I had a yearning, an affinity if you like to go to sea and joining the Royal Navy was an obvious choice for me.
But I knew that I was gay from a very young age, so joining the Navy was always going to come with risks. I’d have to hide who I truly was for much of my life.
But in 1992 aged 21 I became an RN Meteorologist & Oceanographer, at RNAS Culdrose in Cornwall.
I was carving out quite a good career there having several successful trips to sea on exercise where I had just been selected as a potential Officer Candidate, when the day I had always hoped would never come arrived.
In Summer of 1994 I had been away at sea on exercise for three weeks training to deploy to the Caribbean. On return I discovered two friends I shared a house with had been through my belongings whilst I was away and found intimate letters from someone I was seeing outside of the Navy. They had taken them to work and handed them to our senior officer and I was to be taken in to custody and investigated by the SIB.
I went in to work on the Monday following a weekend where suicide was a constant thought and was taken into custody and put in a holding cell whilst the SIB were called. I underwent two full days of intense and intimate questioning about my sex life, my partner, the letters that had been handed in, it was relentless and much of it highly emotional and degrading they made me feel like a sexual deviant.
I was then sent home for over three months whilst the investigation took place not out to my parents at the time.
This was an extremely difficult situation and also ended the relationship I was having with the person outside of the Navy as I blamed him for everything that had happened.
I was called back to Culdrose for dismissal three weeks before Christmas suffering badly with flu, told if I didn’t travel I’d be AWOL and arrested. So I travelled, two days later I was in the Culdrose infirmary with acute pneumonia, fighting for life for nearly two weeks. A incident that left me with life long asthma. I was then discharged just a few days before Christmas.
I spent a year unemployed, suffering with deep depression and attempted suicide twice during this period. But then I discovered Rank Outsiders and joined the fight to lift the ban. Spending 13 years fighting the Government’s of the day until finally winning our case at the ECHR. Something I will forever feel proud of.
Alongside this still wishing to serve my country I had joined the Civil Service and carved out a successful career that saw me working at Dstl Porton Down and 10 Downing Street. But even working in No10 couldn’t replace the void in my heart that was left by being dismissed from the Senior Service.
