I was really involved in Model UN all throughout high school. I loved being assigned a country, as long as it wasn't ours, researching the nation's policies and then being a delegate in one of the UN's myriad deliberative bodies. It was fun. I learned a lot. And, my parents paid for it every step of the way because it was a "learning experience."

Well, like many high school dreams, my desire to work at the UN faded over time as I realized that no matter how I cut it, I'd end up having to represent the United States in some way. While I love my country, I don't love its policies--especially those of the foreign ilk.

I knew that when I came out in my freshman year of college, being open about my sexuality and being a member of the Foreign Service wouldn't necessarily jive—the "in my hand I have a list" witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy whose goal it was to root out all homosexuals and communists from the State Department was part of my consciousness growing up. I may have not put all the pieces of my life together at 18 but I certainly knew which mountains were harder to climb.

Michael Guest, our country's former Ambassador to Romania, didn’t get the same memo about mountain climbing as I did. I don't know how long Guest was out as a gay man during his 26 years in the Department of State's Foreign Service but he made headlines this week when he resigned in protest.

He wasn't protesting our government's foreign policy. No, he resigned from a career he loved in order to protest the rules and regulations regarding same-sex partners of Foreign Service officers.

At his retirement ceremony on November 20th, standing just a few steps from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's office, he told the 75 senior officials who gathered to wish him well, "I’ve felt compelled to choose between obligations to my partner, who is my family, and service to my country. That anyone should have to make that choice is a stain on the secretary's leadership, and a shame for this institution and our country."

While things have changed for gays and lesbians in the State Department since McCarthy's 1950's witch hunts, the official reception their partners receive is anything but welcoming.

If you're one of the 350 partners of a gay or lesbian Foreign Service official and you'd like to keep your family together when your diplomat has been assigned to a foreign country, you have to pay your own way to get there. You're not entitled to any medical care, you don't get trained on how to spot terrorists or speak the language of the country you're going to, you don't get a diplomatic passport and you have to pay to be evacuated when the Foreign Service decides that is the prudent course of action to take in a country where unrest is the rule rather than the exception.

If you're the heterosexual husband or wife of a Foreign Service official you can take all that for granted. If you're a child of a Foreign Service official, you can take all that for granted. If you're the pet of a Foreign Service official, the State Department will pay your way to and from your Master's destination!

Guest, who for the past several years has helmed the management and leadership school at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, lobbied his colleagues and higher ups for equal treatment. In 2006, he even won the annual "Constructive Dissent" award from the American Foreign Service Association for his steadfast commitment to changing the married couples-only regulations.

Knowing that he would, once again, soon be posted overseas, he wrote directly to the Secretary of State. It seems one stroke of her pen could clean up this whole mess. Not surprisingly, Rice never wrote back, never took action, never even said good bye.

Michael Guest's childhood dreams of exploring the world and making it a better place brought him to the State Department. Equal treatment for lesbians and gays and their partners in the Foreign Service, however, is still just something to dream about.

Libby Post is the founding chair of the Empire State Pride Agenda and a political commentator on public radio, on the Web, and in print media. She can be reached at libby@proudlyout.com.