Gay Women Forgotten Amid Military Changes

To be a lesbian in the military this year has been rather like playing a bit part in a silent film--seen only fleetingly in the background and certainly not heard.

Although lesbians were at the heart of the issue, they were all but ignored during the dispute over homosexuals in the armed forces. Women are discharged for homosexuality at a significantly higher rate than men, but that fact was rarely, if ever, reflected in the debate over President Clinton’s abandoned plans to repeal the military’s anti-gay policies.

Arguments to retain the ban on gay men and women revolved almost exclusively around the concerns of male troops and their reluctance to shower and share quarters with gay soldiers. So pervasive was the discussion of men’s showers that it became something of a joke. As one lesbian reservist quipped this summer: “Lesbians must be dry-cleaned!”

Gay women in uniform have teetered between hope and frustration, dispassion and fury, only to wind up pretty much where they started. As the Oct. 1 effective date of Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy approaches, few of those interviewed believe that the new regulations will bring any measurable improvement to their lives.

“When (Clinton) made that announcement on television, I was shattered,” said Mary, a senior military officer and a lesbian who, like most people interviewed, did not want her real name used. “It hit me right in the gut. . . . Then, I just became angry, in fact, furious.”

Faced with strong opposition in Congress and the Pentagon, Clinton retreated from his proposal to allow gay men and lesbians to openly serve in the armed forces. His new policy ends the practice of questioning recruits about their sexual orientation and directs commanding officers to refrain from ordering investigations without “credible” evidence that someone is gay. But homosexual conduct remains illegal, on or off base. Those who state that they are gay will have to prove that they are not engaging in homosexual acts to avoid discharge.

“It’s really a defeat. . . . It’s just a joke,” said Lauren, a senior noncommissioned officer in the Army who is near retirement. “It means nothing. . . . The only thing that has really changed is the witch hunts are going to stop--so they say. But they can probably get around that.

“I expected a lot more,” said Lauren, a former military policewoman who joined the Army as a teen-ager, before she realized she is homosexual. “I expected (the ban) to be lifted altogether.”

At the same time, she was not surprised by the furor that erupted over Clinton’s plans. The military, she said, is the “last bastion of male macho ego.”

There are no figures on the number of homosexuals in the service. But anecdotal evidence suggests that historically the military has attracted large numbers of gay women. Early restrictions on marriage and pregnancy made a service career more appealing to lesbians than heterosexual women. Even after the prohibitions were dropped, non-traditional jobs available in the military continued to attract gay women.

Department of Defense records also show that women have been consistently expelled for homosexuality at a high rate. From 1980 through 1990, women made up 23% of all such discharges, although they represented only 10% of military personnel. In the Marine Corps, women represented 28% of the discharges for homosexuality during that period, but only 5% of those serving.

When Jean enlisted in the Army in the late 1970s, about a quarter of the women in her basic training unit were lesbians, she recalled. Now in the Army Reserves, she said the past months have given her second thoughts about staying in the service.

“I’m so sick of hearing I’m incompatible and I’m disruptive,” Jean said. “I have no intention of getting enough years to retire.

“I’m actually to the point of having migraines,” she added. “I’m so infuriated that we could spend the money and the time to examine the issue and still not do the right thing. It’s mind-boggling.”

Gay service members are especially annoyed at the aggressive pro-ban campaign waged by top generals.

“I never lost faith in anyone as much as I lost faith in those people,” said Sarah, an Army officer for more than a decade. “It’s so insulting. These are my generals? These guys are going to lead me into battle?”

Clinton, she said, “should have stopped the generals from giving their opinion. . . . They should have kept their mouths shut. You just salute and say ‘yes sir.’ The bottom line is, he is the commander in chief.”

Angry as they are at the generals, they remain mostly sympathetic toward Clinton.

“I feel sorry for him,” Mary said. “I can’t feel betrayed by a guy who didn’t do it deliberately. He just had too many people to fight.”

Some view the new policy as progress, albeit far short of what they had hoped for. “I think it will make it easier for some people and I’m hoping this is just one step and there are more steps to come,” said Kathy Duncan of Lakewood, a nurse in the Army Reserves. Nevertheless, she is thinking of getting out.

“I’ve been toying with the idea of resigning and I’m toying with the idea of doing it sooner and including in the resignation letter that I’m having a hard time serving in a military that would not let me stay in if it knew who I really was.”

The new policy is tantamount to saying “it’s OK to be who you are as long as you don’t tell anyone and you are celibate--right,” Duncan said sarcastically.

Connie, a noncommissioned officer in the California National Guard, welcomed the policy revision as a beginning that would make her more at ease patronizing gay establishments out of uniform. “I feel a little less stressed about the issue,” she said. Still, she does not feel safe enough to sign up for active duty--which she says she would have if the ban had been dropped.

However much they wanted the ban overturned, the women, for the most part, insist that they would not have been open about their homosexuality even if it had become legal to do so. Policies may change overnight, but attitudes do not, they say, and being openly gay would have remained a mark against them.

“We wouldn’t have come out anyway,” Sarah said. “Whatever people’s fantasies are about what was going to happen was not going to happen.”

Said Mary: “At this point, so much negative programming has been put out about homosexuals . . . anybody who would come out would, I think, risk bodily harm.”

Despite the disillusionment of recent months, she and others are determined to stay in the armed forces.

“I plan on doing 20 years,” said one private in the California National Guard who says her colleagues “know I’m a lesbian even though I haven’t told them. . . . I hear all kinds of (talk about me) in the background and I just ignore it and do my work.”

Said Mary: “I take a certain amount of pleasure that in all these years they haven’t gotten me down.” Furthermore, she said, “getting out doesn’t fix it, it just leaves the problem to happen to others.”

Over the years, she said, she has been under suspicion at various times. Military investigators have staked out her home and followed her in search of evidence that she is a lesbian. Once, she suspected they had bugged her house.

“I can’t think of anything in my life that is more frightening than when the (investigative services) is breathing down your back. But I also know they’re not very bright,” said Mary, who has never been charged.

Moreover, she said, “they are not nearly as interested in chasing down these rumors as they used to be.”

Still, she said “it’s enormously stressful” to live a double life. “You sort of walk around with a big target and hope they don’t hit you in the middle.”

She knew she was a lesbian when she joined. “But I really didn’t have any understanding of how difficult it was.”

Not, she added, that it is easy for any woman in the masculine culture of the military. “Women are (considered) either lesbians or sluts unless you’re married and have two children. . . . Single women have a very tough time, straight or gay.”

The best survival method is to do exceptional work, she said, adding that in her case, “they have come to value the product rather than the rumors.”

Regardless of their sexual orientation, women say they can be branded as lesbians if they resist the advances of their male colleagues. Some lesbians feel compelled to date men, invent marriages or get married to deflect rumors that they are gay.

“To throw the men off so they don’t ask me out,” Connie told her National Guard colleagues that she was married. Now, she says she is divorced.

Once, when Sarah was enrolled in a training course, a number of her male peers “started insinuating stuff about why I didn’t want to go out with them.” So she went drinking with them, only to wind up locked in a car with six of them at the end of the evening. They started groping her and let her out only when she began to scream.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Sarah recalled. She never uttered a word about the incident to her superiors for fear that the men would raise questions about her sexuality. “What was I to do, go complain about that? Uh-uh, I kept my mouth shut.”

Such experiences have left her with little patience for heterosexual soldiers worrying about the possibility of gay sexual advances in the barracks.

“This whole issue is a male issue and that’s really aggravating,” Sarah said. “I see my male counterparts doing the most horrendous things (to women) I’ve seen in my life and they get slapped on the hand.”

Heterosexual women in the military are often described as more tolerant of homosexuality than their male counterparts--an assessment supported by the results of a Los Angeles Time poll of enlisted personnel conducted this year. Only 16% of the men approved of eliminating the gay ban, while 35% of the women agreed that it should be dropped.

“A lot of straight women know about me,” Sarah said. “But it’s not a big deal. I’m not a threat to them.”

Sometimes, she said, she wonders why she stays in the Army.

Then she answers her own question. The military is “a family. It’s a dysfunctional family, I will grant you. The parents are abusive. But the siblings are very supportive of each other.

“They owe me my retirement and I’m going to get it,” she added. “And then when I get out, I’m going to walk in the gay pride parade.”