PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Police officers swear to serve and protect, but some cops will admit that historically the oath has been inconsistently applied. They know, they say, because they watched others who wore the badge turn their backs on them.

Fellow officers who would ignore their calls for backup, who refused to ride with them in the same cruiser, who maligned them behind their backs and passed them over for promotion.

All because they were gay cops.

"Everyone here has a story," Detective Michael Carney said this week as he looked over the crowd of 150 gay police officers from around the country settling in for a conference lunch at the Providence Biltmore hotel.

If most in attendance were not discriminated against within their own departments, said Carney, "they have been victims of a hate crime."

Carney, who resigned from his own Springfield, Mass., department in 1990 in the midst of an "identity crisis" and then won a discrimination suit in 1994 to get his job back, is co-founder of the New England chapter the Gay Officers Action League.

The league is wrapping up a five-day conference in Providence, a city run by a gay mayor, David N. Cicilline, who welcomed the conference on Wednesday.

Members are attending workshops on such topics as gender identity and sexual orientation in policing, creating effective diversity training, protecting domestic partner benefits and "coming out at work."

But perhaps the most important function of the conference, members said, is to advocate for police departments to better represent the communities they serve.

"We're trying to reach out to the mainstream," said Carney, "to make them understand the importance of community policing today and that every department should be molded to their communities - and that includes the gay and lesbian community."

Wider diversity within departments helps cops be better police officers, says Carney, by understanding.

Police departments have made big strides since from the famous Stonewall riots of 1969, when the gay community of New York City rose up against the city's police policy of raiding gay bars and arresting homosexuals on indecency charges.

The week of violence at the Stonewall Inn marked a watershed moment in the gay-rights movement.

Terry Jeans, 55, joined the New York City Police Department 11 years later, in 1980. Open hostility toward gays, at least as a law enforcement policy, had been curtailed, but Jeans couldn't trust how those in his own department would react to knowing about him.

"In the beginning I tried to hide it," he said. "I knew by then I wanted to be a cop and it was more important to me to be a good cop than a gay cop."

He drank with friends who were cops and went along when conversations turned to girlfriends and wives. But eventually he stopped lying and started dropping hints that he was gay.

"I wasn't one of these guys who flies the flag," he said. If people asked he just wouldn't deny it. Meanwhile he worked as hard as he could, afraid that his sexual orientation might sway superiors to fire him if they detected mediocrity on the job.

"I had to be a little more diligent in how I did my job." Consequently he became the "the cop bosses always came to if they wanted to get stuff done."

Jeans retired as a sergeant in 2002 - after 22 years on the force - despite passing all the promotional exams for higher rank.

"I like to think I wasn't (discriminated against), because I wouldn't want to be seen as a cry baby, but I'm guessing my career could have gone further" had he been straight.

"Things are definitely better now" for police officers, he said. "I think a lot of the police officers who are gay coming on the job now don't realize what others before them went through and, what makes it even sadder is, they don't care."

Cops, like most close-knit groups, are a bit xenophobic, said Jeans. Gay cops are no exception.

"We're just as surly, just as nasty, just as professional, just as smart, just as brave and we do bleed when we get shot.

"We have our good points and bad points and that's the point: We're no different than any one else."

Sgt. Preston P. Horton, of the MBTA Transit Police in Boston, hesitates to use the word agenda because people sometimes interpret the word to mean "we're looking for something special."

"Gay and lesbian police officers and gay and lesbian people are just looking to be equal," he said. "We're not looking for anything special. I just want to come to work, do my job, raise a family with my significant other and not worry about if we go somewhere I need to bring along a civil union sheet to visit him in a hospital bed. These are just simple, simple issues. It's the pursuit of happiness and being free."

"I think a lot of the police officers who are gay coming on the job now don't realize what others before them went through and, what makes it even sadder is, they don't care."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)