Rules
MAY 1965
DE KALB, ILLINOIS
De Kalb’s major source of pride was the fact that barbed wire was invented there. The inventor lived in a mansion that has long since been carved into little apartments for students at Northern Illinois University. It was from one of these apartments that Danny Flaherty’s journey to Vietnam began, on a sunny morning in May, on the first day of final examinations for spring semester. He was still asleep at 8:00 A.M., having stayed up all night to cram for his History of Western Civilization final, when two campus police knocked on his door. They asked Flaherty to come with them.
Still groggy, Danny responded that he had an exam to take in a couple of hours.
“Cooperate and you’ll be out in time,” one of the two men replied.
Minutes later, Danny was seated in a campus security office, listening to the calm pronouncement: “We have reason to believe you are a homosexual.”
Flaherty understood immediately what those words meant on a campus tucked snugly among miles of cornfields, not far from the tiny hamlet where he had been raised. Homosexuality was considered as foreign and potentially menacing as communism. He felt his stomach sink. They left him alone in a room with a pen, a paper, and a ticking clock. All they wanted were names of other homosexuals.
He could not believe it was happening. He had always played by the rules. That Danny was gay was never in doubt. It was one of the first truths he knew about himself, and he had known it as a child playing under the maple and oak trees along the rolling banks of the Illinois River. Not that anybody in Spring Valley, Illinois, the town of five thousand where Danny’s family had lived since 1900, ever talked about homosexuality. And it was not even a sexual issue at first; Danny had just known from as early as he could remember that he was … different. Later, he understood that this difference had something to do with sexuality.
The fact that no one talked about homosexuality was a way of denying that it existed. Most folks in Spring Valley preferred to think that there were no homosexuals in their town. Maybe a handful in Chicago. Maybe even one or two in Aurora or Joliet, but not in Spring Valley. Danny, however, was an observant child, and he could tell fairly soon that he was not the only different person in town.
Every morning on his paper route, for example, he threw a copy of the Lasalle-Peru Daily Tribune on the doorstep of George the Town Queer. George lived on St. Paul Street and some folk seemed to know he was a homo—the wry smiles and obscure jokes that were never entirely clear to Danny said as much.
When the kids gathered at Kirby Park on hot summer evenings for Pony League games, George would be there, parked across Devlin Street with the town queer from Granville, an even smaller hamlet on the other side of the Illinois River. The two watched the boys from their car, but they never approached anybody. Since they kept up their end of the rules—never talked about being queer and never made anybody have to acknowledge it—they survived. Nobody beat George up, at least as far as Danny knew; when they didn’t make harmless jokes about him, George was clearly a man viewed with pity rather than hatred. Maybe those people aren’t criminals; maybe they’re just sick: The condescension of such compassion convinced Danny that he did not want to end up like George the Town Queer.
Once he began taking courses at Lasalle-Peru-Oglesvy Community College, Danny became aware that violating the rules could have serious consequences. He noticed occasional stories in the Chicago papers about police raiding gay bars. The stories included the names and places of employment for people arrested at such “establishments catering to homosexuals,” as they were called then. Individuals so listed were almost always fired, since few businesses would knowingly employ a homosexual. Danny realized that he must adhere to a second rule: Don’t get caught. Be very, very careful.
This required subterfuges. In Spring Valley and at community college, it meant dating girls and keeping up appearances. It also meant a great deal of sexual frustration. By the time Danny packed up and drove the sixty miles to De Kalb for his first semester at Northern, he had still never engaged in what Dr. Kinsey called a homosexual experience to the point of orgasm. It did not seem likely he would. There was no university in the United States at this time with a campus gay group. But Danny soon discovered the next best thing—the Drama Club.
It made perfect sense that people who spent much of their lives acting like someone else would be attracted to theater. Before long, Danny fell in with Bill, a member of the debating team. Together, they kept up appearances by double-dating with girls. After a movie, they’d drop off the girls and have sex in Bill’s Ford. Neither of them ever spoke about these interludes. Don’t talk about it. It doesn’t exist. But within a few days, they would be planning their next double date.
Danny began to learn that there were many more homosexuals than he had ever imagined. He heard about gay bars in Chicago and began visiting them. Like other establishments catering to homosexuals in this era, these were not wholesome places. Most were run-down and Mafia-owned, since decent people wouldn’t operate such businesses. For Danny, however, they were a revelation—places you could be homosexual without being the town queer.
Even in these nights of freedom in the Chicago bars, the rules were always in effect. No one touched. Same-sex couples could dance, but the lights switching on and off signaled that the vice squad had entered the bar, so men could change partners with the nearest pair of lesbians.
Danny also learned more about the penalties for violating the rules when he met four sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in nearby Waukegan. They had been found out as gay and were being housed in a special barracks while they were being processed out. Two of the young men talked darkly about a war that looked as if it was gearing up in Southeast Asia. They were just as glad to be out of the military. The other two wanted to stay in. The Navy was their life. Danny could see the emptiness of their future in their eyes, even as they tried to maintain their bravado and pick up guys. They had gotten caught; they had violated the rules.
Danny came to understand the rules better: You had to make it by the police, pass as straight to your boss, and not let anybody know. It was a dangerous lifestyle. Psychologists said that homosexuals liked to flirt with danger—more evidence that they were sick. No one ever said homosexuals flirted with danger because heterosexuals had made the world a very dangerous place for them.
Altogether, the rules defined the one road it was safe for homosexuals to walk in America; and the discrimination, police harassment, religious denunciations, and all-around disdain functioned as discernible walls to keep them on that road. If most Americans seemed blithely unaware of such walls, it was only because they had never been inclined to step off their own path and so had never bumped into one. When you did run up against the walls, you never forgot it.
Scores of frightened young students like Danny Flaherty would never forget being brought into a room on campus and asked to give names. Many were offered the same deal: Name other homosexuals at the university and you can simply withdraw from classes. Don’t and flunk out. In May 1965, just two months after President Johnson committed ground troops to Vietnam, flunking out meant more than the end of one’s college career. It was also an end to one’s student deferment from the draft. Next came a notice from the local draft board to report for a preinduction physical.
Flaherty looked at the paper in front of him, glanced at the clock, and tried to figure out who had betrayed him. He had had sex with only two men at NIU: Bill, his boyfriend, and Ted, a rich kid from Barrington, Illinois, who had spent the past semester partying. Danny had spent the previous evening with Bill and everything had seemed normal. It must have been Ted. Danny took his pen and started writing his woeful tale. He had gotten drunk. Ted offered to give him a blowjob. Danny was just experimenting, he wrote. Normal curiosity. The campus police seemed satisfied with the letter and released Danny in time to let him take his examination.
From the stories he heard around the Drama Club afterward, Danny pieced together what had happened. Ted had been flunking out. He had gone to the school psychiatrist and explained that he could not study because he was so confused over being a homosexual. The university made him a deal: If Ted gave names, he could withdraw from classes rather than fail outright. From the names he had given, campus authorities had been able to draw still more names.
According to one count, as many as two hundred students were under investigation. Across the campus, graduating seniors were being told they couldn’t take their finals.
Danny finished his tests and was packing for home when his mother called to say she had opened a letter for him from the university informing him that he would not be allowed to return because of his “sexual misconduct.” A quarter of a century later, when the university denied having any records about what had happened to Danny Flaherty in May 1965, Danny could recite the last sentence of that letter verbatim: “We hope this investigation has given you the impetus to seek the professional help you need so badly.”
Danny knew then that he would soon be on his way to Vietnam. There was no question of whether he would go into the Army once called. He would never say he was gay to get out of the service. One of his grandmother’s best friends was the clerk of the local draft board. Word would be all over town in fifteen minutes. Danny loved his family and would never embarrass them—not to mention that going into the Army was his patriotic duty. Like most young people in small towns across America, that, too, was never in question. Though Danny had read about antiwar protesters in places like Berkeley, California, and New York City, they might as well have been on another planet. They were certainly a long way from Spring Valley, where Dan’s dad was a loyal member of the Catholic War Veterans and the American Legion.
Indeed, after living a year in California, where he met a new boyfriend, Danny got his draft notice and was inducted and sent to Vietnam.
Some people accept what they are told by their friends, families, leaders, and church as the truth. Others accept such edicts as the rules. The difference defines two distinctly separate ways to approach being homosexual in American culture. Truths are things one believes, absorbs, and attempts to obey in thought and deed. Rules are strictures imposed from the outside that one may or may not accept as valid. One may obey them, or reject them, or, for the most comfortable life, simply try to navigate around them.
Jess Jessop accepted what he had learned about homosexuality as the truth. Since the truth was incongruous with what he knew about himself, he was destined to years of internal strife. People who accept others’ truths end up being the most tortured, because their primary concern is not that they will fail others but that they will fail themselves. Daniel Joseph Flaherty had never internalized what he learned of homosexuality as the truth. He suffered no particular shame or embarrassment. Instead, he learned a complex set of rules by which he must play.
Surely, most homosexuals serving in the military during the early part of the Vietnam War struggled through their service like Jessop, accepting society’s truths and repressing their sexuality. But others, like Danny Flaherty, simply played by the rules. And since the rules for the military reflected the rules of society, it was not so tough an adjustment for those who had already figured out the game.
JUNE 1966
BIEN HOA, SOUTH VIETNAM
The heat felt to Danny like 49,000 degrees when he stepped off the plane. To the west, clouds clung to the mountains, as in those Oriental paintings: the clouds white and light gray, the mountains lush green.
When Danny wrote of his impressions of Vietnam, and of his loneliness, to Gary Peterson, the lover he had left behind in Sausalito, he addressed his letters to “Peggy.” Changing “Gary” to “Peggy” was just part of the coding process he had adopted years earlier. Being gay meant being bilingual. And when Gary wrote back or sent gifts and books, he signed his name the same way. He was Peggy Peterson. You never knew who was going to read your mail. Don’t get caught.
Peggy was the reason Danny didn’t visit the whores in Saigon on weekends. Slowly, however, Danny became aware of signals from other men like himself, each adapting the rules to his own disposition. Some of the most flamboyant were sailors from the USS Constellation, who called themselves “The Connie Girls.” Always testing the limits of what passed for discretion, the Connie Girls answered admonishments from more cautious gays by chortling, “What are they going to do to us? Shave our heads, put us on a boat, and ship us off to Vietnam?”
The men who had it best were known as REMFs—rear-echelon mother fuckers. These were officers and senior enlisted who stayed far back from the bloody front lines, enjoying the air-conditioned luxury of life in military headquarters. They ate real food, not C-rations, and swigged cold drinks with real ice cubes, unheard-of luxuries for the grunts in the mud.
The air base at Da Nang saw considerable action that was not particularly warlike during these early days in Vietnam. The veranda of the officers’ club at China Beach was a favorite place for REMF gay cruising. And the swimming pool at any Army or air base also became a cruising zone as the numbers of troops swelled in 1965 and 1966. Most organized gay life, however, was in Saigon, a cosmopolitan city that had long considered itself the Paris of the East.
Saigon’s best pickup spot was the bar at the Continental Hotel, which had been a favorite gay meeting place since the days of Tom Dooley, where a casual visitor might not even notice the subplots being played out between five and seven every evening. Here, large numbers of handsome young officers gathered to strike up convivial conversations before pairing off for dinner.
A few blocks from the Presidential Palace were the Louis Pasteur Scientific Baths, where a gentleman could usually spot like-minded companions. If no assignation occurred here, one might make a trip to Tu Do Street, a honky-tonk thoroughfare with rooftop bars and restaurants that served thick American steaks. Rooftops made the bars fairly safe from random hand grenades thrown by passing Vietcong bicyclists, and, at night, tanked up with plenty of beer, one could watch U.S. Air Force bombing raids on suspected enemy supply routes, the explosions lighting up the horizon like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Curfews complicated cruising. You had to pick up early enough to get your business over with in time to return to the barracks, or you had to be sure you could spend the night. Curfews also presented a cover. Army intelligence officer Lieutenant Dave Dupree learned this one morning when eyebrows raised over his having spent the night in the room of an Army major with whom he was having an affair. He had gotten drunk and missed curfew, Dave explained, and everybody understood, because under the pressure of the fighting and dying just about everybody got drunk at one time or another and missed curfew.
After a night of cruising the Continental, the Pasteur Baths, and Tu Do Street, Lieutenant Jerry Rosanbalm was rather amused to hold top-secret briefings for general-staff officers he had seen the night before in these same places. Rosanbalm had “come out” as a gay man in his early twenties in the less inhibited atmosphere of Southern California and had learned the rules well. By the time officers or the occasional senior enlisted men were old enough to make it to these briefings, they knew the rules, too. No one ever mentioned a word about the night before, even alone with one another. Don’t talk about it.
Though no one spoke of it, there were rumors. Rumor had it that the most elite staff of all, General William Westmoreland’s own, was among those with the most gay officers, according to officers who served at the general’s headquarters. It started with one gay staffer recommending his own gay replacement and continued with other recommendations, until a significant share of the staff was gay. Westmoreland’s insistence that his staff be spit-shined and polished also appealed to and attracted homosexual officers; gay men, it seemed, tended to care more than straight men about personal appearance.
Being homosexual was still a risky business. The safest way to make contact with gay people was through private friendship networks. Civilian expatriates, most notably the French, were usually at the center of such networks, having lived in country longer than the one-year stint required of most U.S. servicemen. In villas throughout Vietnam, lavish parties welcomed and bid farewell to a stream of handsome young American soldiers.
One such party to which Rosanbalm was invited took place in a luxurious villa across from the Presidential Palace in Saigon. The guest list included a number of American servicemen in drag. It was the same night that Vice President Hubert Humphrey arrived at the palace to pay respects to the president of Vietnam. Throughout the evening, limousines carrying prominent American officials and high-ranking military officers sped past drag queens in exquisite wigs and gowns, some of whom would attend intelligence briefings the next day for the Vice President and military brass.
Life was much tougher at the front lines, because the field offered so few opportunities for privacy and because the soldiers at the front tended to be younger and less confident in skirting the rules. The Vietnam experience was far less libidinous for the typical gay soldier than was later fantasized in homophile fiction and erotic filmmaking.
Danny Flaherty, for instance, had only one homosexual experience in Vietnam, with his first sergeant’s effeminate driver in the back of a truck. There was, however, a near encounter a few months later, as Danny was smoking pot with a heterosexual sergeant. As Danny took a deep drag of marijuana, he saw that his friend had opened his zipper and was glancing toward him. Danny was extremely stoned; it took a moment to appreciate what was going on. It was a moment too long. The next thing he knew, the zipper was closed. The two of them continued smoking and joking, and neither of them acknowledged that anything out of the ordinary had happened.
For thousands of gay soldiers in Vietnam, overtures from heterosexual colleagues were the most confusing experiences of their service careers. Though there were indeed some brazenly gay troops who were not reluctant to put the make on anybody, it was also true that the most sexually aggressive soldiers in the field tended to be heterosexual, usually married, and clearly intent on resuming their heterosexual proclivities once they returned to the United States.
A sexual subtext was rarely absent from these gatherings of men. The longer the war continued, the more distant the notions of purpose and victory, the deeper the current ran, because there was not much else to think about.
Specialist Gary Milo was drafted into the Army when the Pentagon yanked draft exemptions from graduate students. Once in country, he was struck by how bluntly and frequently the straight men talked about masturbation. Milo thought his buddies, the elite paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, should change their nickname from the “Screaming Eagles” to the “Screaming Queens.” All these men talked about night and day was jacking off, often adding suggestive glances and comments that they would prefer not to do it alone. Every hooch seemed to have at least one guy walking around naked with a hard-on, sometimes saying with a wink, “I sure wish somebody would help me out with this.”
If there was any hint that a soldier really was gay, he was often subject to scores of advances. Straight guys would never say, “Let’s have sex,” of course. That would be queer. But if they believed somebody would be receptive, they might suggest something appropriately mechanical and impersonal, such as “Let me put my dick in your mouth.”
Straight guys had a hundred reasons why such behavior did not make them queer. They were just horny. Years later, scores of gay Vietnam veterans recounted the rationalizations: As long as they were not having sex with a woman, they were staying faithful to their wives. Getting a blowjob from a guy wasn’t real sex, anyway. Besides, American men would not give them gonorrhea like the hookers in Saigon.
The fact that they discussed it proved to many of the gay soldiers that these adventurers were certainly not homosexual. They did not know the rules. Don’t talk about it. Male-male sex was just something they thought of when they found themselves in a strange country without any Caucasian women. Psychologists call it “facultative homosexuality.”
Married men in particular exuded a cavalier confidence, because everyone knew you couldn’t be queer and be married. In the 101st, for example, there were two soldiers who jerked each other off every night in a jeep behind the barracks. It raised few eyebrows. They were not queer, Gary Milo was told: They both had wives at home.
So while most genuinely homosexual soldiers utterly repressed their sexuality or only cautiously engaged in a rare encounter, the straight guys made out like Casanovas, usually unaware of any danger.
For military women serving in Vietnam, life was very different. To be female in the military at this time was unusual; to be among the few hundred women who served in the war zone was extraordinary. Virtually all women assigned to Vietnam were nurses; nursing was one of the only jobs open to women in the military, anyway. Though their medical chores put them in proximity to doctors, who were some of the best educated personnel in the service, the women still had to contend with male attitudes that defined them solely in terms of whether they could fulfill the men’s sexual needs. If they could not, they must be lesbians.
First Lieutenant Mary Hall had learned of the Army’s obsession with its lesbian members a decade before her assignment to Vietnam, back in 1956, when she first enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps. Even after a dozen broken engagements to men, she had not considered herself a lesbian; she just thought she had a hard time finding a man to whom she could relate.
Mary was statuesque, with thick dark hair and a smooth Texas accent. She did not conform to the tough lesbian stereotype. And she could explain her WAC service as a family tradition: Her grandfather had been a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War, her father an enlisted man in World War I, and her uncle a Naval Academy graduate.
In her early assignments, therefore, Mary’s colleagues never considered that she might be gay, and they spoke to her openly. These were the days, just a decade after the massive mobilization of women in World War II, when “members of the church,” as lesbian WACs called themselves, still occupied a huge share of both the WAC’s upper echelons and its enlisted ranks, which made it resemble an exclusive gay sorority. The male officers seemed preoccupied with changing that. At her first assignment at Valley Forge Army Hospital, for example, a gay medic told Mary that his gay friend’s principal job in the Criminal Investigation Division was ridding the hospital of lesbians. He had to do a good job at it, too, or the brass would become suspicious of him and he might be kicked out. But the medic’s friend had some scruples and so only went after those who by his judgment were so indiscreet as to get caught.
At Mary’s next duty station at Camp Zama in Japan, she met a large group of gay WACs who were anything but discreet. They held parties at which they wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars. These were the days when lesbians related to one another as butches or femmes. Mary felt no affinity for either category and breathed a sigh of relief at her introduction to this lesbian subculture. She was not like them; therefore, she must not be a lesbian. The Army conducted regular investigations of these women, eavesdropping on their rooms, even tapping their phones, and many were discharged.
By the time she reentered the Army in 1966 as an officer, Mary had a surer sense that her sexual identity was not heterosexual, after all; she also knew she must be very careful, and she was. In Vietnam, her best friend became a gay male nurse named Jerry. She had met him at Fort Ord shortly before both were sent to the Twenty-fifth Infantry’s Twelfth Evacuation Hospital at Chu Lai.
The physical setting, with its tents and Quonset huts, was not unlike the set that later become familiar to Americans from the television show “M*A*S*H,” except that there was more jungle, and the constant sound of incoming rocket and mortar fire. Mary handled the night duty, tending the wounded and preparing the worst of them for transportation to the better hospitals in Japan and the Philippines. Everybody was busy all the time. And now that there were women around, the men were busier than ever.
There was the issue of territoriality: Men from an engineer unit built air-conditioned rooms for the new women, a rare luxury in the stifling tropical climate. This infuriated the doctors in Mary’s unit, who told the nurses matter-of-factly that if they were going to have sex with men in Vietnam, it should be only with the doctors in their unit. Meanwhile, some of Jerry’s heterosexual colleagues had figured out that he was gay and began to make advances on him.
That male homosexuality was accepted in the war setting became most clear to Mary when she went on an R and R to Bangkok. The military-organized trips had long included briefings on where soldiers could pick up bar girls, but the one Mary sat in on included new advice. Although the Marine briefer looked embarrassed talking about it in front of Mary and the other female officer with whom she was traveling, he nevertheless advised the rest of the passengers, “All of you have been fighting for your country. If you don’t like girls, we have something for you, too,” and he went on to tell them where a GI could hire a boy.