Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out by Steve Estes

From the Publisher

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was the directive of President Clinton's 1993 military policy regarding gay and lesbian soldiers. This official silence continued a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. Ask and Tell recovers these lost voices, offering a rich chronicle of the history of gay and lesbian service in the U.S. military from World War II to the Iraq War.

Drawing on more than 50 interviews with gay and lesbian veterans, Steve Estes charts the evolution of policy toward homosexuals in the military over the past 65 years, uncovering the ways that silence about sexuality and military service has affected the identities of gay veterans. These veteran voices—harrowing, heroic, and on the record—reveal the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans, men and women who simply did their duty and served their country in the face of homophobia, prejudice, and enemy fire. Far from undermining national security, unit cohesion, or troop morale, Estes demonstrates, these veterans strengthened the U.S. military in times of war and peace. He also examines challenges to the ban on homosexual service, placing them in the context of the wider movement for gay rights and gay liberation. Ask and Tell is an important compilation of unheard voices, offering Americans a new understanding of the value of all the men and women who serve and protect them.

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ASK & TELL

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapter One

The men and women who served in the military during World War II have become known as "the greatest generation." Although there are exceptions, the majority of these veterans have been exceedingly humble about the sacrifices that they made in service to the United States. When asked why they served, almost every one of them answers: "I was just doing my duty." This is true of gay as well as heterosexual veterans. Patriotism runs strong among them all.

Just talk to Charles Rowland, a gay draftee from Phoenix, Arizona. Rowland knew "an awful lot of gay people but nobody, with one exception, ever considered not serving. We were not about to be deprived the privilege of serving our country in a time of great national emergency by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay."

Antisodomy laws and military regulations had limited gay service since World War I, leading to courts-martial for men found having sex with other men. Still, gay men were in uniform from the very start of World War II. There were gay sailors at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and gay sergeants training the massive influx of recruits anddraftees immediately afterward. In the early 1940s, draft boards examined 18 million American men for possible service in World War II. Military psychiatrists sought to screen out gay men as "sexual psychopaths," but fewer than 5,000 of the 18 million draftees were initially rejected because of homosexual tendencies. A conservative estimate of the number of gay men who served during World War II is 650,000 out of 16 million American servicemen.

Paul Jordan had already been in the army for years when the vast majority of volunteers and draftees joined him to fight in World War II. He had enlisted in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, but Paul's enlistment had more to do with the Great Depression than with international politics. With few jobs in his rural Maine community, the military was one of the very few alternatives to unemployment and poverty. After helping to train the new wave of recruits brought into the army at the start of World War II, Paul volunteered to fight in Europe. His memories of the war echo the stories of hundreds of thousands of other young infantrymen who fought in the European theater. Paul was just one of the boys ... one of the boys with a secret.

Another young man who shared a similar secret was Bill Taylor. Short in stature, Taylor was tapped as a tail gunner for a B-24 bomber based in England. Like Paul Jordan's, Bill's story varies only slightly from the ones that his straight crewmates would tell about service during the war. Like them and like his two brothers who served, Bill was just doing his duty: trying to win the war for the Allies and most of all, trying to survive.

On the home front, World War II accelerated the social changes that the Great Depression had begun, inspiring millions of people to migrate in search of jobs in the war industries or to relocate because of enlistment and deployment. As the historian Allan Bérubé argues in his book Coming Out under Fire, "The massive mobilization for World War II relaxed the social constraints of peacetime that kept many gay men and women unaware of themselves and each other." Away from the small town authorities and conservative mores, young gay men found new identities and new communities. Bud Robbins and Burt Gerrits saw these changes first hand. Stationed in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, respectively, these young men found kindred spirits in the nightclubs and bars that became the nuclei of urban gay communities after the war.

The war also inspired revolutionary changes for American women, both gay and straight. The formation of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, renamed the Women's Army Corps (WACs) in 1943, was just one small part of this seismic shift in gender roles. Along with the waves in the navy, the WACs replaced servicemen in clerical and other noncombat occupational specialties. By the end of the war, more than 150,000 women served on posts across the United States and overseas.

Worried that servicewomen would be seen as "amazons" or "camp followers," WAC officers emphasized the virtues of femininity and chastity in their recruits. There was clearly a fear that more masculine women-code for lesbians-would take over the WACs, but the military did not officially screen for lesbians until 1944. In fact, many lesbian recruits found a certain sisterhood in the organization. Iowa recruit Pat Bond was one of those women. "I came with my suitcase, staggering down the mess hall," Bond explained in the documentary film Word Is Out, "and I heard a voice from one of the barracks say, 'Good God, Elizabeth, look! Here comes another one!'"

As the historian Leisa Meyer argues, the visibility of lesbians in the WACs sometimes made them targets of harassment, but their presence also "served as both an anchor and a rallying point for the formations of lesbian communities within the corps." This community would be especially important at the war's end, when lesbian purges were part of a general pattern of downsizing the number and the role of women in the military. Despite the purges and harassment at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, Pat Bond and other lesbian veterans left the service with a better sense of themselves and a strong support network.

The final interviewee in this chapter, Charlotte Coleman, served in the women's auxiliary service with the Coast Guard. Called the SPARs-after the u.s. Coast Guard motto: Semper Paratus (Always Ready)-women in the coast guard during World War II had much the same experiences as women in the WACs and WAVEs, though there were far fewer SPARs. By the summer of 1944, around the time that Charlotte joined, there were 771 women officers and 7,600 female enlisted personnel in the coast guard. Unlike the women on the spars softball teams, Charlotte's sexuality was not so obvious to most people, but still she enjoyed the sisterhood of the women's auxiliary service. Most important, the service provided her a ticket out of the small New England town where she was raised. Though she heard about purges of lesbians from the spars before the group was disbanded at the close of the war, Charlotte was lucky and left the service with an honorable discharge.

The purges of lesbians at the conclusion of the war and the less-than-honorable psychiatric discharges of gay men and women throughout the conflict exemplify the confusing evolution of military policies regarding homosexuality. Working on the psych ward of a Bay Area naval hospital, Burt Gerrits met many young men whose only psychosis was homosexuality. These men were being drummed out of the Navy with less-than-honorable discharges, while others, like Burt himself, were retained either because they successfully hid their sexuality or because the military needed their skills. A third and much smaller category of gay service personnel were court-martialed under prewar antisodomy regulations, but such criminal punishment of homosexuality was deemed costly and inefficient given wartime manpower demands. This three-tiered military policy toward homosexuals-court-martial, discharge, or retention-was the reality that underlay the stricter public prohibition of gay military service from World War II to the passage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Despite their humility, the members of the Greatest Generation have finally gotten their due, with a surge of popular histories and movies and the creation of a monument on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It is about time. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as many as 1,100 World War II veterans are passing away every day, their memories lost to history forever. Unfortunately, mainstream histories of the war and eulogies to the Greatest Generation are often silent about the sacrifices and contributions of gay servicemen and servicewomen. If we are to "ask and tell" about the history of gays in the military, we should begin by giving those in the Greatest Generation their due.

ONE OF THE BOYS

An Interview with Paul Jordan

The oldest veteran in this collection, Paul Jordan joined the U.S. Army in the early 1930s. He knew from an early age that he was gay, but otherwise, he was just "one of the boys." The secret of his sexuality was much less important than the survival skills that he imparted to the new recruits and draftees entering the army at the beginning of World War II. As Paul recalled in this interview, these skills allowed him to survive some of the most harrowing battles of the European theater.

I was born in Orono, Maine, on September the twenty-seventh, 1911. Bangor, Maine, has been my hometown since my family moved from Orono a year right after I was born. I went to St. Mary's and from there to Bangor High School. A couple of months before graduation, the Great Depression came on, and my father took me in the back room and said, "I've lost my job. I don't know if I'll be able to keep up the payments on the house." He said, "The best place for you, since you've had three years training at Bangor High School on ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps], is the army. There, you'll get food, shelter, and clothing, and I won't have you to worry about. I'll just have the three girls." And with that, I lost all interest in doing pre-med at the University of Maine. My original intent was to have become a physician.

I went to the recruiting sergeant in Portland, and I told him, quite honestly, "I'm not wearing this monkey suit in the United States." He says, "Why do you take that attitude?" I says, "Look in any bar window and you'll see a sign, says, 'No soldiers or dogs allowed.' That is offensive to me, and if you don't have something for me in foreign service, then I prefer to go to the Civilian Conservation Corps and do road work."

He said, "We've got a place for you," and he shipped me o to the Thirty-third U.S. Infantry at Fort Clayton in Panama, where I was assigned to Headquarters Company, and there I began my career as a soldier.

They recognized right away that I'd had military training, and in no time at all I was teaching the other men how to do a snappier manual of arms, how to do a right face without looking sloppy, how to do an about-face and make it real sharp. Before that enlistment was over, I had progressed to corporal. That was unheard of in a first enlistment in those days. This was 1933.

I've been gay since I knew what gayness was. That came upon me in my teens. I was seventeen, and I had several experiences of rather pleasurable excitement in the presence of certain types of other men that disturbed me because I knew, or felt deeply, this wasn't natural. I'd have to leave the scene because I was getting excited. I began to look through the literature to see what I could find out about these things. I found a book on abnormal psychology in the Bangor Public Library, and there it was, black and white: I was homosexual. I had to learn how to conceal that, live with it, accept it, and try to get others to accept it. It has not been an easy task.

No one in the army knew, because I took great pains to emulate the more masculine types in my different organizations, and I was a good mimic. I guess I'm a little bit of an actor anyway. But in doing this, I found myself being accepted as "one of the boys." One of the boys, with a secret.

Homosexuality has been a part of every army since the ancient Egyptian army, the Greek army, and the Roman army. Some of these gay men, called "camp followers," were prostitutes, and they followed these armies when they moved. This is all historical, and I don't know why today so many people think they're just discovering something.

All the time I was in the army ... you've heard the expression, "It takes one to know one"? Well, I ran into some gay guys that had a certain appeal. Gay people are not attracted to all their own gender. It's just certain people with something in their personality that's very attractive. Anyway, our method was: "This weekend, we'll get a hotel room, share the expenses of a hotel room." Raleigh was one of my favorites, Raleigh, North Carolina, which is quite close to Camp Buckner, where I was division artillery sergeant major. We'd go over there and we'd party.

Unlike the millions of citizen soldiers drafted only after World War II began,

Paul witnessed the inexorable march to war from within the ranks of the infantry.

I was at Fort Slocum, I believe, in New York. I had just been sent down there from Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont, and I saw the handwriting on the wall when I heard things on the radio. It became very clear to me that the United States was not going to be able to stay out of this conflict, and it wasn't too long before we got to Pearl Harbor, and that confirmed my suspicions.

At Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont, they were receiving a lot of recruits. They were drafting young men o the streets of every city and state in the Union. And that was one of the collecting areas where the basic training-thirteen weeks of basic-was given, and I was participating in that. And it wasn't long before they needed somebody that knew enough about army methods, so I was transferred from an active unit to another headquarters company. Became a staff sergeant then, I believe.

It was my decision to go overseas, and it was difficult for me to convince my immediate commander, Colonel Nelson. I had the job of division artillery sergeant major supervisor, a job I didn't like. I was merely a supervisor for eight clerks. They were punching out social orders and making copies and delivering them to all the other units in the organization after I'd proofread them, and it was dull for me. I had been trained as an infantryman. I was never without a rifle in my hands. In Maine, as a boy, my daddy gave me a rifle-a little .22 rifle-when I was seven years old, and no squirrel was safe. I understood cover and concealment, and sneaking through the woods and getting close to your victim to make your shot a good shot.

So I went to the colonel when I found out from classified documents that I was cleared to handle that the invasion of Europe was to take place in the spring of 1944. This rang bells in my head, because here was what I was trained for. Here was an invasion of historical proportions, and I wanted to be a part of that history-making invasion. I could picture in my mind the coast of France and what this all meant to the military leaders and planners. And I went to the colonel and asked him, "If I surrender my rank and pay, will you transfer me to an organization that's headed for Europe as a replacement in the invasion?" He said, "Only if you can find me a suitable replacement."

And I did. I found a man who, with a little urging and the inducement of higher pay, volunteered for the job, and I introduced him to the colonel. They had an interview, and I was out of there in no time as a private.

It got me placed in a spot in Southampton in England. I knew from the position of Southampton that we were at the jumping-off spot. The casualties were bound to be heavy. The Nazis were not playing around. They were stubborn, and they were foolhardy. There's a difference between courage and foolhardiness. They were foolhardy, because they believed everything that the Führer had told them. They were going to run the world. And they all wanted to be a part of it, just as I wanted to be part of the invasion of Europe to put an end to their dream.

D-plus-3 landed me on Normandy. We were just ordered down to the water, the water's edge in the dark, and we got aboard the transports, the troop transporters. They had bulletproof sides on them. The gunnels were thick steel, so that told me something.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ASK & TELL by STEVE ESTES Copyright © 2007 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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