History and Me

On Saturday, 18 January, 2010, congress repealed the egregious "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy which kept the estimated 65,000 gays and lesbians currently serving in the United States armed forces not only from being open about their sexual orientation, but forced them to live in fear of being summarily dismissed should that orientation become known. Thousands of qualified men and women, many of them in key positions necessary to the efficiency of their service, suffered the humiliation of being thrown out of an organization they had willingly joined in order to serve their country.

I was raised in a society and a time where the subject of homosexuality was never mentioned in other than the most pejorative way. Homosexuals were looked upon with almost universal contempt and had no legal rights or recourse against harassment and persecution. It was simply accepted that they deserved anything anyone wanted to do to them. I remember hearing my own father tell family friends about how, when he was a teenager, he and some of his buddies used to go out looking for queers to beat up. I never asked why he did it...he wouldn't have had an answer other than Sir Edmond Hillary's reason for climbing Mt. Everest: because they were there. And because they deserved it.

When I joined the U.S. Navy in 1954, one of the questions I had to answer was: "Have you ever had homosexual tendencies?" I answered "No" truthfully, on the grounds that they weren't "tendencies," they were part of my existence.

From the minute I was sworn into the Naval Aviation Cadets through the time I spent in the "regular" Navy, I was constantly aware of the sword over my head, and that it could drop at any moment. Between the ages of 20 and 22, when heterosexuals my age were giving free reign to their extremely high libidos, I had no form of real emotional or physical contact with anyone. While a NavCad, I did have one gay friend among my fellow cadets, but the possibility of or opportunity for other than a casual friendship was out of the question. When I left the NavCads and went aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga, with 3,000 other men, one might imagine I'd be like a little kid in a candy store. One would be wrong. I knew full well my survival depended upon staying on the outside of the store, looking in, but being careful not to be seen looking in. Even when on liberty in some of the largest cities in Europe I did not dare to go anywhere near places where I might hope to find other gays.

I know that of the 3,000 men aboard ship, statistically at least 300 of them had to be gay. Some 50 years later I encountered an officer who had been aboard the Ti when I was, who was as paranoid as I was about being discovered to be gay. The personnel officer aboard the Ti was a prissy Judas Goat who tricked one of the guys with whom I worked, who everybody "knew" to be gay, into admitting he had once had an encounter with another man. We we were at sea in the middle of the mediterranean when he "confessed". The kid, a little younger than I and a gentle, sweet, decent human being, was flown off the ship in the middle of the night lest he contaminate the rest of the crew! Had I not already been paranoid about being found out before, I certainly was after that incident.

The Navy...as well, I'm sure, as the Army, Air Force, and Marines...was equally paranoid about the horrors of having homosexuals in their midst. I remember a story I heard many times on the Ti about a reported incident aboard the cruiser USS St. Paul, involving 35 to 350 (depending on which rumor you heard or believed) caught up in a homosexual "ring," necessitating the ships return to port for mass discharge of the offenders. The St. Paul was widely referred to throughout the fleet as the "Snookie-Poo." Whether this was true or not, I can't say, though you can be positive that if it were, the Navy would go to any length to hide it.

But gradually, with glacial slowness, things have changed until we reached Saturday, December 18, 2010. All the injustice, all the trauma and humiliation and bigotry and cruelty born by so many decent men and women who wanted nothing more than to serve their country honorably, is coming to an end. And I can guarantee you than, in two years, if anyone even remembers that there was a time when we were denied so basic a right, the response will be to wonder what the fuss was all about.

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