroit area after she revealed to her boss that she had struggled with gender most of her life and had, at long last, “decided to become the person that my mind already is.”
Zarda died in an accident in Switzerland in 2014. Stephens died of kidney failure May 12, just a month before the ruling.
“Sadly, they’re not here physically to share this victory with us,” said Bostock, who has recovered from cancer. “I never had the opportunity to meet Don . ... but luckily I did have the honor and privilege to meet Aimee and her wife in Washington [at the Supreme Court hearing of the case], and I got to hear her story from her. And I got to know her. And she was such an amazing woman. That’ll be a memory that I cherish for the rest of my life.”
There’s no hearing set yet for his own case, now remanded to the lower courts. Bostock’s attorney, Tom Mew of the firm Buckley Beal, said the matter will first go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and then to U.S. District Court, where the case had been dismissed based on a determination that the law just didn’t provide for relief for this type of discrimination.
“These are very early days in his underlying case, believe it or not,” Mew said.
Bostock, despite the setbacks and challenges, never wavered in his resolve.
“That’s who I am,” he said. “I was not only doing it for myself, but I was doing it for all those people that were either living in fear of being fired, or that had been fired and nothing was done about it.”