On a day to come very soon—September 20, 2011—a serviceman's sexuality will no longer be grounds for dismissal from the U.S. Armed forces. These are the voices explaining what it has been like to be a gay man1 in the American military over the previous seventy or so years, from World War II veterans in their late eighties to young servicemen on active duty.

1. Life Today as a Gay Serviceman
How we got here: In 1992, many people thought that the discrimination was nearly over. "I remember being in the Castro," says John Forrett (army reserve, 1987–99), "and watching the TV at a bar with some friends, watching Al Gore and Bill Clinton swearing that if they became the tag team for America they were going to get rid of the harassment of gays and lesbians serving in the military." But when the tag team prevailed, they underestimated the resistance to such a reform from a coalition of social conservatives, religious groups, and a large part of the military itself. The consequence, the following year, was a messy kind of compromise that became colloquially known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Gay people were allowed in the military but only as long as they didn't reveal their sexuality; to facilitate this, all members of the military were also prohibited from inquiring about anyone's possible orientation. This was presented as a kind of victory for the forces of progress—you were no longer excluded from serving—but it could instead be seen as solidifying discrimination. Gay people were only acceptable, in effect, to the degree to which they could successfully masquerade as nongay. Still, the whispered message from Clinton and Gore seemed to be that this was only a temporary stopgap while the nervous military took a large deep breath: Trust us, they seemed to imply. We'll be there soon.




Navy #1 (lieutenant, fourteen years): "There's always been a fear that people would find out and then hold it over you for some kind of leverage. I have seen it happen: 'If you don't do this, I'm going to report you.' "

Air Force #1: "Two of my friends were discovered, both officers—it's a long and arduous process for an officer to get kicked out for being gay. For an enlisted member, it takes about five days. Paperwork is much easier. It's really just 'You do not meet standards.' Within five days, out the door."

Air Force #2 (senior airman, three years): "No one at my job would ever, ever suspect that I was gay at all. I talk about Sam, I even say 'Sam' at work, 'I'm meeting Sam, we're going to do this and that,' and they're like, 'Oh yeah, how's she been?' The worst part is when they start asking me about our sex life and I have to make shit up. But I'm 'That's the woman I'm going to marry, so I'm not cool with you guys talking about my wife like that,' and everybody goes, 'Yeah, you're right.' "

Marines #1 (major, fourteen years): "I'm older, I'm single, and I don't talk about a girlfriend. I don't what we call 'gender fuck,' don't do any of that. So I always feel like there is a bright light shining on me."

Marines #2 (captain, nine years): "Part of what has really allowed me to hide in plain sight is the fact that I don't meet the stereotype. And you're good at your job—a gay person wouldn't be good at his job, so obviously you're not gay. You're a Marine, you don't mind getting dirty, going out into the field and not showering for weeks at a time...and, if you were gay, when you have to shower with all these other guys you'd get all excited. You're not getting excited so you're clearly not gay. I mean, if you want to hide, the Marine Corps is one of the best places to do that, because nobody wants to admit they are standing next to a gay guy. Nobody wants to admit that they have gone to war with gay people."

Air Force #3 (captain, eleven years): "You can be upset about a lot of things—you can be upset that the law was what it was. But I don't think you can be upset about your service, because ultimately it was your choice. You know, we're a volunteer force."

Marines #2: "When I went into the recruiter's office to sign all the paperwork and we got to 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' I started reading through it, because this was significant to me. I was raised by an attorney—it's important to know what you're signing. I had made it about halfway through and the recruiter was frustrated with how long it was taking me, and he said, 'Well, basically, are you gay?' I hadn't even joined the military yet, and here he had asked me! If my life had been a movie, that would be the dramatic foreshadowing of what was to come. Of the way it was going to be."


2. One Man's Operation Iraqi Freedom

When Alva signed up, before "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," he had to lie on his paperwork. "I knew I was lying," he says. "But I loved what I did, I loved my job, and I didn't want to tell anyone. I said, 'It's going to be my secret.' I knew I was not going to be happy in a way, but I knew this was what I wanted." In 2003 he was deployed to the Middle East, and on March 21 he crossed the border from Kuwait. His unit was part of a huge convoy that stopped outside Basra. Alva got out of his Humvee and went to fetch something from the back of the vehicle. "That's when I triggered the IED. I was awake, my hearing was sort of gone. My hand was covered in blood and part of my index finger was gone. The chaplain was holding my head and I was telling him I didn't want to die. I was taken off a helicopter in Kuwait—it was estimated that I was only in Iraq about three hours—and carried into surgery. I woke up later and when I looked down I saw that the right side of my sheet was flat. I cried myself asleep, only to wake up hours later and see that it's true: My leg is gone."

As he recuperated, he learned about his inadvertent status. "I don't know who designated me to be the first. I was never given a certificate or anything. One-millionth shopper. Now I have the dubious distinction of being the first American injured when the war started. It didn't make it better or worse. I mean, my life was changed forever. I was angry that my leg was gone. Even when I was still in the hospital, hours would go by so slow, and I actually said to myself: 'Who is going to love me now?' I'd never really experienced dating anyone. 'Who is going to love me now? I'm missing a leg.' "



Meanwhile, the media picked up on his story. He went on Oprah. People magazine gave him an award. But nobody thought to pry too deeply into his personal life. After the attention died down, his post-military world began to take shape. He went back to college; he did find a boyfriend. And when, in 2006, the battles over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the military and gay marriage in the wider community were simmering, Alva's boyfriend at the time pointed out to him that he did have some notoriety that might be of use. "I finally said, you know what, I'm going to tell my story. The first American injured in the Iraq war is a gay Marine. He wanted to give his life to this country."


3. Invisible Partners

Air Force #4 (senior airman, four years): "Right now our relationships don't exist."

Air Force #3: "I've had three deployments [while] with the same person. Every time it's been 'All right, see you later.' All the spouses get together, do stuff. He's just there by himself, fending for himself."

Marines #2: "The relationship lasted for about four years, but I always felt like I was disrespecting him, to have to pretend he didn't exist when I went to work. When I got deployed, he was there with my family when I left. It kind of sucked—to shake his hand and a little pat on the back and 'I'll see you when I see you' kind of thing. And when you're getting ready to come back, the spouses were getting classes—here's how you welcome your Marine back into the family—and my boyfriend didn't get any of that. I had a really hard time adjusting to being home. We tried to make it work for a year but he was getting more and more paranoid about people finding out about us. It killed me that he felt that way because of me. I don't think we ever really had a chance, ultimately."

Air Force #3: "When I was deployed, every Sunday we would sit down on opposite sides of the world and we would each order a pizza and we would watch a movie together over Skype. We weren't doing anything bad except trying to spend some time together. But there was no 'I love you.' Certainly nothing sexual, or anything like what some straight guys do over Skype."

Navy #2 (captain, twenty years): "Personally, I haven't had a lot of struggles. The hardest thing that I faced was about eight years ago. I was dating somebody for about two years who had gotten out of the army. He was HIV positive, and I didn't know that, and he ended up dying—it just happened very quickly. I am not positive, luckily. So I had a lot of difficulties grasping with that personally, dealing with his death, and I had to take time off work, but still not tell them. I couldn't go to the doctor or the psychologist. There wasn't really anybody to talk to."

Army #1 (lieutenant colonel, seventeen years): "I met my boyfriend in '97. We've been together ever since. This will be our fourteenth year. It's worked out. Honestly, while I'm certainly happy to see its demise, I've never had a 'close call' or any significant hardships serving under DADT."

Navy #2: "I take my boyfriend to the commissary and to the grocery store on base, and it's always an interesting dynamic when I see people that I know. Just doing the same thing that every other couple is doing—buying Wheaties and milk and yogurt and dog food."


Navy #2: "My boyfriend is not in the military. In fact, he's left of Che Guevara in his social viewpoint. And he thinks it is just all great fun and he's corrupting the military. I think it's funny, because he's not changing me. Just today we put down money on a house that we're buying together and, now I'm retirement-eligible, that's part of what's buying this nice house. [laughs] So, as much as he thinks he's corrupting the moral fabric of military society, he's actually sucking off the teat of Uncle Sugar."


4. One Man's Tale of Life Under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"
Silence can protect, but it can also provide a potent and despicable weapon. In the shadow of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," whenever gay servicemen did face any kind of homophobic harassment, they were powerless to draw attention to it without potentially triggering the end of their military career. The rule itself became the very tool of their oppression: "The 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy," says Joseph Rocha (navy, 2004–7), "punishes homosexuals who comply, and it protects bigots."

Before his own experience turned ugly, Rocha was exactly the kind of idealistic, motivated recruit the military must wish for. He signed the paperwork on his eighteenth birthday, and eventually applied to join a K-9 unit in Bahrain, training to be a dog handler. "I just got caught up in this little unit with no oversight, with a history of corruption and a history of abuse and harassment and hazing, and I didn't survive it. It was a boys' club—they liked to gamble, they liked to drink, they liked to smoke, and there was a large aspect of the solicitation of prostitution. None of these things appeal to me—one, because my mother was a drug addict; two, because I had a Catholic upbringing. Nothing to do with the fact that I was gay. But when you get caught up in these little groups of boys, the first excuse for anything that doesn't fit in with them is that you're gay. And I had too much pride to say that I wasn't gay. I felt that I deserved to not have to answer that question. So then all I did was make it worse for myself, in that it became a curiosity that was insatiable for them. I think my downfall was the fact I didn't stand up for myself...but how would I have?"


Nonetheless, Rocha chose to say nothing about what had happened. "There's this self-righteous and cocky attitude that if it was really so bad then I would have reported it. Anyone who gets off thinking that in 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' under the Bush administration anyone could have gone and said, 'Hey, I'm being antagonized under the principle that I might be gay' and feel safe is absurd." Eventually these events—details of which are still disputed by other participants—came to light in a broader investigation; in its aftermath one of the senior officers being held responsible—a woman who happened to be Rocha's best friend in the unit—committed suicide. Rocha's sexuality was not exposed, and he was subsequently admitted into the Naval Academy Preparatory School. There he reluctantly decided that he was no longer prepared to live with the fear of being discovered: "In order for you to be protected by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' it would require such a level of deceit and deception and such a removal of everything that is beautiful in your life—of relationships, of meaning, of friendships. You would have to have no gay friends, no friends that knew you were gay, no friends who understood what it was like to be you. That's not human and shouldn't be asked of anyone, especially not of our service members."

Following full repeal, Rocha intends to rejoin. "I'm lucky," he notes, "because a lot of people whose lives and careers were ruined by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' don't have that opportunity anymore. I just can't wait to be in uniform again."




Jack Strouss, 88: "We had heard about these very frightening psychiatrists who were going to grill you. We thought they were the all-seeing people. So we were a little apprehensive. But it certainly didn't happen that way. I was called in, and there was a man sitting behind this desk, and he pulled down his glasses and looked at me, and the only thing he said to me was 'Do you like girls?' I said, 'Oh yes. And I love to dance.' And he looked over at the door and said, 'Next!' "

John McNeill, 85: "They were in desperate need of more cannon fodder—they didn't care whether we were gay or straight."

AW: "In January '45, the Belgian Bulge occurred, and American troops, Patton's Third Army, were slaughtered, and the army decided: We don't need any more hot pilots, we need more infantry, so I did go overseas as an infantry rifle replacement in the spring. This man tried to rape me on the troop ship between Boston and Le Havre. I was small and I was cute—who wasn't cute at 19, 20?—and he was a big, horny guy. I was afraid to scream, because people would wonder, 'Why was he after you?' I was afraid I had it coming to me because I was made that way."






6. An Out American Soldier at War
If sometimes "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been compromised by persistent asking, then, as Darren Manzella (army, 2002–8) discovered, there have been other times when, curiously, the military shut their ears to what they'd been told.

"I finally accepted that I was gay the first time I went to Iraq in 2004. We were being hit by mortars and rockets every day, we had car bombs going off. A friend of mine was killed the fourth day we were there. That experience made me come out to myself and accept it." It was when he returned to Texas from his tour of duty that the problems started. "I started getting e-mails harassing me, getting phone calls at work. Finally my supervisor said he could tell something was wrong, and I told him: 'I'm getting these e-mails, I have a boyfriend in Austin, and I don't know what to do anymore—I need some guidance here.' He was very understanding at first. He said, 'Okay, take the rest of the afternoon off, go home, and we'll see you tomorrow morning.' After I left, he went to the legal department and turned me in."




This was the summer of 2006. From here, Manzella's case was supposed to follow a well-established one-way path under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that would lead to his inevitable discharge. But that is not what happened. Manzella cooperated fully with the investigation; when he was asked for evidence that he wasn't just claiming to be gay in order to trigger a discharge, he even supplied photos, and footage of him and his boyfriend passionately kissing on a road trip. A month later he was called in to see his battalion commander and told that the investigation had been closed: "His words were 'We found no proof of homosexuality.' " While wary of putting further words in the commander's mouth, Manzella felt what was clearly being communicated was: You're a good soldier. We don't want to lose you. Manzella was puzzled. "It doesn't make sense, but in my mind I was able to stay in the military and keep serving my country."




7. A Report from a Trailer Park in the Desert

Though I'm forewarned when I arrive this morning that "we all suffer from CRS—Can't Remember Shit," most of these trailer-park veterans remember plenty. They had very different experiences, too. David Schneider, for instance, served in the navy until 1980 doing aircraft maintenance, retiring with a pension after twenty years of being secretive and careful. He says that he didn't seek promotion past a certain point because it would have required an investigation to get him clearance, and he was concerned they would discover his subscriptions to gay magazines. He avoided gay bars because he was worried about undercover agents and so would use prostitutes and hustlers instead. When he had a relationship with someone for three years, he never told his partner he was in the navy. "He figured it out, but that's how paranoid I was." Right toward the end of his service, he remembers being very tempted by someone he was giving after-hours counseling to at work. "There was a real opportunity. The thing that went through my head: 'Don't be an idiot and throw it all away.' I was only six months from retirement. And to this day I am very happy with the decision that I made."


But it is Schoen who I had initially come here to see, for his tale seems emblematic of many who fell afoul of the more vindictive scrutiny that became commonplace in the '50s and '60s. Schoen joined the navy on July 20, 1942. He was 17. "I knew I was gay, and I knew that they kicked you out in the military," he says. "I don't know if I gave it any thought." Like many, his chosen path was one of discretion. "Most of them were quiet like me. There were very few who weren't quiet. Privately I was comfortable with it, but I was never open about it. My success for nineteen years was: The people I was with didn't know or never said anything, and I never said anything." Whatever sexual activity he engaged in, he waited until he was off the ship. "As a matter of fact, I wasn't that active sexually. It seemed like it was safer just not getting involved with anybody." Then, in 1953, he met a man at the YMCA, and they were together for seventeen years. "We had a house like this and we lived together. Come home at night and did what we wanted to do. A normal life."



Back then, people were yet to raise their voices and suggest that this wasn't right. The first high-profile legal attack on this system would not come until 1975, when an airman named Leonard Matlovich initiated a long battle in which he managed to highlight many of the system's absurdities, inconsistencies, and cruelties—most pithily summarized by the quote on his gravestone: "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one." In Schoen's era, there were many men like him who, after years of service, were summarily dispensed with. "I don't ever expect to get a retirement check," he says.


8. One Man's Vietnam
"Back in the '50s in Oregon," recalls Tom Norton (Army, 1968-71), "they were still putting people in jail for homosexual activity, and that certainly sends a strong message to a young kid. I realized I was gay when I was 5 years old, and I struggled with it my whole childhood, thinking about suicide. I decided I would join the army, thinking that would change me. Make me a man, so to speak. The day I joined the army was the first I had had a good night's sleep in as long as I could remember, that I didn't think about committing suicide.

"I wanted to be a pilot. Again being dumb and naive, when I graduated from flight school I thought, I'll do the honorable thing and volunteer to be a medevac pilot in Vietnam. I got shot down four times in a month. I was in so much emotional pain over being gay that anything was better than that. I went to Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder, which I had had from the age of 5 when I learned the word homosexual and knew that's what I was. Whatever I experienced in Vietnam was better than that."


Norton, who has spent many years recovering, now lives in Portland with his partner, a man who happens to be Vietnamese and grew up there during the war. "It is quite ironic," Norton reflects. "You never know where life is going to lead you. He struggled so much with growing up gay in Vietnam and being ostracized for his sexuality, just wanting to be loved and cared for with the war going on around him. He's never really asked me about the war, and I've never really talked to him about it."


9. Silence or Trust


Air Force #2: "There's one good friend that I thought about telling, but always right when I think, 'Okay, it's cool to tell him,' he'll say something that is kind of weird about gay people."

Marines #2: "I came out to one person when I was in my first unit. Everything was fine, then something came up—I said something job-related that she took offense to personally. And her form of retaliation was to go in and tell my officer in charge that I was gay. It's the easiest thing you can do because there's no defense against that. Thankfully, I had proven myself at that unit and his response was: 'He's a good Marine. I'm not really interested in any of this nonsense.... Mind your own business.' And that was the first, last, and only time that I ever explicitly told another Marine I was gay."

Marines #1: "I worked in the House and Senate. I remember riding the elevator with Jesse Helms, just thinking, 'You hateful son of a bitch.' I was looking for a career change so I joined the Marine Corps. The senator I worked for and the congressman I worked for knew I was gay—they were both conservative Republicans—and they wrote a letter of recommendation to get me into the Marine Corps."

Air Force #3: "It's a sanity issue. Guys I've flown with for a couple of months, they all know because for my mental sanity I can't handle being this close to these guys and keeping that charade up. It's like: How many times can you lie before you go completely nuts?"

Navy #1: "The Marine Corps is so stringent—I don't see the navy being that way. People are already open. When we talked about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' being repealed on the ship, nobody really cared."

Marines #1: "The problem for me a lot of times is my buddies' wives. They think, 'He's got a great house, he's nice, he's wonderful,' and they want to set me up and set me up. And I'm demur...demur...demur...and finally you don't do stuff with them, because, come on, girl, get over it. Drop it already."

Navy #1: "I'm always listening to Britney or Lady Gaga or Madonna—I don't turn it down or hide it. That starts a lot of rumors and discussions, but that's who I am."

Air Force #1: "All of the pilots in the squadron who talk about the episode of Glee last night—that would have been a giveaway before. I just assume everybody is gay now because you can't tell anymore. Some of my married friends act gayer than any of my gay friends."

Marines #2: "You'd be amazed how gay Marines are when they don't believe there's anyone gay around."

Air Force #5 (senior airman, two years): "Every three or four months I go out with people I work with to a club and I make out with some girl in front of them. It doesn't give me any pleasure, but if they don't see someone constantly getting with someone, they question it. I don't go for the good-looking girl. I've told them I like old fat women and they believe me. I tell the women: 'I have some friends there, they don't know I'm gay and I don't want them to know I'm gay. I will buy you drinks for the rest of the night and we'll dance together and is it okay if I kiss you a few times?' Most of the time they're fine with it. They just want somebody to dance with."

Navy #3 (commander, reserves, twenty years): "A pal of mine on a carrier went to the CO and said, 'What is your policy on gays?' The CO looked at my friend and said, 'If somebody wants to get off my ship for being gay, they have to come to me with two Polaroids, in both of them they have to be clearly sucking cock, and I want to be able to see their face.' That's why I love my navy."


10. One Man's Secret Too Many
It's tempting to see gay servicemen's entire military existence through the prism of this single issue—the campaigner, the oppressed, the stoic endurer—and as the totality of who they are. Real lives tend to be much more complicated. In June 1998, Richard Merritt (Marines, 1985–98) appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, in uniform but with his face obscured, and inside the story described what life was actually like for someone gay serving in the military. But his true story, and how he actually accommodated his sexuality within a military that wanted to pretend it didn't exist, was more complicated than he revealed at the time.

Merritt partly agreed to participate in the article, written by novelist Jennifer Egan, because he had already decided that he was leaving the Marines. (He would become a lawyer.) Gradually he became the focus of her reporting. He knew this wasn't a good idea: she was writing a story about a man living with a secret, but he knew that he had another secret that he couldn't tell her, one that would cast him in a very different light. "If I could go back I would smack myself across the head and say, 'Tell Jennifer you cannot be the focus of her story.' But I wasn't at that place. I wanted to be on the cover." In her story he came across as, he says, "a very conservative type of gay," but when he started letting people know that its subject was him, he must have known the clock was ticking. Eventually, The Advocate exposed him.



11. A Report from the White House

12. On the Day Everything4 Changes













Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.

