What happened to Shoemaker in 1980 was the continuation of a policy launched nearly 30 years earlier, in 1953. Eventually, personnel officers told him that he was going to be fired. For the next four months, Shoemaker didn’t work while his bosses came to a decision. “They read me my rights,” he recalls, “and they said ‘we understand you’re leading a gay lifestyle.’ And I remember saying, ‘well, I didn’t think I was leading it, but yes, I’m gay.’” It was made clear to Shoemaker that he couldn’t keep his top secret security clearance, and he was taken to a nearby facility where he was separated from his fellow employees. Six years into his career as a linguist at the National Security Agency in 1980, Jamie Shoemaker was called into the office of the Agency’s security apparatus.
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