For weeks during the winter of 1957, four agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence commandeered a house on Coronado, a little island off San Diego. They were engaged in a security mission, they told the owners. Through holes in a fence, the intelligence officers peeked beyond the bird-of-paradise plants and bougainvillea bushes in the neighboring garden and spied into the suspect’s living room. To see what was happening in an apartment above the garage, they went up to the second floor of the home they’d taken over and used binoculars and periscopes to peer through windows.1
What they saw the first night was a fine foretaste of what they’d hoped to see: not a rogue sailor selling state secrets to the Russians, but a retired rear admiral, Selden Hooper, dancing with Roscoe Braddock, a twenty-two-year-old seaman who lived with Hooper when Braddock wasn’t at sea. The two men kissed. Then Hooper turned out the lights.
The intelligence agents agreed it was worth coming back a second night. They were disappointed that nothing of interest happened that night, or the following one; but their job entailed infinite patience. On the fourth night, they were rewarded. The slim and still-dashing six-foot-tall Hooper was having dinner with two young men: Braddock and enlisted sailor John Schmidt.
Roscoe Braddock left after dinner, and the sailor and Hooper went out to walk Hooper’s dog. The four intelligence officers waited patiently. Then the sailor and Hooper came back and had a few drinks. Then they watched television. The four intelligence officers waited some more. Finally, Hooper and Schmidt kissed, and undressed, and turned off the lights. That was quite a bit already, but the intelligence officers wanted even more. They returned night after night, peering through cracks and binoculars and periscopes, and taking notes and pictures.
In April retired rear admiral Selden Hooper was officially notified by navy counsel that the commandant of the Eleventh Naval District, Rear Admiral Charles Hartman, was filing charges against him for having violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He was being charged under Article 125 (sodomy), Article 134 (“conduct of a nature to bring discredit on the armed forces”), and Article 135 (“conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman”).
Three weeks later, Hooper was called to the US Naval Station on the mainland, where he had to sit in the courtroom and listen as one witness after another testified in front of a court-martial board. Hooper was making history. Retired admirals had never before been brought up in front of a court-martial board and prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
• • •
The military had been Hooper’s life since 1921, when at the age of seventeen he left his San Francisco high-society mother and stepfather to enlist in the National Guard. Two years later, the handsome and gentlemanly Hooper entered the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Upon graduating, he joined the US Navy as an ensign; he made lieutenant in good time. Then in 1937, at thirty-three, still a bachelor when most American men were married by twenty-five, he took a wife, the daughter of a wealthy paper manufacturer in the east. Their marriage, a high-profile society wedding,2 ended four years later when America entered into the war. He was made commander of the newly built naval destroyer Uhlmann, and he saw action in Okinawa, Formosa, and the Philippines.
On August 12, 1944, on a moonless, overcast night, Japanese bombers and torpedo planes attacked Hooper’s task group in the waters around the Philippines. He ordered his ship’s antiaircraft guns to open fire on enemy planes. Under his command, seven Japanese aircraft were downed during that one night. Captain Hooper was credited with having averted a crippling attack on a crucial fleet of American amphibian ships that were supporting allied positions.3 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal pinned the Silver Star on Hooper’s chest, which took its place among two bronze stars, an American Defense medal, a Philippine Liberation medal, and a rainbow of commendation ribbons and valor ribbons. After the war, he became head of the Naval Reserve’s Eleventh Naval District, which included Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Southern California. At his retirement in 1948, at the age of forty-four, Selden Hooper was bumped up to the rank of rear admiral, a “tombstone” recognition, as the military called it, of his exceptional performance in active combat and his twenty-five years of distinguished service.
But a few years later, a young sailor, caught by the law in one of the usual ways—entrapped in a bar or on a street or spied on in a men’s room—was grilled by the authorities and made to name names. In a familiar scenario, one of the names he named was a man of some prominence. The young sailor’s inquisitors were thrilled. A big fish would be caught—a rear admiral who threw parties in his home for “persons known to be sexual deviates.”
• • •
Hooper was no longer on active duty. His lawyers demanded to know what jurisdiction the military could possibly have over what he did in the privacy of his own home. The navy’s lawyers responded that even though Hooper had retired, he’d been entitled to wear the uniform and draw the pay of a naval officer. And retired officers are part of the nation’s national defense effort; therefore they’re subject to court-martial the same as active-duty officers.4 To assure there was no way Hooper could wriggle loose, Rear Admiral Hartman, the commandant who’d initiated the court-martial proceedings, ordered that Hooper be nominally reinstated to active-duty status.
Witnesses were called to testify against Hooper at a court-martial panel. Roscoe Braddock was forced to admit under oath that he and Hooper had shared a bed. (Intelligence agents had already supplied that information to the panel.) But they’d never engaged in sodomy, Braddock insisted. Then he chose to take any punishment the court would mete out to him rather than say more.5 Others, young men who’d been scared into baring all they knew, testified they’d seen Hooper embracing men, or they’d seen two men kissing in Hooper’s home. Some gave graphic details about their own acts of sodomy with Hooper.6
Hooper’s lawyer called scores of character witnesses to counter those damning testimonies: Hooper had a sterling record in the military. He was an upstanding citizen. They called members of the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, the American Red Cross, the chamber of commerce, all organizations to which Hooper belonged, and the witnesses testified that he’d worked unstintingly to help rehabilitate juvenile delinquents and serve the community. The lawyers called Hooper’s elderly mother, Rose Hooper, at that time a well-known painter of society women’s portraits. She lived in an apartment in her son’s home, she told the panel, and she was certain he was not a homosexual. They called a psychiatrist from San Diego County Hospital who also testified that Hooper was not a homosexual.
Rear Admiral Hartman sat in the courtroom through all of it, unsmiling but confident. A couple of years earlier, he’d stripped the rank and benefits of an honorably discharged naval lieutenant who’d been accused of joining leftist organizations after he left the service. An appeals court upheld Hartman. “Whatever may be the guarantees of civilian life,” the court declared, “the armed forces are not required to tolerate the typical tergiversations of the alleged subversive,”7 and if he was drawing a military pension, he had to abide by military rules, no matter that he was no longer on active duty. Rear Admiral Hartman could be sure of the strength of his case against Selden Hooper now because homosexuals were even lower than subversives in the court’s regard.
An officer of flag rank, as Hooper was, cannot be court-martialed without the agreement of a Military Board of Review and the Court of Military Appeals. Both bodies affirmed the decision of the court-martial panel. Even retired officers form a vital segment of our national defense, the chief appeals judge agreed in explaining his court’s 3-to-0 decision. “The salaries they receive are not solely recompense for past services but a means devised by Congress to assure their availability and preparedness in future contingencies.”8 That meant that Hooper could be stripped of his pension and all other veterans’ benefits, too.9
The final decision rested with the commander in chief of the armed forces, president and former general Dwight Eisenhower. But he’d declared “sexual perverts” enemies of the nation’s security within his first months in office; his opinion was predictable. Selden Hooper became the only admiral of the US Navy to be convicted by court-martial.
The American military had been homosexual hunting since 1919, when the assistant secretary of the navy, thirty-seven-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assigned special investigators to the Intelligence Office at the Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Roosevelt had gotten complaints that sailors were engaging in “scandalous conduct” with male civilians at the Newport Art Club and the YMCA, and he ordered the investigators to ferret out homosexual behavior by conducting “a most searching and rigid investigation,” in which the very zealous investigators didn’t scruple to entrap the homosexuals by indulging in sex acts with them, to the point of ejaculation.10 This was the first massive “sexual pervert” witch hunt in America.
The following year, 1920, the military code of conduct, Articles of War, officially criminalized the commission of any homosexual act by a service member;11 but few people were charged. In the army, for instance, only about seventy-five soldiers were court-martialed for sodomy each year.12 It was only with the start of World War II that the US Selective Service tried to get serious about eliminating all men with “homosexual proclivities.” At induction centers, recruits were asked whether they were homosexual, made to bend over and spread their cheeks, and observed for feminine mannerisms. Five thousand were weeded out.13 But as the war progressed and manpower was desperately needed, scrutiny became halfhearted. Most men with “homosexual proclivities” slipped through. So did most lesbians who wanted to enlist.14
In the middle of the war, War Department Circular 3 made the military’s ambivalent policy toward homosexuals clear. Those homosexuals who were “reclaimable” were to be hospitalized and treated; if the treatment was successful, they were to be restored to duty. The Circular emphasized that “the mere confession by an individual to a psychiatrist that he possesses homosexual tendencies will not in itself constitute sufficient cause for discharge.”15 At a time when bodies were sorely needed for the war effort, the military would not easily let go of anyone. The next year, 1944, a new regulation, 615-360, section 8, mandated that homosexuals, whether self-identified or identified by others, must be examined by psychiatrists. But the psychiatric examination was to reveal the malingerer—the man “simulating homosexuality in order to receive a discharge”—at least as much as it was to reveal the “genuine chronic homosexual.”16
• • •
After World War II, there was a sea change in military policy. From 1947 to 1950, the number of military personnel shrank by almost 90 percent of what it had been at the height of the war, but the number of homosexuals who were discharged tripled. Serious screening began soon after the war. In directives of staggering ignorance, officers and military doctors were encouraged to spot the homosexuals by telltale signs of inappropriate gender behavior or appearance, and by inquiring into personal histories. Male homosexuals, for instance, would have a history of “shunning girls after puberty” and “abnormal attachment to mother.”17
In October 1949 the newly established Department of Defense issued a memorandum that left no doubt about how rigid the policy regarding homosexual men and women would be: “Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory.”18 The various branches of the military got to work on implementation. In 1950, Army Regulation 600-443 delineated three kinds of homosexuals—all of them to be gotten rid of: aggressive homosexuals (those who forced attention on others) must be immediately court-martialed; nonaggressive homosexuals could avoid court-martial by resigning or accepting a dishonorable discharge; those with “homosexual tendencies,” against whom there was no hard evidence, must be removed from the military but could receive a general or honorable discharge.19
But in June of that year, America entered the Korean War, and bodies were again needed. The number of discharges shrank and remained low until the armistice was signed in 1953. Then it soared.20 The years that followed saw the most brutal homosexual-hunts in US military history.
Women made up only 2 percent of the postwar military. But the percentage of lesbians among the women who did serve was huge. For obvious reasons: the social climate of the 1950s indoctrinated females to strive for 3.4 children and a house with a white picket fence. Few straight women were willing to serve their country instead. And women who were already married or had children under the age of eighteen weren’t allowed to enlist. Most lesbians had none of those disqualifications. Also, they knew they’d never have a man to support them. The military offered training that could be used to make a living in civilian life; it offered the GI Bill for advanced education, too. Common sense suggests that the WAC, WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), WAF (Women in the Air Force), and Marine Corps Women’s Reserve were full of lesbians—despite the resolute decree of the Department of Defense that “Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces.”
• • •
From the very beginning, Carlita Durand liked everything about the WAF: learning to carry out orders (no questions asked); the disciplined neatness (skirts and blouses starched so well that they stood up by themselves, nylons perfectly rolled, bras folded and put in the drawer in a specified way); the high moral standards (you weren’t even supposed to go to a bar in uniform). She liked especially being a team member. It was the best possible training anyone could have, she thought, and was honored to be part of it all. She was made a squad leader and was allowed to carry the flag. She was twenty years old, and her ambitions soared. “There’s something in me that would make a good officer,” she thought.21
Shortly before she’d joined the WAF, Durand had a brief relationship with another girl, Winn. It was right after her father died. One night she and Winn and a few friends had gotten a little high on Budweiser, and they sentimentally snipped locks of one another’s hair for mementoes. Durand kept Winn’s. She put it in the glove compartment of her car, together with a smiling picture of her.
But Durand wasn’t sure she was a lesbian. She thought she might be straight. She didn’t know what she was. Wiry and athletic, she sometimes liked to wear jeans and a boy’s shirt, and sometimes a dress and high heels. At her enlistment physical, the doctor asked her point-blank, “Do you like women?” “No,” she said. “Do you date?” “Yes,” she said. When a young man in the Medical Corps showed interest in her, Durand started going out with him. When a bunch of other WAFs invited her to go to Corpus Christi, Texas, to loaf on the beach and swim in the bay, she did that, too.
She finished her six-month medical training: setting IVs, drawing blood, cleaning tracheostomy tubes, lugging medical equipment while crawling under barbed-wire fences. Then she was assigned to work in the squadron orderly room until an appropriate spot opened for her elsewhere. “Airman Durand has been an outstanding airman in all respects and can be relied upon to do all tasks assigned to her promptly and efficiently, to the best of her ability. Her appearance and barracks area are always commendable,” her commander, Captain Barbara Pratt, wrote in an evaluation.22
One day, at work in the orderly room, Durand was summoned to report to the reception area of the barracks. Two men dressed in plain clothes were waiting for her. The badges they flashed said they were agents from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. “We’re here to investigate you,” one told her without preliminaries.
“What for?” she asked.
“Homosexuality,” the other said. “Let’s go up to your room.”
They were emotionless, tall. Giants, in Durand’s head. She thought they’d come to put her in jail or court-martial her. “This is what it means to be scared out of your mind,” she thought. People were walking by. She was humiliated.
In her room, they went through everything as she stood there. They turned all the pockets of her skirts and pants and jackets inside out. They opened her locker and all her drawers. Everything she’d neatly rolled according to regulations they unrolled, even her nylons and bras. They found her address book. They looked through every page, demanded she tell them about her relationship with every female listed. Then they confiscated it. “Take us to your car,” they told her. They left her clothes and everything else strewn about the bed and floor.
They looked under the seats of the car; they took off the inside door panels. She had to stand there while they did it. People walking by turned their heads to watch. They took every piece of paper out of her glove compartment and examined it minutely. Then they found the lock of hair and Winn’s picture. “Here’s your girlfriend,” they said. “We need to contact this person.”
“No, we’re just friends!” Durand protested. They told her they knew she’d gone to a lesbian party in Corpus Christi. “Nobody told me it was a lesbian party,” she said. “Nothing went on there!”
She racked her brain to think of why this was happening. She remembered that one of the women with whom she’d gone to Corpus Christi was later investigated on charges of homosexuality and was kicked out of the air force. She must have named Durand when they made her name names.
They came back every few days to ask the same questions again and again. How many lesbian relationships? What did she do in them? Who were the other lesbians on base? Who were the lesbians she’d known before she enlisted? They ordered that she be sent for a psychiatric examination. The chief of the Lackland Air Force Base Medical Center Psychiatry Service reported that “at this time she was found to be free of mental defect, disease, or derangement and is not suffering from any condition which would warrant separation from the Air Force.”23 But she was not allowed to go to her duty post. She was confined to the barracks and assigned to a cleaning detail, scrubbing floors, picking up garbage outside the buildings. She was kept on base while the OSI men finished building their case against her.
She knew she’d be discharged. Captain Pratt, who was not unsympathetic, had told her, “Lee, this is not going to go away.” But the captain promised she’d recommend an honorable discharge. Durand feared that if she fought, they’d try to dredge up real “evidence.” She could be court-martialed. She was stunned and frightened and after three weeks of harassing investigations didn’t feel strong enough to fight.
Finally, the staff sergeant (whom Durand knew to be “one of the girls,” but who never got investigated) came to her to say, “Put all the air force property in your duffel bag. We have to go check them off.” Again she was led across the base. Again humiliated. She was being discharged under the DOD directive that said “known homosexual individuals are military liabilities and security risks who must be eliminated.”24
The honorable discharge Captain Pratt had promised was denied. She was given a general discharge, which meant that the world would know she’d been booted out of the military as unsuitable.25
• • •
Officers weren’t as easily expendable. But if they were homosexual, they not only had to stay in the closet, they also had to be complicit in the military’s harassment of other homosexuals. In 1953, at the end of the Korean War, Sue Young applied for a commission in the navy and was sent to the Women Officers Indoctrination School at the Naval Training Station in Newport. She’d grown up during World War II, her two older brothers had been soldiers, and she’d learned patriotism at the dinner table every night. Before entering the navy, she’d had four years of college at the University of Arkansas, but she hadn’t lost her Ozark Hills twang. Blond, five foot eight, and 120 pounds, she looked like a Coca-Cola poster of a 1950s college coed.26
She’d had crushes on girls since she was five years old but had never had a lover. Her company officer, Barb, a bright young woman only five or six years older than Young, had breezy, all-American girl looks and overwhelming charm. Young was quickly smitten. It was a wonder to Sue Young that when she was invited to a cocktail party on board a visiting ship, Barb was there too. And sat next to her. When she was invited with three classmates for a week’s vacation in Boston, Barb offered to take them, saying she had to get her new car serviced there. When Young was invited for Thanksgiving in New York, Barb said she was going in that direction and could drive her. That Thanksgiving weekend, they became lovers.
On the drive back that Sunday night, Barb stopped the car on a dark street, a few blocks away from the naval station. “I have to tell you something,” she said. “I’m giving a lecture tomorrow in your personnel administration class. It’s about how officers need to handle things if someone is reported to them for being a lesbian.”
Young listened in stunned silence as Barb went into detail about the instructions she would have to deliver the next day about what officers were obliged to do with lesbian personnel and the discharge procedures. “But don’t worry,” Barb said. Official policy was one thing, and personal life was something else.
Months later, Young finished Women Officers Indoctrination School and waited with the rest of her class for assignments to be doled out. Barb, good friends with the assignment officer (who was also a lesbian), asked the officer to assign Young to a nearby post. The arrangement lasted for years, during which Barb taught Young strict rules about how to survive as a lesbian officer in the navy: Don’t trust anybody unless you have absolute knowledge of him or her. Never let anyone see you upset when homosexuals are getting harassed or being discharged. Be ladylike, wear makeup; if you can stand it, date men for cover. Be “neat and discreet”—that one a private talisman, to be chanted daily by lesbian officers everywhere.
Fannie Mae Clackum was a Georgia girl—pretty and feminine, friends said of her. Soon after she graduated from Marietta High School in 1948, she entered the air force as a reservist and was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. There she met Grace Garner, and they became inseparable. They were promoted together from privates to corporals, and by 1950, they were seen so often together around the base that they aroused suspicion. The Korean War had started, and witch hunts of homosexuals had slowed, but they hadn’t stopped entirely. When an obvious “pair” such as Clackum and Garner came to the attention of the Office of Special Investigations, the Office pursued with fervor.
In this case, OSI staged a sting operation using a decoy, another air force woman who befriended Clackum. The decoy and her “partner,” one of the other reservists, were going to visit an aunt in Dallas for the Easter holiday. She invited Clackum and Garner to come along, stay at the aunt’s spacious house, and go sightseeing in Dallas. When the “aunt” was nowhere to be found, the decoy told Clackum and Garner that she’d foot the bill for two motel rooms. They accepted, and the two “couples” checked into a Dallas motel.27
Soon after the Dallas trip, the decoy supplied the OSI with testimony that Clackum and Garner were a pair. They were called before their commanding officer and an OSI investigator and accused of violating the military’s prohibition against homosexuality. Clackum and Garner denied they were a couple and denied they were homosexual. Denial didn’t help. The OSI began its obsessive investigation of them, tearing apart their rooms looking for incriminating evidence, summoning them for repeated long and brutal interrogations.28
In October, their commanding officer told Clackum and Garner they must resign. They refused. They stuck to their story. They were friends and not homosexual lovers. They demanded to see documented evidence against them. When it wasn’t forthcoming, Clackum, the feistier of the two women, called the OSI’s bluff. She demanded a court-martial. That would force the military to produce whatever evidence it thought it had. It was a breathtakingly bold move: she’d grabbed the upper hand by challenging the OSI. No one had dared to do it before.
In November the commanding officer demanded that Clackum be examined by a psychiatrist. After twenty or thirty minutes, the psychiatrist concluded that Clackum was “a sexual deviate manifested by homosexuality latent.”29 She and Garner were both demoted back to private; and on the same day, January 22, 1952, they were given dishonorable discharges. Clackum demanded a hearing before the Air Force Discharge Review Board.
At the hearing, she brought in witnesses—acquaintances, clergymen, past employers. They testified to her “ladylike manner” and claimed it was “impossible to believe that she is a homosexual.” The OSI countered that it had solid evidence of her homosexuality. But except for the psychiatric report, it presented nothing. “What evidence?” Clackum’s lawyer demanded. He scoffed at the “absurdity” of the “oracular” psychiatric pronouncement that Clackum was a homosexual on the basis of a twenty- to thirty-minute exam. But the Air Force Discharge Review Board confirmed that both women were to be given dishonorable discharges.
The two women left Barksdale Air Force Base and went to live in Clackum’s hometown of Marietta. As though they had nothing to hide, or as though they were thumbing their noses at the OSI, or as though they really were lovers, the two got an apartment together and then waged war on the air force.
Eight years later, still living together, their case finally went to the United States Court of Federal Claims. Judge J. Warren Madden tore into the discharge board. Due process had been violated, he rebuked them.“The evidence upon which the case was decided was not present at the hearing, unless the undisclosed dossier which contained it was in the drawer of the table at which the board sat,” Judge Madden declared sarcastically in his written opinion.30 The women won their suit. They were granted back pay and all veterans’ benefits.
But homosexual witch hunts continued. The Clackum case was no victory for the right of lesbians and gay men to serve in the military. The judge’s major complaint had been that Clackum was, without evidence, “officially branded as an indecent woman.”31 If the OSI had presented credible proof that she and Garner were lovers, the Court of Federal Claims’s judge would have upheld the discharge board’s decisions.
The outcome of Fannie Mae Clackum v. United States does prove, however, that the witch hunters didn’t always have proof that could stand up under scrutiny. Those who were discharged were almost never caught in flagrante delicto: someone had been frightened into naming names, or they hung out with suspicious company, or they wore their hair the wrong length. But to challenge the Office of Special Investigations took more confidence than most young lesbians or gays had at a time when the government, the law, the church, the psychiatric profession, all colluded to tell homosexuals they were guilty just by being who they were. There was no one to encourage them to believe that they were innocent because homosexuality in and of itself is innocent.