Only months into his job selling Zoll Lifecor's wearable defibrillators in the Atlanta area, Roy Shelley says he started to notice it was getting harder. Unbeknown to Shelley, his boss, Bill Haun, was asking Shelley's coworkers what they knew about his sexual orientation.

Eventually, another coworker of Shelley's found out he was gay through an old University of Alabama fraternity brother of Shelley's and, a few months later, he was fired for "underperformance."

"Bill continued to ask around, 'Do you think he's gay?'" Shelley says. "And then when Adam found out, he outed me by telling him that I'm gay. The very next week, things began changing in the territory, like manipulating the territory."

Within 10 months of his hire date, Shelley says, he was driven from his job because the situation had become unbearable. As soon as Haun found out Shelley was gay, the boss restructured the sales territory, which Shelley shared with two other salespeople. Though he was allocated only 17% of the Atlanta region (while the others were given 16% and 67%, respectively), he was expected to deliver 46% of sales from the area.

"The guy that had 67% of the territory to cover had [to sell] 30% [of the territory], and the other guy had 20%," he says. "So everything was off-kilter, because it was all based on getting your target and filling your quota. It just made the perception that I was not meeting my objectives. So I was given a short stick, and I was required to do five times the amount of work."

Several calls to Zoll Lifecor went unreturned.

Shelley says it took him months before he found out that Haun was grilling employees for more information on Shelley's sexual orientation. He filed a complaint with the vice president of the company and made a request for reevaluation of the territory, but he was never given a response. But before he could move any further on his complaint, he was fired for underperformance.

"I immediately filed a complaint with human resources, but as it turned out, two witnesses that I provided, they were not interviewed," he says.