SERVING TRUTH AND HER COUNTRY

Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer is trying to get her life back in order after being reinstated to the National Guard last June.

“I still continue to have a full-time job in the VA hospital (in Seattle) as a nurse clinical specialist,” says Cammermeyer, over tea at a Pasadena hotel. Cammermeyer, 52, who immigrated from Norway with her family when she was 9, is an imposing woman--6 feet tall, with closed-cropped hair and glasses. But appearances are deceiving. The mother of four sons and grandmother of two is very warm and eloquent.

“I run a sleep lab in the seizure clinic and that’s what I have been doing all along. The job, the career, I lost was a military career which was in conjunction with having served in the military in active duty and then in the Reserves and then in the National Guard. So now I am back in the military doing my thing.”

Immediately after U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly ruled on June 1, 1994, that Cammermeyer’s discharge based on sexual orientation was unconstitutional, the Justice Department appealed the ruling. The appeal is “being negotiated,” Cammermeyer says. “They are trying to figure out how to have some closure on my case.”

In the meantime--48 hours after she was reinstated, in fact--she was back in the Guard, serving at the 164th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

“I have never seen anything work so fast in the military,” observes the 52-year-old Cammermeyer, who earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam. “I just recently found out I have a mandatory retirement on the 16th of September of this year because I will have completed 30 years in the military. So I will be retiring at that time unless something unforeseen happens and I should request an extension.”

Cammermeyer, who recently published her autobiography “Serving in Silence” (written with Chris Fisher), says it was eerie to see her life unfold on the screen. “We would see dailies,” she says. “Sometimes I would see them alone and sometimes Diane would be there.”

“At times I would have to leave,” Cammermeyer says. “There were some parts that were so salient and so close to what the actual experience had been that I said, ‘I don’t have to relive this’ and I would walk away. I guess that would speak to how well it is done. I have tried to sort of go back to the very premise this really doesn’t have anything to do with me, it is just they are borrowing aspects of my life.”

What the film has to do with, Cammermeyer says, “is the types of problems so many people have in life as they go through their passages. This is dealing with the discrimination against gays and lesbians, overt and subliminal, and it can only change as the stereotypes change.”

She says everyone carries homophobia within them. So did she. That was one of the reasons Cammermeyer felt her four sons and her father would turn against her when she told them she was gay. But that didn’t happen.

“Being discarded because of who we are is what keeps us silent,” Cammermeyer says. “We have, we hope, loving, caring relationships and underneath is this fear that if they find out they won’t want to have anything to do with us. Just as an example, what is that Rock Hudson feared?

“This is really a tragic hang-up that we have been ingrained (with) and carry. I was sure my children wouldn’t want me to spend time with my grandchildren. My son said when the first grandchild was born, ‘It’s not every little girl who has four grandmothers.’ That sort of says it all essentially and speaks to (my children’s) wisdom and my ignorance.”

Cammermeyer spends a lot of time making speeches. “My agent books talks at universities. Sometimes the Rotary Club calls. I know that I’m in the right place when I really feel uncomfortable because that’s a place where I can talk about what the whole experience is like and why I don’t believe (being homosexual) has anything to do with choice.

“That is who we are and have been all of our lives and some of us are a little slower understanding that. When people come back to me and say, ‘I have a different understanding,’ my presence there was right. I think this movie and the book both are offshoots of trying to reach out for those people who are open enough to want to try to understand or a least to see. It’s not a matter of acceptance, it is a matter of allowing to be.”