One year ago, Massachusetts created a review board for service members discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and similar policies. They could petition for state benefits like rental assistance and reimbursements for family medical expenses — benefits they previously couldn’t access due to their discharge status.
In that year, five veterans applied, and four were approved.
State officials like Jon Santiago, Massachusetts’ secretary of veterans’ services, say it’s not about the numbers.
“Look, one veteran in need is one too many,” he said. “The fact that it’s been a year and we’ve had a number of folks apply and get back the services they deserve, we’re pretty proud of that.”
Some advocates say they aren’t surprised by the figure.
“This is a very new thing, and getting the word out about it is challenging,” said Anna Richardson, who represents veterans in federal discharge upgrades at the Boston-based Veterans Legal Services. “And so it’s not surprising to me that it’s been kind of underutilized.”
Now, this new board is already changing. Under legislation signed by Gov. Maura Healey in August, the Veterans Equality Review Board is massively expanding in its mandate — while also likely serving a much smaller population of veterans.
Many more veterans now qualify for state benefits by default, a feat accomplished by sweeping in more discharge statuses.
The VERB still exists to help LGBTQ+ veterans not included in that automatic process, and it now also serves veterans who can demonstrate they experienced one of any number of forms of discrimination, such as on the basis of race, sex, disability, or military sexual trauma.
Christine Serpe sits on the board and coordinates LGBTQ+ veteran care at the Veterans Affairs Jamaica Plain campus. She sees the board’s function as the same — just knowing, now, far fewer veterans will have to go through the paperwork in order to access their benefits.
“Our hope is that folks will enter the process, get more benefits and not have to go through the VERB,” Santiago said.
Similar to initiatives in a small number of other states, the VERB is a partial solution to a federal problem. It creates a backstop for veterans who get missed under broad nationwide policies or even more inclusive local ones.
Experts and advocates say it’s difficult to identify and reach veterans who may benefit from the board’s individual review process, and those who do know about it may not want to relive their trauma. Still, state officials and advocates hope to see more service members getting benefits — through whatever avenue they can.
When asked what success would look like for the VERB, Santiago said it can be defined by acknowledgement from Massachusetts’ veterans.
“Success won’t be a number,” he said. “If they’ve been discriminated in the past, or if they feel that they have a service that has been denied because of who they are and what they believe in, we want [them] to know that we’re here for them.”
The challenge of getting veterans to apply
Every benefit available to veterans has its own dense web of criteria, from their discharge status to the amount of time they served and, sometimes, their current income.
An estimated 100,000 veterans since World War II were discharged for their sexual orientation. After Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed 13 years ago, service members who’d received a less-than-honorable discharge under the policy could ask for a federal upgrade.
But that process can take months or years, and some pay lawyers to help them through it.
Peter Perkowski said the federal review process is mired with burdens, and many veterans don’t trust that the board would come to a just conclusion.
Seeking a federal upgrade — or a VERB approval — also means litigating what are often some of a person’s most painful experiences.
“It requires people to kind of relive the trauma of their discharge or the trauma of their service,” said Perkowski, an attorney who works at Harvard’s Veterans Legal Clinic and also serves as the legal and policy director at Minority Veterans for America. “There’s a lot of people out there who are carrying around mental health conditions from service. And not just PTSD and [traumatic brain injuries] or military sexual trauma, but also trauma from being investigated and being told, ‘You’re unfit.’”
“In the ’90s, when they would put ‘homosexual conduct’ as the reason for the discharge, that’s an easy one to say: ‘We need to fix this,’” Richardson of Veterans Legal Services said.
But sometimes the reason for a discharge may be related to a service member’s identity but not directly stated — like if they were discharged because of substance use, which they’d turned to during their service to cope with discrimination.
“I don’t think this will be fixed until the military kind of acknowledges the role that it played in harming people’s lives — and, as of right now, that’s not happening.”Peter Perkowski, Director of Legal and Policy at Minority Veterans of America
Of the roughly 100,000 veterans discharged dating back to World War II, fewer than 2,000 have had their discharges upgraded at the federal level, according a letter sent to Congressional members by the Pentagon this past May.
The Biden administration announced last year that it would be proactively reviewing some veterans’ discharges, meaning the onus would no longer be on the veteran to ask for a change. But that same letter shows that no discharges have been automatically upgraded yet.
“They’re doing this automatically for a subset of veterans, in an unknown period of time up to 2011, for what I call the ‘easy cases.’ And that’s great,” Perkowski said. “But still, there’s a group of veterans out there — the harder cases — who are not getting the benefit of those automatic reviews.”
Still, advocates hope to see the federal government take more action. Perkowski hopes the military makes a big shift in how it approaches remedying discharges.
“I don’t think this will be fixed until the military kind of acknowledges the role that it played in harming people’s lives — and, as of right now, that’s not happening,” he said. “It’s very disappointing. I don’t even think they understand that the process isn’t working for a lot of veterans.”
In Massachusetts, it’s likely those “harder cases” who would be seeking help from the VERB now.
Dana Montalto, who also works at Harvard’s clinic, said while she hopes more veterans will take advantage of the VERB, she’s not surprised the number was so low in its first year.
“Most people were approved,” she said. “And I’m hopeful that means they’re really taking an empathetic and understanding eye towards all the complex reasons that can lead someone to be discharged less than honorably.”
Who could benefit
Given the long wait for federal discharge upgrades, Massachusetts and a small number of other states have come up with state-level initiatives that offer faster relief.
To Serpe, that streamlined approach is a big reason that the board was created.
“We can do this a lot more quickly,” said Serpe. “It’s 30 days.”
But the uptake has been limited in Massachusetts, just as it has in other states. Since 2020, New York has restored state benefits to 54 veterans through its expansive program — including 12 on the basis on sexual orientation, according to a spokesperson.
Maryland and Rhode Island’s initiatives are only built to address sexual orientation discrimination. Neither veterans’ services department has records of a single veteran applying since their programs went into effect — in 2022 and 2019, respectively — according to department spokespeople.
It’s unknown how many veterans are eligible to apply in Massachusetts, and how many would want to.
Less than 1% of all veterans have received dishonorable discharges, and those veterans could be discharged for any number of reasons. That subsection of those who are discriminated against gets even smaller — a figure Santiago said would be “almost impossible to calculate.”
“Let me just be very specific here: These are for veterans applying for state benefits,” he said. “It’s not every veteran in the commonwealth, right? These are poor veterans at the federal poverty line, or just above that. So it’s a very select group of folks.”
Why it matters
There’s a uniquely strong set of safety-net benefits for veterans in Massachusetts that date back as far as the Revolutionary War. A veteran in Massachusetts who’s behind on rent can get cash assistance if their income is low enough. Their child can get reimbursements for medical expenses. Their widow or widower can get money for emergency home repairs.
But, until August, those who weren’t honorably discharged didn’t qualify.
One group of veterans that just became automatically eligible for benefits — those with an “Other than Honorable” discharge — are more likely to need them, as a recent RAND report found. Homelessness, suicide, and several mental health conditions such as PTSD and alcohol misuse are all more common among people who have been other-than-honorably discharged than honorably.
Pursuing a federal upgrade through the Department of Defense would give veterans access to more sweeping benefits, like tuition help, and take care of state benefits, too. But the state-level recognition still gets people part way.
The VERB goes “hand in hand” with the federal discharge upgrade process, as Lynette Gabrila put it.
“If somebody is having financial limitations and wants to be able to apply for that benefit — but because they have a dishonorable discharge, they might not qualify — this gives the VERB the opportunity to step in,” said Gabrila, who works in the state’s office of veterans’ services and served on the board until June.
Granting state benefits is one way Massachusetts can “right that wrong” of a discriminatory discharge, she said.
Many veterans still choose to pursue the arduous federal route — and not just for the benefits, as Perkoswki explained.
“All those tangible things are important, but I don’t want to minimize the intangible dignitary harm that continues from these historical discriminatory policies,” he said. “Essentially, you’re carrying around paperwork that calls you unfit. And until you fix it, that’s probably going to be how you feel about your service, too.”
Under the VERB’s new expansion, advocates told GBH News they hope to see more veterans applying for relief. Serpe, who sits on the VERB, is glad to see that some veterans have already been taken care of.
“It feels really good to us to know that this is working in the way that it was intended and designed to,” she said. “We just want to get the word out, I think, as much as possible.”
