Ask and Tell:
Gay Veterans, Identity, and Oral History on a Civil Rights Frontier
by Steve Estes
(without notes)

Vince Patton faced discrimination on his first ship in the U.S. Coast Guard. It was the early 1970s, and his superior officer was an unabashed bigot, who used prejudicial slurs with impunity. Despite the fact that Patton had scored at the top of his class in radioman’s school, the Chief of the Dallas said that he didn’t want an “ignorant nigger” serving in communications. “He told me that the smartest thing that I could do would be to march my black ass down to the galley and learn how to be a cook like the rest of the blacks and Filipinos on the ship,” Patton later remembered. Instead of being cowed by such open hostility, Patton decided to make the military a career and to succeed in spite of the racism he faced. Intelligence, ambition, and above all perseverance would eventually enable Patton to get a doctorate and also attain the highest enlisted post in the Coast Guard, Master Chief Petty Officer.

During his thirty-year career in the Coast Guard, Patton took part in surveillance operations on Soviet vessels in the North Atlantic, search and seizure operations against drug smugglers in the Pacific, and peacekeeping operations in Haiti, but his toughest assignment was an appointment to the presidential commission on homosexuality in the military. In 1993 Patton was assigned to research the potential parallels between Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order abolishing racial segregation in the military and Clinton’s proposed order to lift the ban on gays and lesbians in the armed forces. To Patton, the similarities were obvious: racism and homophobia were both odious forms of discrimination that had no place in the modern military. Following Truman’s lead, Patton believed Clinton could easily lift the ban with an executive order. He was wrong.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy, implemented as a political compromise in 1993 and 1994, legislated the silence of gay and lesbian soldiers on active duty and in the reserves. This silence about gays in the military has led to a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. In this case, the politics of military service are also the politics of memory. If we forget that gay and lesbian Americans have served their country, then we as a nation are much less likely to view them as full citizens, deserving of civil rights and equal protection of the law. Oral history provides one way to break this silence, to “ask and tell” about the military careers of gay and lesbian soldiers and to allow these veterans to speak for themselves about the current military policy.

In 2000 the Library of Congress launched the Veterans History Project (VHP), one of the most ambitious volunteer oral history projects this country has ever seen, rivaling even the massive slave narrative project undertaken by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. To date, the VHP has collected more than 10,000 personal narratives of veterans who served from World War I to the Gulf War. Gay advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign and American Veterans for Equal Rights saw potential in the VHP to document the impressive military careers of gay and lesbian veterans, who have long been denied official recognition in other forums. As one of the interviewers for this project, I have spoken with more than 45 gay and lesbian veterans. The interviews being recorded by gay rights organizations, working in partnership with the Library of Congress, help to chart the shifting relationship between sexuality and military service since World War II, supplementing earlier studies and building a case for lifting the ban on gays in the military.

The activist must “Ask and Tell,” but the scholar has a responsibility to do more. This essay has four primary objectives. First, it charts the evolution of military policies on homosexuality since World War II, and it shows that gay and lesbian responses to those policies were far from monolithic. It places the fight to lift the ban of open gay military service in other context of struggles for civil rights, particularly the African American struggle against discrimination and segregation in the US military. Finally, this essay explores the ways that silence about sexuality and military service has affected the dual—and sometimes dueling—identities of the gay veteran.

A veteran is an individual whose very identity rests on memory, on the recognition and often re-telling of the stories of military service. If gay veterans hide their sexual identity, they are welcome to participate in official commemorations of their service. But this secrecy echoes the silence that accompanied their military service in the first place, and it forces a division in their identities as both gays and veterans. Oral histories that take both sexuality and service into account then, not only document the service of gay veterans; they also provide an opportunity to analyze the complex relationships between the military, memory, and the construction of identity.

¤ ¤ ¤

With the completion of the World War II monument in Washington, DC, the D-Day museum in New Orleans, and the release of numerous popular books and movies, commemoration of the “Good War” has reached something of a fever pitch. Though historians might wish such remembrances were more critical and analytical in tone, few would begrudge WW II veterans their due. In fact, this may be our last chance to thank and learn from this generation of veterans, who are passing away at a staggering rate. Nearly 1100 of them died every day in 2004. With the exceptions of work by Allan Berube, Studs Terkel, and Mary Ann Humphrey, however, much of the scholarly and popular coverage of World War II ignores the contributions of gay veterans entirely.

Thanks to Berube’s seminal research and interviews, we know that the social upheaval and changes in military policy during the Second World War enabled many gay soldiers to “come out under fire.” Though men who had sex with other men had served valiantly in the American military since the Revolutionary War, anti-sodomy laws made their service and their sexuality risky propositions. The growing influence of the psychiatric profession in America during the early 20th century, led to a new military policy of treating homosexuality as a psychological problem as opposed to a criminal one. Instead of locking homosexuals in the brig for years or even decades—deemed not only inhumane, but also costly and inefficient during World War II—the military simply discharged them from the service. But the massive manpower needs of the war led to the draft of more than sixteen million Americans, ensuring that thousands of gays and lesbians would serve.

The “Greatest Generation” has a reputation for humility regarding military service and patriotism. They were simply “doing their duty,” many said. In this regard, gay veterans are no different than their straight comrades, although with gay veterans, this humility reinforces a silence that has long hidden the transcripts of gay patriotism. In fact, because of this silence, the very concept of “gay patriotism” is itself little understood. If we take patriotism to mean love for and loyalty to one’s country, then perhaps there is no higher expression of this than military service during a time of war. Such a traditional definition denies the patriotism of the protestors who demonstrate against bad US policy precisely because they want America to be the best country it can be. Still given the power of traditional ideas about patriotism, documenting the service of gay veterans from the Greatest Generation onward can lay a foundation for gay citizenship rights and reveal the shared ideals and experiences that bind Americans, gay and straight, together.

As a WW II submariner, Perry Wood has given many interviews over the years, but he remains bashful when speaking about his experiences as the navigations officer on the Spadefish in the Sea of Japan. Perry’s story is important not only for its fisheye view of military conflict in the Pacific, but also because it shows how gay and straight sailors worked together and looked out for each other during the war. On shore leave, Wood was relatively open about his homosexuality, having sex with both gay and straight men, some of whom returned home to wives and girlfriends after the war. On the Spadefish, however, he says that he was all business. “At sea, I was too busy to have fun,” Wood remembers. “You didn’t hardly dream about it; you were so tired.” Still despite his excellent record as a navigator, the captain of the Spadefish heard the rumors that Wood was gay and tried to have him transferred. In Wood’s memory, it was only a “miracle” that kept him from being replaced: "One time … my replacement was walking on board, and a monkey’s fist hit him on the head. A monkey’s fist is a piece of metal and a rope that you can throw on a small line to pull a big line. Somehow it just dropped from above. The tender area is like a ten story building and the submarine is just this little teeny thing. So we don’t know if it was on purpose or if it was an accident. We’ll never know, but I kind-of think that somebody just thought: “Well, we like Mr. Wood.” Whack!" Such “miracles” show that the band of brothers forged during the war might not have been as exclusive as some military policymakers would have us think.

The oral history interviews that Allan Berube conducted for Coming Out Under Fire first revealed both the oppression of military policies against gays and the liberation that resulted when “the massive mobilization for World War II relaxed the social constraints of peacetime that kept many gay men and women unaware of themselves and each other.” The classic story that Berube heard involved alienated young gay men or women swept up by the war into a homosocial world of military service far away from the small town authorities that restricted explorations of alternative sexualities. Shore leave or R&R in big cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago contributed to a burgeoning and surprisingly open gay bar scene, one of the foundations of urban communities so central to gay life today.

Interviews and research conducted for the Veterans History Project both support and complicate this vision of World War II as a social cyclone that picked up rural gays and lesbians and carried them “over the rainbow” to urban gay communities. Burt Gerrits was a farm boy from South Dakota when he moved to San Francisco just before the war. Once in the Bay Area, Gerrits learned of the gay community serving as a corpsman on the psychiatry ward for homosexuals being discharged from Army. Like Gerrits, Ted Winn had only had the briefest of gay encounters as a boy growing up in Texas before service in the Navy allowed him to go to medical school in Boston and take leaves in San Diego and San Francisco. Pat Bond, interviewed for the film Word Is Out, told of escaping her small town in Iowa to join the WACS where she found she was not the only lesbian. “I came with my suitcase, staggering down the mess hall,” Bond remembered, “and I heard a voice from one of the barracks say, ‘Good God, Elizabeth, look! Here comes another one!’” As historian Leisa Meyer argues, the visibility of lesbians in the WACs sometimes made them targets of harassment, but their presence also “served as both an anchor and a rallying point for the formations of lesbian communities within the corps.”

While World War II was clearly a crucial turning point in twentieth century gay history, we should not let the glittering stories of life on the other side of this rainbow blind us from the vibrant but hidden gay worlds in the heartland before the war.
At the age of 78, Bill Taylor was not about to apologize for his strong Kentucky accent or his sexual experiences before becoming a tail gunner in Europe during the War. He may have “come out under fire,” but it certainly wasn’t his first time. “There’s an awful lot of gay life going on in the South, but you do it and you don’t talk about it,” he said. “I’ve been away from Bowling Green for several years, but there was an awful lot of it going on. You could have had as much or as little [sex] as you wanted.” Even Pat Bond and Ted Winn had sexual experiences in Iowa and Texas before the war, though they were glad for the chance to escape that war provided. So, while we should not look with uncritical nostalgia at rural gay culture and the period before the war, these stories do reveal the continuities that tie these worlds to post-war gay urban culture.

Stories from the end of World War II and the early years of the Cold War show that tolerance of homosexuality in the military and the society at large could be rather short-lived. Women who served in the Armed Forces, including many lesbians, felt this social shift first. Investigations and purges of lesbians from the WACs resulted, at least in part, from Americans’ discomfort with women serving in the military and working in non-traditional occupations during the war. Upon first hearing rumors that there were lesbians in the WACs, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered a woman on his staff to draft a list of known lesbians in the Army, so that he could get rid of them. “Sir, if the General please, I’ll be happy to check into this and make you a list,” the WAC recalled saying. “But you’ve got to know, when you get the list back, my name’s going to be first.” The investigation stopped. After the war, however, purges of lesbians from the WACs became a way to winnow down the ranks of women in the Army and return the country to normalcy. Stationed in Japan during the occupation, Pat Bond saw dozens of fellow lesbians kicked out of the Army. She escaped with an honorable discharge only because she had married a gay man in San Francisco. Sarah Davis, a lesbian serving as an aviation mechanic in the Navy at the end of the war, remembered, “I was interrogated and was scared to death” during the purges.

Fear was the watchword during the late 1940s and early 1950s as the Cold War bred the Red Scare, which, in turn, led to something of a “lavender scare.” With communist spies lurking in every corner of the globe, according to fear-mongers like Senator Joseph McCarthy, America had to be ever vigilant against security risks, real and perceived. Gay soldiers and diplomats were seen as dangerous, because they could be blackmailed to keep their sexuality under wraps. The new Uniform Code of Military Justice reinforced the idea that sodomy was a crime in the early 1950s, and when Eisenhower became president, he drafted an executive order arguing that “sexual perversion” was reason enough to fire homosexuals and to discriminate against them in hiring for government positions. According to historian David Johnson, however, “no gay was ever blackmailed into revealing state secrets,” because of homosexuality.

Gay soldiers and sailors in America’s “forgotten war” of the twentieth century, the Korean conflict, remember this period vividly. After serving in the Navy medical corps during World War II and then earning an MD from Harvard University, Ted Winn shipped out for Korea in 1951. “This is the time when McCarthy’s beginning to really accuse everybody of having gay relations,” Winn remembered, so “each ship would lose in a period of six months overseas as many as 20 or 30 men … just because someone said they were gay. It was a real police state.” As devastating as such purges were for individual sailors, Winn argues that they also hurt the Navy. “The officers of the ship were very disturbed, because they said, ‘All our best men are being discharged. These are our best people, [and] we’re discharging them.’” Ric Mendoza-Gleason served on the ground in Korea with the Army, but unlike Winn, he felt that the homophobia of the Red Scare was much less severe in Inchon or Seoul than in Chicago or Washington. “It was a nightmare here in the States,” Mendoza-Gleason says, “‘Cause this is just before the McCarthy hearings, and I mean it was just awful, I mean if you were gay here it was over, Grover, anywhere in the United States .” But in Korea, it was a different story.

"Once you got overseas, oh, the commanders looked the other way and you know, you’d be leaving somebody’s tent, and they didn’t say anything, they didn’t care, they didn’t….We had a couple of guys who used to do drag at the bar, [and] the company commander thought they were wonderful. He used to cheer them on, and he was a really great guy. He was Polish, and he was very, very straight."

Going by the official Defense Department figures, Mendoza-Gleason’s memory was probably more accurate, or at least his experience was more typical, than Ted Winn’s. Though many soldiers and sailors were drummed out of the military for being gay during the Korean War, the figures were much lower than during peacetime before or after the war. There were 533 enlisted personnel discharged for being gay during 1951, but more than twice that many were discharged in 1953. In fact, discharges for homosexuality did not drop below 500 again until 1970, and by that point, there was another civil war in Asia that demanded the attention of the US military.

American military involvement in Vietnam once again called for the service of patriotic young men and women, but almost from the beginning, there were questions about the morality and strategy behind the war. As the war dragged on, increasing numbers of American men opted out of service in Vietnam, some by fleeing to Canada and others by claiming to be gay (though this was not accepted as a deferment in many cases). Ironically, many young men volunteered for Vietnam to prove to themselves and others that they were real men. As Randy Shilts argues in Conduct Unbecoming, “The people who most need to prove something, after all, are the people who are most in doubt. Where proof of manliness is concerned, this meant young men who thought they might be queer.”

The interviews conducted for the Veterans History Project bear out Shilts’s observation, but they also reveal how the identities of gay Vietnam veterans evolved over time, as this was a war that made the identity of the veteran almost as controversial as the identity of homosexuality. Michael Job, a teacher in Michigan, volunteered for the Army, because: “The way I was reasoning it—well, my father had never been in the military. So I want to go. It’ll make a man out of me. It’ll prove I’m not gay.” This seems to fit Shilts’s explanation of why gay men volunteered to fight. Still it is important to investigate when the men themselves came to understand this, to examine critically the changing nature of memory and identity. Job admits, “It took years after Vietnam to figure all of this out,” explaining that as he became a peace activist, he became more critical of the Army’s claim that you could join and “be a man.” Just as Job’s sexual identity evolved over time (he didn’t come out until he was 30), so too did his memory of his time in the service and his understanding of himself as a veteran. Unlike Job, Bob Yeargan, did not initially chose to go to Vietnam, but after he was drafted, he felt that it was his duty to go. Yeargan’s time as a platoon leader in Vietnam was the beginning of a twenty-year career in the Army that included a voluntary second tour “in country” as a company commander. Yeargan saw four of his men blown up by friendly fire and he recalls killing Viet Cong on reconnaissance missions as a matter of course. He pushed his feelings about the war beneath the surface for years, perhaps using the same coping mechanisms that allowed him to deny his homosexuality. It wasn’t until after he retired from the Army in Washington, DC, having served in the Pentagon as a Lieutenant Colonel, that he finally came out. Like Job, Yeargan now has a better understanding not only of his sexuality, but also what his military service meant. This understanding came, in part, from his visits to the Vietnam War Memorial where, like many veterans, he cried at the memory and recognition of the sacrifices that he and his comrades had made.

Gay veterans of the Vietnam War bear many of the same physical and psychological scars that straight veterans carry. Michael Job, the infantryman who had volunteered for the draft, had to seek counseling for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. So too did Ted Samora, an E-5 with Military Intelligence. Samora was one of three brothers to serve in Vietnam, and all of them returned with drug or alcohol problems. Tragically, one of Samora’s brothers committed suicide after the war. While Job and Samora survived to defeat the demons that haunted them after the war, John Castro is still locked in this struggle. A Native American draftee from Michigan, Castro earned a Purple Heart while driving trucks for a minesweeper unit in Vietnam, but this was one of the more superficial injuries Castro suffered. As he spoke about the racism he faced in Vietnam and the shock treatment that he endured because of his diagnosis as a homosexual and a paranoid schizophrenic, it was clear that Castro’s war is not yet over. Although these men all earned honors and medals for service to their country, theirs are not the stories one is likely to read in most accounts of the war. Too gay to be seen as heroes and too “damaged” to be poster boys for gay liberation, these men embody the sacrifice of everyday soldiers, regardless of their sexuality.

There is, in fact, a tension within the gay community surrounding service in the armed forces and American militarism more generally that has roots in this period. The gay liberation movement came of age in this era within a broader movement for peace and social justice. The gay community was as divided as America over the Vietnam War, with individuals falling on a diverse spectrum between hyper-patriots and vehement protestors. Tom Carpenter remembers marching proudly in his dress uniform as a young Marine while anti-war demonstrators lobbed bags of urine and shit at him in the late 1960s. Carol Riso, an Alabama native and an Air Force nurse during the Vietnam era, often did not tell people that she was a veteran, because anti-military and anti-American sentiments were so strong in her community after Vietnam. But sometimes, she had to speak up. “I used to get very angry at people [when] they used to talk about this country and how terrible it was, and I went up to somebody one time, this big guy, and I said, ‘If you think it’s so terrible, go and live in another country.’ There is no way in hell that I would live in another country.” Other gay veterans returned from service overseas highly critical of US policy, finding a home in the peace movement. Judith Crosby, a Navy nurse from Florida, flashed peace signs to the Marine Guards on her base instead of saluting them. Ted Samora threw away his medals at peace demonstrations in the early 1970s, and Michael Job traveled to Nicaragua and Iraq as a pacifist observer in the 1980s and 90s. Although most of the Vietnam-era veterans interviewed for this project eventually found peace with their wartime experiences and the anti-war movement, they vividly remembered the divisions in their country and their communities in the 1970s.

The tension between gay peace activists and gay veterans could not have come at a worse time. This was an era of possibility, following on the heels of the African American civil rights struggle and the women’s movement, when it appeared that gay rights might also be acknowledged. As gay and lesbian veterans understood, honorable and open service in the military could serve as a foundation for other civil rights. Some of these men and women began to speak out, and one of the first to do so was an Air Force sergeant named Leonard Matlovich.

Leonard Matlovich was the son of a soldier. He volunteered for the Air Force and served three tours of duty in Vietnam. As he explained in an oral history interview years later, “I had to prove that I was just as masculine as the next man. I felt Vietnam would do this for me.” During his first tour in 1966, Matlovich received the first of two Air Force Commendation medals for bravery in the face of a mortar attack when he went out to his base’s perimeter to improve the defenses and check for casualties among his comrades. He eventually won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. When Matlovich returned to the States in the early 1970s, he became an instructor in a new program set up by the Air Force to improve race relations. Though Matlovich had been born in the South and grew up as a self-avowed racist, he had come to know and serve with black troops in Vietnam and had been greatly moved by the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. Consistently awarded the highest marks when up for promotion, Tech Sergeant Matlovich’s 1974 evaluation in the race relations program praised him for being “dedicated, sincere, and responsible,” an “absolutely superior NCO in every respect.” That was before Matlovich told the Air Force that he was gay.

“What does this mean?” Matlovich’s superior officer asked when handed the letter announcing the sergeant’s intention to challenge the ban on gays in the military in 1975. “It means Brown v. Board of Education,” Matlovich told the African American captain. In fact, it meant Matlovich v. Secretary of the Air Force. It also landed Matlovich on the cover of Time Magazine and the forefront of the movement for gay rights.

Though Matlovich feared he was the only homosexual in the military before he came out, he received hundreds of letters from gay soldiers, sailors and veterans across the country and more than a few correspondences from straight soldiers. “Imagine the multitude of gay men during World War II,” wrote Bill Adamson from Louisville, Kentucky. “I joined the Navy when I was 17 during that war…. Then, when the Korean War came along, I enlisted again. Both wars found me in battle zones.” After the Korean War and seven years of honorable service, Adamson received an undesirable discharged simply because he was gay. “Unfortunately, in those days, we didn’t have the guts to stand up for ourselves,” he concluded. Laverte McDonald, a black sailor who had also been discharged for being gay, sent a donation to Matlovich’s legal fund, writing from New York, “I hope you fight like hell to remain in the A.F. I and thousands of other gays stand behind you 100 percent.” Finally, a letter from a cub reporter in Eugene, Oregon, showed that Matlovich had begun to heal the divisions between anti-war activists and veterans in the gay community. “As a member of the peace march generation,” a young Randy Shilts wrote, “I may have a difficult time relating to your desire to stay in the military. But I can respect and relate to the great service which you are now doing for your country.” There was hate mail, of course, and there were several correspondences with scripture to convince Matlovich to repent his sinful lifestyle, but the vast majority of the letters he received were supportive. Matlovich was not alone.

When his case made it to the US District Court in Washington, DC in 1976, it looked like Matlovich actually had a chance to win. Despite the fact that the courts usually deferred to the military on personnel matters, briefs from civil liberties and gay rights groups sought to convince the relatively liberal judge, Gerhard A. Gesell, to find the ban on gays unconstitutional. Matlovich’s lawyers argued that the Air Force policy was a denial of their client’s privacy and liberty, that it was arbitrary and capricious, and finally that it was a denial of due process and equal protection. These were some of the same arguments used to win civil rights cases for African Americans and women. Judge Gesell came to admire Matlovich and recognized the validity of this comparison to the black freedom struggle: “No one … who has studied the civil rights movement and the striving of blacks for opportunity will ever fail to recognize that the Armed Forces, more than any branch of government and far ahead of the private sector in this country, led to erasing the stigma of race discrimination…. Here, another opportunity is presented.” But it would not be presented by the court. While Judge Gesell strongly urged the Air Force to reconsider its ban on gays, he followed precedent and deferred to the Pentagon. After five years of fighting, Matlovich eventually accepted a financial settlement and an honorable discharge in 1980.

As a result of the Matlovich case, the federal government clarified and hardened its opposition to gays in the military, at the same time that more gays in uniform began coming out to challenge this discrimination in court. Before the members of Jimmy Carter’s Administration left office early in 1981, they began to revise the wording of the ban. The new policy, enacted in January of that year and enforced by Ronald Reagan’s Department of Defense, began bluntly: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” Though the new policy was a slight improvement over the old in that it offered an honorable discharge to most gays drummed out of the military, it codified the reasons why homosexuals (regardless of whether or not they broke the law against sodomy) should be banned from service. The DoD explained that the primary reasons for retaining the ban were to “maintain discipline, good order, and morale,” to “prevent breaches of security,” and to ensure the successful recruitment and retention of heterosexual soldiers. As many activists and scholars have pointed out, this rationale was strikingly similar to the defense of racial segregation in the armed forces during the 1940s, when federal officials feared that integration “would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations of national defense.”

Despite the new policy, gays continued to serve their country in the military. Vernon Berg, Miriam Ben-Shalom, Perry Watkins, Dusty Pruitt, and a handful of other courageous individuals followed Matlovich in challenging the ban in court. Mary Ann Humphrey recorded the stories of many of these activists in her oral history collection: My Country, My Right to Serve. Though there were small victories from these cases in the 1980s, none of them forced the military to revise its overall ban of gay and lesbian servicemembers. For the majority of gay and lesbian military personnel who chose to serve in silence, the 1980s and early 1990s were a difficult time. With the Cold War winding down and with few major military conflicts, gay discharges under the new policy skyrocketed. Steven Zeeland interviewed sixteen gay military men stationed in Germany during the early 1990s, finding that they experienced varying responses from straight soldiers who either knew or assumed that they were gay. One sergeant that Zeeland interviewed had been hospitalized as the victim of a gay bashing, while a linguist who had worked for the Secretary of Defense said that he faced very little discrimination. The unpredictability of the military’s enforcement of the ban was almost as frightening as the ban itself.

Interviews with gay veterans whose careers spanned the 1980s and early 1990s tell similar stories of some commanders who looked the other way and others who seemed obsessed with rooting out homosexuals and defending the ban at all costs. Tony Benfield, a Marine mortar specialist stationed on Okinawa in the early 1980s, was called in to see his superior officer one day after another Marine accused him of being gay. The officer gave him a warning and a gentle reprimand: “I don’t care what you do on your own time, but when you’re here, it’s about duty, you do your job.” According to Benfield, that was the end of it. Steve Clark Hall, an alumnus of the Naval Academy, was relatively open about his sexuality when stationed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, but a transfer to San Diego under an exceptionally homophobic commander brought him face to face with prejudice. The slurs came almost daily. For example, Hall remembered, “If I got up to leave a movie, [the commander would] say, ‘What’s the matter, not enough dick for you in this movie?’” Or he would make derogatory comments about Hall going on leave to see “boyfriends in San Francisco.” Despite such overt prejudice, Hall eventually became commander of his own nuclear submarine, the USS Greenling.

Military women faced additional challenges in the peacetime, volunteer force of the 1980s, and lesbians held an exceptionally tenuous position. At times, women in the military found themselves in the double bind of sexism and homophobia. Their very presence challenged the connection between the military and manhood, and if they were too good at their jobs or too “butch,” there would be whispers about lesbianism. Proving one’s heterosexuality would address such suspicions, but this left an opening for sexual harassment. Partly as a result of this double bind, women were drummed out of the military for homosexuality at higher rates than men. Though women made up about 10 percent of the US military in the 1980s, they accounted for 23 percent of the gay discharges. Massive purges during the decade drove lesbian soldiers and sailors deeper into the closet. Patty Duwel, who first served for a short time in the Marines and then put in twenty years in the Navy, ended up marrying a gay man to cover her homosexuality just so she could continue to serve her country. Though she weathered the purges of the 1980s, she knew many other women who did not.

The first Gulf War led to a brief reduction in gay discharges from the military and a chance for gay servicemen and women to prove their patriotism once again. Greg Mooneyham, a gay graduate of the Air Force Academy, flew forty-four combat missions as a fighter pilot in Desert Storm. Jose Zuniga served as a medic during Desert Storm and was awarded numerous medals as well as “Soldier of the Year” in the Sixth Army. But when he came out during a 1993 gay pride march in Washington, DC, he was suspended from duty and demoted.

Zuniga’s story broke in the news media during the deliberations over President Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban, and it captures the dilemma of thousands of gay military personnel who were silenced in the debates about a policy change that would directly affect their lives. One of the first items on the new president’s agenda in 1993 was fulfillment of his campaign promise to lift the ban. Though Clinton contemplated an executive order akin to the one signed by President Truman to end racial segregation in the military, opposition arose almost immediately from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and from Senator Sam Nunn, the conservative, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Battle lines were drawn and the usual combatants in the culture wars took sides, with an older generation of military leaders and fundamentalist Christians arrayed against civil libertarians and gay rights advocates. Other than a handful of exceptional individuals like Jose Zuniga, the one group left out of this debate was gay servicemen and women on active duty or in the reserves. In fact, the enactment of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 1993 and ‘94 wrote this silence into law, so that now, a decade after its passage, we still haven’t heard from active duty personnel who are openly gay, because officially, there are none.

In addition to documenting the courageous service of gay and lesbian military personnel since World War II, oral history interviews also provide the opportunity for veterans who served under “don’t ask, don’t tell” to talk openly and honestly about how it affected their lives and how it affected the US military. The general consensus among the interviewees is that it changed nothing or that it made matters worse. Though the policy eliminated the question about sexuality on Armed Forces recruiting forms and forbid harassment of suspected gay individuals, it does allow for investigation and expulsion of service personnel if evidence comes to light that they may be gay. Because Patty Duwel stayed in the closet, the new policy had little affect on her personally. The people she was really worried about were a younger generation of gay recruits who might be misled into a false sense of security only to have their lives ruined once they chose a career in the military:

"The military’s saying, and this was my interpretation of it, 'OK, you can be gay, sort of.'… What that tells young kids today is like, 'OK, I’m gay, I’m going into the military. I’m just not going to tell them.' But they don’t understand … [that] they might do something that’s going to get them caught. And even though the government can’t ask, if it finds out for whatever reason, they’re gone, you know. There’s no question; they’re gone."

One of the ironies of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is that it inevitably forces gay servicemen and women to lie about who they are. For men and women who may not fully realize that they are gay when they enter the military or enter a service academy, this poses particular problems. Jeff Petrie was recruited for the varsity gymnastics team at the US Naval Academy when he was eighteen. He knew he was “different,” but he did not yet know he was gay. That realization came a few years after he arrived at Annapolis, a place like all of the military academies that prizes honor, integrity, and honesty. Petrie was ashamed that he had to survive a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Shield with letters from his male partner back home disguised as letters from a “girlfriend.” When one un-coded letter was opened on the ship before it reached him, he feared for his life and ultimately decided to leave the Navy. More than a decade later, Jeff is no longer ashamed of who he is. The evolutionary nature of identity and memory is nowhere more apparent than in his story. His quest to get the Naval Academy Alumni Association to charter the gay alumni group USNA Out represents a recognition and reconciliation of his identities as a gay man, a Naval Academy alumnus, and a veteran. More than a personal quest, Petrie views his campaign as part of a civil rights struggle, so that future gay and lesbian service personnel do not face the same fear and harassment that he did.

Comparisons between the ways that the military deals with race, gender and sexuality get to the core of whether this is a civil rights issue. The one soldier that many looked to for leadership on this issue was Colin Powell, the first African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many civil libertarians and gay rights advocates hoped that Powell would favor lifting the ban, because, as one black scholar said, “If any people should understand another group’s desire, drive, and thirst for full citizenship, it should be us.” But Powell, and other conservative African Americans, found this comparison spurious. In a response to Representative Pat Schroeder who had asked him to support lifting the ban, Powell wrote, “Skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.” Powell went on to argue that privacy rights of straight soldiers and potential negative effects on unit cohesion convinced him that the ban was necessary.

When Vince Patton, the man who would become the first African American Master Chief of the Coast Guard, went to see Powell with other members of the presidential commission on gays in the military, he was directly ordered to keep his mouth shut about his opposition to the ban. To Patton, there was “no difference” between the racism that he felt when he first entered the Coast Guard and the discrimination he saw against gays and lesbians. Drawing the parallel on a personal and historical level, Patton said, “One of my biggest military heroes is Leonard Matlovich…. I was impressed that here was a man who laid his life on the line, earned a Bronze Star, did all kinds of things and then all of a sudden [after he comes out], he’s no good. What about the lives that he saved—the people who now have grandchildren to tell the story?” It was the exemplary service of gay soldiers, sailors, and airmen like Matlovich that ultimately convinced Patton that this was not only a civil rights issue; it was also an issue of military effectiveness. So he spoke up. He spoke up to Chairman Powell, to the other members of the commission assigned to study lifting the ban, and to his superior officers in the Coast Guard. Patton could do this, because he wasn’t gay.

Though it may not have been the original intention of the policymakers who started the Veterans History Project, these oral histories are allowing gay veterans to speak up as well. In their interviews, these veterans talk about how they have done their duty in service to the United States, about the sacrifices that they have made to defend this country, and about the discrimination they faced in uniform and out. These stories reveal that veterans’ identities based on their memories of military service evolve in some ways that are surprisingly similar to identities based on sexual orientation. The interviews themselves are part of that identity evolution, allowing gay soldiers to embrace both their sexuality and the veteran’s identity that has been long denied to them. As oral historians, it is our job to “ask and tell,” to uncover and investigate the hidden transcripts that are left out of recorded history, or in this case, silenced by official federal policy. How wonderful then that an oral history project supported by the federal government has provided the impetus to collect these personal narratives. This is oral history on a civil rights frontier. While it may be naïve to hope that this project is compiling evidence that may someday help lift the ban, at the very least, it is documenting courage that should not be forgotten.