Mica Stands Up - and Pays the Price Part: 2 of 4
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She remains estranged from her parents. Her older brother, Guy, whom she says was
unable to come to grips with a drug problem and his own
homosexuality, committed suicide in 1988. Her long relationship with a prominent Dallas
lawyer recently ended. She has had her car repossessed and her morality attacked.
"A woman actually called me a pervert! To compare me to a child molester!
Meanwhile, as a cop-in-waiting, England struggles financially. She says she barely scrapes by
on her small salary from The Mansion on Turtle Creek restaurant in Dallas, where she is the
Promenade chef.
Why is she putting herself through all this?
Why not just go to another city in Texas-Fort Worth, for example-that doesn't care and
doesn't ask about its officers' sexual preferences?
"I like Dallas, the city, the gay community," she says. "My brother lived here. This is where I
want to do my public service."
Mica England has talked about being a police officer since high school, her mother says, and
she took college courses in sociology and psychology to bolster her major in criminal
justice.
She sold her horse to pay the tuition at Rogers State College in Claremore, then transferred
to Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.
She worked her way through college - she was a fry cook and a security guard, and she even
sold shoes - and when she was 20 she applied to join the police force in Mukogee. But the
minimum age was 21.
She then failed the written exam for the Broken Arrow Police Department. And when she
applied to the Tulsa P.D., she was told that she didn't have enough college credits. Then in
1987, she tried Dallas.
When the female recruiting officer asked her Question 14 - "Have you ever engaged in
deviant sex?" - Mica England said no.
Even though she believed that being a lesbian was not "deviant," on some level she knew
she was lying. And when she answered the question on a follow-up lie-detector test, the
needle on the polygraph went haywire. She was rejected.
Two years later, on a recruiting trip in May, the same Dallas recruiter again interviewedEngland in Tulsa. And even though England told her that she was a lesbian and that she
wouldn't lie about it again, the recruiter encouraged her to come to Dallas for a formal2/4
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Mica Stands Up - and Pays the Price, clipping, May 4, 1992; Dallas, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1634451/m1/2/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.