After 12 Years, Lesbian Gets Military Promotion : Rights: In settling her lawsuit against the U.S., officer will be presented with major’s oak leaf in ceremony today.

Today, Dusty Pruitt will finally get the major’s oak leaf she earned a dozen years ago, only to lose it when her candor and sexuality collided with military law.

In an unofficial Long Beach ceremony, Pruitt will celebrate the pending settlement of her lawsuit against the government, a case that has endured for more than a decade and helped shape the continuing legal debate over homosexuals in the military.

Under the terms of the settlement outlined by the U.S. Justice Department, Pruitt said she will be granted the promotion to major that was suspended in 1983, shortly after she disclosed in an interview with The Times that she is a lesbian. Instead of saying that she was honorably discharged from the Army reserves for homosexuality three years later, her records will state that she retired, and she will be given credit for the years of service she would have accrued had she not been discharged.

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It is much less than Pruitt and her attorneys hoped for in 1991, when a federal appeals court ruled in her favor, saying that the military had to have “a rational basis” for banning gay men and women. Her case was ordered back to a lower court for trial, and gay rights lawyers predicted that the decision, if upheld, could pave the way for the end of the military’s anti-gay regulations.

Other legal challenges to the Defense Department’s policy on gays, along with the establishment of new Pentagon rules on homosexuals, have since overtaken the case. So Pruitt is settling for her promotion and a place in legal history.

“It’s been quite a little haul,” mused Pruitt, 48, a minister of the Metropolitan Community Church in Long Beach. It is not one she regrets.

“I’m really thrilled to do something that is going to go down in history as a really good thing for the gay and lesbian community,” she said.

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Pruitt’s attorney, Mary Newcombe, said that although there had been other court decisions favorable to gay service members prior to the Pruitt ruling, that was the first to clearly state that the government could not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation unless it could show good reasons to do so.

It was not enough, the judges said, to simply acquiesce to prejudice against gay men and lesbians--a line of argument that has since been adopted by several other judges ruling in lawsuits challenging the gay ban.

One of those who benefited from the 1991 ruling is Army Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, a lesbian who was reinstated in the military last year by a U.S. District Court decision that flowed from the Pruitt case.

Cammermeyer, whose reinstatement is being appealed by the government, will pin the gold oak leaves on Pruitt’s uniform at a Long Beach gathering of gay veterans today.

Although the settlement has not been finalized, Newcombe said Pruitt and the government have agreed to it in principle.

Because it’s Memorial Day weekend, Pruitt decided to celebrate a little bit early. There will be a color guard, speeches and the rites of patriotism.

“There’s a major amount of shame that rolls off us,” Pruitt said. “Shame that the military put on us because we were stigmatized as gay or lesbian. And there’s no prouder moment than when you can stand as an openly gay or lesbian veteran and say, ‘I served my country proudly.’ ”