Gays Relate War Stories of Shadow Life in Military

Eliseo Martinez distinctly remembers what happened when he told his superior officer that he was gay.

Nothing.

“He said, ‘You’re doing a fine job, Marine,’ and that was that,” recounts Martinez, a former platoon sergeant from Los Angeles who spent six years in the Marine Corps in the 1980s and has even received calls from his former unit, asking him to return as a reservist.

While the Department of Defense annually expelled 1,500 gay men and women from the military in the 1980s, many others were undetected or ignored. Clearly, the armed forces’ ban on homosexuals has been somewhat porous. The debate over whether it should be lifted has angered some gay service members and veterans and left others bemused.

Many have searing stories to tell. They talk of discreet double lives, tolerance by colleagues and, occasionally, cruelly humiliating discharges. Those on active duty say that even if the ban is swept away by President Clinton, they are unlikely to be very open about their homosexuality. But they would love to be free of fear, to feel secure in jobs they chose for the same reasons as their non-gay peers.

“Bill Clinton said he was going to emancipate me and no one has said that before,” said Rich, a self-described conservative Republican, and a Naval officer. Like other service members interviewed for this story, he declined to give his full name.

He was standing in one of San Diego’s gay bars, where it’s easy to spot the servicemen. Their hair is shorn, their backs straight, their demeanor macho. If there is a stereotype they conform to, it is a military one, not a gay one.

“Most military people aren’t flamboyant. I don’t know what this big uproar is about,” said Clif, a Navy hospital corpsman. “I just wish people could see how many military people are gay. There’s always a gay club within minutes of every base, and it’s not a coincidence.”

Top military officers have voiced a number of concerns over homosexuals being allowed to openly serve. They say they are worried that discipline will be undermined, the risk of HIV infection on the battlefield will increase and that separate sleeping quarters and bathrooms may be necessary to protect the privacy of heterosexuals.

To Tim, a Navy enlistee who has spent four years at sea, such concerns are unwarranted.

“I showered with them. I slept with them. I ate with them. I worked with them. And I didn’t go sashaying through the barracks. It’s so stupid,” said Tim, who has little doubt that many of his fellow sailors know that he is gay.

Chuck Schoen, a World War II veteran who lives in Northern California, has been amazed at the stream of television interviews with servicemen fretting that they could never share intimate quarters with homosexuals. “You get the feeling that everybody is in the shower all the time, so we must be a very clean military,” chortled Schoen, who was discharged for homosexuality in 1963 after 19 years in the Navy.

Schoen, who was a lieutenant, is one of many who invented girlfriends, carefully monitored his pronouns and wrote “Miss” on letters to his boyfriend. He went along when his shipmates patronized prostitutes during shore leave. “And I always had a couple of pictures of gals up in my locker.”

More contemporary service members seem less inclined to spin tales of fiction. “I’m not at a stage of my life where I can make up things,” said J., a Southern California Marine sergeant. He keeps quiet about his private life and doesn’t socialize that much with his co-workers.

Similarly, Sandy, another Marine, said she simply doesn’t offer any personal information. “I just kind of adopted the attitude that they can make whatever inference they want to. I think everybody pretty much knows (I’m gay), but I don’t flash it.”

Former Navy machinist’s mate Kirt Grubbs of Indianapolis was more daring when he was stationed in Florida in the early 1980s. “Sometimes I took my straight (Navy) friends to the gay bars. There was one outside the (station) gate. A person with a good arm could have stood in the door of the bar and put a rock through the chow hall window. There was nothing but a chain link fence between the two.”

Navy officialdom ignored the bar, an unmarked warehouse, and Grubbs survived his three-year stint without incident.

Such tales of the military turning a blind eye conflict with the anti-gay statements coming recently from the armed forces. “I’ve been surprised,” admitted J. “These were people I thought or hoped were better educated or more worldly.”

At the same time, he and others argue that much of the public grousing by the rank and file has been stirred up by the Pentagon’s stance.

“If the old warhorses would get out of the way,” said Joseph Tommasini of Los Angeles, who was discharged for homosexuality after nearly 13 years in the Marine Corps, “they’d find the younger generation is much more sensitive.”

Yes and no, says Sandy, 30. “It’s all pretty upsetting listening to the aggression coming out.” She overhears more Marines going along with Clinton’s plans than opposing them. “But the ones who are against it are so adamant that it’s very scary to think about the foolish young people who are going to come out and be the subject of all this aggression.”

For similar reasons, Brian Terry of Los Angeles has his doubts about whether the armed forces can handle openly gay soldiers and sailors. “I’m happy about Clinton taking a step but I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not. I have mixed feelings. I just don’t know if the military is ready for that.”

For Terry, the controversy has churned up unsettling memories of his 1990 discharge from the Army for homosexuality. He enlisted the year before, knowing that he was gay but wanting to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a decorated World War II veteran. During a security check, the Army learned he was gay. One of his superiors tried to protect him, but it didn’t work. Terry was called to an office, made to stand at attention and grilled by seven officers at his Northern California post.

“I was called faggot and queer. I was asked to give other names” of service gays, said Terry, now 24. “They asked me--of all things--to prove it. They asked me to write an essay describing a sexual act, something I had done, and submit it to my commanding officers.” Terry, who says he was celibate during his nine months in the service, didn’t know any other gays in army. But he did write the essay. “I had to.”

The experience so devastated him that he checked himself into a private rest home for two months of counseling after his discharge and is still paying the bills.

Terry’s treatment is hardly unique.

Sass Nielsen, now a technical writer for the Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, was hauled into a stark interrogation room with a bare light bulb in 1966 after the Navy was tipped off that she was a lesbian. She was questioned for hours without a break while her Navy girlfriend was grilled in another room. “It was a real nasty interrogation.” Nielsen recalls. “They wanted to know in detail every little contact we had . . . all they wanted to know about was the sex.”

Afterward, the two were put on a work detail. “We spent some time scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes and baseboards and painting barracks.” When her girlfriend tried to hurl herself out of a window, they were promptly discharged. The woman, who came from a Navy family, had a nervous breakdown because of it all, Nielsen says.

Nielsen is still bitter. “I haven’t stood up for the national anthem since 1967,” she says. “I hope Clinton can give us the civil rights and respect we deserve so I can once again stand up for the national anthem. The emotional damage this did to me was just horrendous. Talk about having self-esteem problems. It was years before I got over the way I was treated.”

When Renee Mueller’s military police colleagues found an old letter from an ex-lover of hers in the locked glove compartment of her car in 1986, “they took it inside the provost marshal’s office and read it to everybody.” Mueller, an MP at the Parris Island Marine installation in South Carolina, was on leave at the time and had loaned her car to a friend who was stopped for drunk driving.

“I came home on a Friday, went back to the barracks. They met me at my barracks with a search warrant (for her room), handcuffed me and took me” to MP headquarters for questioning, said Mueller, 28, who lives in Indianapolis. She stayed away from her friends while she awaited discharge for fear they would be tagged gay.

Like others, Mueller didn’t realize she was homosexual when she enlisted at the age of 19, unable to afford college. She expected to get married and have a family. “When I first went in the service, I was very homophobic.”

When she acknowledged to herself that she was attracted to women, “I felt I had to keep everything quiet and discreet.”

Some gay service members have easily adjusted to what Schoen calls the “phony life” necessary to stay in an institution that officially disdains them.

But for others, the cover-up is a constant, gnawing strain. “When I got out of the military, I looked over my shoulder for a year,” said Aslan Brooke of Los Angeles, an Army medic in the 1960s. “You never know when the ax is going to fall, never know when someone is going to say you’re gay. . . . The pressure was tremendous.”

On her last assignment in Washington, D.C., Brooke was living with her lover, also in the Army, off post. One night they were tipped off that investigators were on their way. Panic-stricken, the two women gathered up all the mementos of their relationship. “We burnt everything, valentine cards, everything. Put it in the tub and set it on fire.”

The investigators never arrived.

Even if the ban is dropped, the memory of harassment and discharges will linger--and with it, caution.

None of the active-duty service members interviewed said they would come out if the ban is lifted.

“If you are in the service and you are open about it, it’s not going to get you anywhere,” observed a 32-year-old Army officer.

Remarked J. “I still think (gays) will be the hidden minority. They’re still going to face discrimination. But they’ll have the confidence they won’t be kicked out.”

Gay men and lesbians yearn for a time when they will be judged on their job performance alone. “Anyone who can make it through boot camp, they can make it through anything and they deserve anything,” Mueller said.

MILITARY OPPOSITION: Polls show military personnel oppose admitting gays. A19