Joan Darrah

Who is Joan Darrah?

Joan Darrah is an activist for LGBT rights, specifically the end of the "don't ask don't tell" policy, which prohibited gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members from being open about their sexual orientation.

Darrah joined the Navy in 1972, unaware that she was a lesbian, and retired in June 2002 as a captain. At one point in her career, she supervised 1500 people at Naval Intelligence Command, including openly gay civilians. Darrah was a Navy officer who narrowly escaped being killed in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon, which caused her to reevaluate the harm the policy was causing to her life. Due to this, she retired in 2002 after serving for thirty years.

In pursuit of ending DADT, in 2006 she founded and chaired a Mount Vernon Unitarian Church Task Force, and in 2007, she and several other MVUC members collected signatures and successfully advocated for a Unitarian Universalist Association Action of Immediate Witness to repeal DADT.

She testified at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in July 2008 to advocate the repeal of DADT. She said she would not join the Navy as a lesbian with DADT in place, now that she understood how stressful it would prove. She cited the inability of a homosexual servicemember to seek redress for harassment. In response to another witness who said "unit cohesion is a leadership issue", she said: