Convenience of the Government (Part I)
MAY 1968
FEDERAL BUILDING TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Perry Watkins walked across Pacific Avenue toward the front door of the federal building for his induction into the United States Army. Mounting the staircase outside, he happened upon a dozen other young men, including five former classmates from Lincoln High School, all there for the same purpose. The group had been talking but stopped, stunned, when Perry joined them.
Finally, one said, “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been drafted,” Watkins said.
“Didn’t you tell them?”
Of course he had told them; he always told anybody who asked.
Word spread quickly inside the induction hall, according to Perry’s recollection of the day. Many of the young men knew Watkins by reputation, if not personally. Tacoma was still a small town. Everyone stared.
During the induction physical at Fort Lewis, the doctor looked up from Perry’s paperwork, stared at him oddly, and asked, “Has anything changed in your life since you filled this out?”
Watkins knew what the doctor was talking about. It was the yes box Watkins had checked regarding “homosexual tendencies.” He knew how uncomfortable the truth made people, especially when the subject was homosexuality, so he was not surprised that the doctor talked around it.
“No,” Watkins said. “Nothing has changed.”
The doctor turned back to the form. Watkins, he wrote, was “qualified for military service.”
The doctor probably figured Watkins would be drafted, go to Vietnam, get killed, and nobody would ever hear about it again. At least that was how Watkins sized up the situation years later with a wry chuckle.
Ola Delores Watkins was born in Doyline, Louisiana, in 1928, the great-granddaughter of freed slaves, and had been brought up proud. She had high cheekbones and penetrating brown eyes and never wore makeup. Her dad was a determined preacher who had built the first black Southern Baptist church in Joplin, Missouri, the segregated town he had brought his family to in 1945 and where he opened a small grocery, one of the only black-owned stores in town. After a brief marriage, Ola divorced and looked for work to support herself, her daughter, and her three-year-old son, Perry James Henry Watkins. About the only work a black woman could find in those days in Joplin was as a domestic for families in the white part of town, but Ola knew this would not provide her a decent income. Though no Negro had ever been allowed into Joplin’s nursing school before, Ola strode into the admissions office just the same, knowing that being rejected could not be any worse than being a domestic all her life. She was accepted, and she worked her way through nursing school by washing dishes and later as a nurse’s aide at the local Catholic hospital.
As an African-American woman in the South, Ola had grown up knowing what it was like to be despised, and she had concluded that you just had to ignore it. Once you did that, she believed, you could do anything you wanted if you put your mind to it. These observations led her to a short list of truths, which she taught her children:
Don’t give a hoot what anybody thinks about you.
You can do anything and be anybody you want.
Be responsible for who you are.
Take the punishment when you are wrong and you will get the rewards when you are right.
There was also one final commandment that Ola rigorously enforced: Never lie. There was only one way to tell the truth, she said, but many ways to lie. Lying was confusing, and you could never get your stories straight, so it was just easier to tell the truth.
Everybody commented on how much alike Perry and Ola were. It was not just the physical resemblance, which was striking; their similarity also lay in their straightforward personalities. Other kids rebelled against their parents, but Perry idolized his mother, and she respected his individuality.
This was remarkable considering the unusual interests Watkins began to demonstrate at a rather early age. Playing with dolls was perhaps the first. Perry never had much use for the team sports that so intrigued other boys. He preferred styling the hair on his sister’s dolls and dressing them in their fabulous tiny satin gowns, or playing jacks with the other girls. The guys watched “Combat” and “Gunsmoke” on TV, but Perry preferred the June Taylor Dancers every Saturday night on “The Jackie Gleason Show.”
In some households, it might have been a problem; but for Perry’s, consisting of himself, his mother, sister, grandmother, and two aunts, it was not. And Perry figured if his family could accept him the way he was, then he really did not care if other people could not.
Perry was in junior high school when Ola married a buck sergeant she had known since high school. When the sergeant was transferred to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Ola packed up her two children and moved.
Perry’s first days in Franklin B. Gault Junior High were a bore. He hated wood-shop classes, now that he knew his true ambition was to be a ballet dancer. In mechanical-drawing class, however, one of his classmates suggested they have sex. Perry had had some marginal sexual experiences in Joplin and had no doubts about where his sexual interests lay. He was happy to comply.
The next day, another boy approached Perry in the school auditorium and asked whether it was true that he’d sucked off their classmate. “Are you queer?” the boy asked.
Perry stared at his interrogator, remembering “Never lie,” and “Be responsible,” and “Don’t give a hoot what anybody thinks,” and he said he was.
The other boy was speechless. First he looked surprised, then a little scared, and then he quickly backed away. This informed Watkins of the power of telling the truth. Giving people the answer they did not expect gave you the upper hand. Maybe it scared people. You would suffer more from being homosexual if you lied about it, he realized. He resolved never to lie about being homosexual.
From that moment on, nobody ever picked on Perry Watkins and nobody ever called him a faggot to his face. From that moment, he became one of a very small number of gay men in the mid-1960s who lived entirely by their own rules.
Of course, word spread throughout Gault Junior High, and later Abraham Lincoln High, that Perry was queer. His black schoolmates were the most outspoken about not liking fags, especially this fag who had perfect elocution and talked like a white person. A lot of other students, however, were privately asking to meet him after school, maybe to study or something.
Meanwhile, Perry studied dance at the Tacoma City Ballet Company, participated in and won speech tournaments, and even made the finals for the cheerleading squad. He did not make the team, but no black person had ever made the cheerleading team at Lincoln. Not long after Perry’s high school graduation in 1966, his stepfather transferred to Germany and invited Perry to go along. It was a chance to see Europe, and the best place to study ballet. Perry figured he had the time, since he was not worried about being drafted. He was gay and he knew the Army did not take gays.
It was in Germany, in August 1967, that Perry was summoned to the U.S. Army Ninety-seventh General Hospital in Frankfurt and given his draft physical. In the course of filling out the forms, right after checking no to the questions about drugs or alcohol, Perry checked yes to the question about homosexual tendencies.
Watkins would later be asked to recall what happened next, and no one would ever step forward to challenge his recollections. The Army psychiatrist wanted to know precisely which sexual acts Watkins performed with men.
“Oral and anal sex,” Perry answered evenly.
“I can’t accept that answer,” the psychiatrist said.
Watkins rephrased it. “I like to suck dick and get fucked in the ass,” he said.
“Do you ever date women?” the psychiatrist asked.
Perry thought it was strange that when he talked about having sex with men the doctor wanted to know about precise acts but when he talked about sex with women he referred to it as “dating.” The psychiatrist, a lieutenant colonel, pressed further, trying to dissuade Watkins from his admission—to no avail.
Perry was sent to another psychiatrist, with no explanation on the accompanying paperwork as to why he was there. But Perry took a number-two pencil and wrote in big block letters in the space provided, “I’m here because I checked ‘homosexual tendencies.’”
“Why did you do that?” asked the second psychiatrist.
“Because it’s the truth.”
“Do you want to go in the Army?”
“I don’t object to going in the Army,” Watkins said. He was not trying to get out of the draft; he was simply telling the truth.
“Do you want to go to Vietnam?” the psychiatrist asked.
“I wouldn’t object to going to Vietnam.”
“Why did you check the box?”
“Because it was the truth.”
The psychiatrist then wrote on Perry’s form: “This 19 year old inductee has had homosexual tendencies in the past.… Patient can go into Military service—qualified for induction.” And May 1968 saw Perry Watkins, an acknowledged gay man, inducted into the United States Army.
Though Perry did not want an Army career, he did have a strong sense of patriotism. For all its faults—and having grown up in the segregated South, he knew those faults intimately—America was still the best thing going, Watkins believed, and he believed he owed his country something. He was willing, if not thrilled, to do his service. As for being gay, he just figured they had changed the rules somewhere along the way. When he explained the whole story to Ola, she agreed.
A few months later, in advanced training at Fort Dix to become a clerk/typist, Perry was talking about the local gay hangouts with another gay draftee. Perry suggested they go barhopping the next weekend.
“I won’t be here next week,” the recruit said.
When Perry asked why, the young man said, “Because I’m gay.”
He had not even engaged in any sexual acts in the Army, he said. He had just told his commanding officer he was gay and they had started the paperwork to kick him out.
Perry marched into his commander’s office and explained that he was homosexual and that he wanted to be discharged. For a month, Perry did not hear anything. Then he was told that he could not be discharged for being gay, because he could not really prove he was gay. In order to do that, he would have to be caught in a sexual act.
Perry contemplated this odd treatment. There was one difference between the draftee being bumped for being gay and himself, Perry observed. The other man was white. One other black friend of Perry’s had also checked the yes box, Perry learned later, and was denied exemption; this young man had stopped the induction process finally by complaining to his congressman. It was interesting, but Perry didn’t have any grudge against the military; he did not fight his induction.
“Greeting.”
By the mid-1960s, this was the most feared salutation to appear on a letter. It was how the U.S. Selective Service System opened its draft notice. Not “Dear Mr. Watkins,” or even “Greetings.”
“Greeting. You are hereby ordered to report…”
By 1968, more Americans were being so addressed than at any time since World War II. Within six months of the first escalation of the war in early 1965, the Selective Service was calling up 27,500 men a month for the Army, the largest draft call of any month since 1953. Within three months of that, the call rose to over forty thousand a month. By March 1968, when General Westmoreland asked President Johnson for 200,000 more troops to bolster the sagging effort in Vietnam, draft calls for troops increased to nearly 300,000. While military manpower typically maintained 2.4 million troops through the 1950s and early 1960s, the draft had bloated the number of American men in uniform to 3.5 million by 1969.
The United States had gone through most of its history without a large standing peacetime Army and without conscription. But facing superpower responsibilities in the post–World War II era, the Truman administration instituted a peacetime military draft in 1948. By the late 1960s, the biased nature of the Selective Service System’s selectivity had become more apparent. College students got their 2-S deferments; divinity students got their 4-D deferments. Men whose parents were well connected could get a coveted slot in the National Guard. This meant the draft boards did a lot of selecting on the basis of class, among people who could not afford college or did not have the right family ties. A low-income high school dropout had a 70 percent chance of going to Vietnam. That was only the beginning of the inequities. Draftees were far more likely to get the dangerous grunt duty on the front lines of Vietnam than those who enlisted. Though conscripts accounted for 39 percent of the Army in Vietnam, they comprised 55 percent of the deaths.
Such distinctions also had profound racial overtones. Between 1961 and 1966, when 8 percent of the U.S. military was black, African-American soldiers comprised 16 percent of those killed in Vietnam. In 1966, blacks accounted for 23 percent of combat deaths there. Blacks did not get much sympathy from draft boards. In 1967, only 1.3 percent of 16,632 draft-board members nationally were African American; draft boards in seven states had no black members at all.
Such statistics partially explain how Perry Watkins, a black man from a working-class background, would be drafted into the United States Army, even though he had openly stated he was gay. The inclusion of Perry Watkins, and thousands of others like him, represents one of the most intriguing though seldom-discussed aspects of the military’s personnel policies in Vietnam. Despite regulations and public protestations to the contrary, the military needed able-bodied men to fight its war and was quite ready to look the other way if some of them were homosexual.
As early as 1966, when Vietnam manpower needs first mounted, the Pentagon issued a directive to local draft boards requiring that potential draftees claiming homosexuality be required to submit “proof,” according to later reports from gay organizers. The Defense Department later said a search of files turned up no such directive, but from that year onward, draft boards clearly did begin demanding evidence of homosexuality for gay claimants, either signed affidavits from sex partners or the sworn statement of a psychiatrist. The catch, of course, was that in forty-nine of the fifty states, confessing to a homosexual act also meant confessing to a felony, one that was sometimes punishable by twenty years in prison.
When publicly pressed to state its policy on admitting gays, the Defense Department asserted that it would not allow homosexuals to serve because, as Colonel M. P. DiFusco wrote at the time, “The presence of homosexuals would seriously impair discipline, good order, morals and the security of our armed forces.”
In Los Angeles, Don Slater monitored the local induction centers in the weeks after the Tet offensive. Slater was a feisty little man with a gravelly voice and a thick shock of sandy brown hair beginning to turn white. In 1968, he was one of a handful of Americans who could be called a full-time gay activist. At the time, the entire gay movement of the United States could comfortably fit in one medium-sized living room. Most gay organizations in existence then were outgrowths of the few Mattachine Society chapters that had slowly formed in major cities since the early 1950s. After a purge of early organizers who drew their political heritage from the American Communist party’s heyday of the 1930s, these groups of “homophiles,” as they politely called themselves, devoted their efforts to producing gentle educational materials—pamphlets and various newsletters—that not very many people outside their own memberships read.
From his office on Cahuenga Boulevard near the old Universal Studio lots, Slater had launched a new crusade, in opposition to the military’s policies: the Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces. He took his cause, the first that specifically concerned gays in the military, to the National Planning Conference of Homosexual Organizations in Kansas City in April 1966. The conference included all of forty gay leaders from fifteen gay groups who agreed that, with the war growing, the military’s ban on gays could be an issue around which they might mobilize gays.
Of course, hardly anyone took homosexual organizing very seriously back in the mid-1960s. The conference received a polite write-up in The New York Times, focusing on the military issue, but few efforts after that, including a series of demonstrations planned for Armed Forces Day in 1966, attracted much attention. Gay demonstrations in that era were lucky if they drew more than a dozen picketers.
Nevertheless, Slater pushed his cause ahead, issuing advertisements in the growing number of underground newspapers. These ads, offering free draft counseling to gays, put Slater in touch with the draft-resistance network, which taught him what was going on in induction centers in Southern California. Within four weeks of the Tet offensive, it was clear that the Selective Service would draft anybody they could, queer or not. By Slater’s count, in Los Angeles alone, at least a dozen openly homosexual men had been drafted or classified 1-A during the previous two months.
Slater’s committee issued an angry press release on February 28, 1968: “Because of the growing need for manpower in Vietnam, the Defense Department, while publicly paying lip-service to the idea that homosexual persons are unfit for military service, has quietly instructed induction centers to make discreet ‘exceptions’ to the rule—the case of homosexuals who are not the ‘obvious’ types.”
The Committee to Fight Exclusion did not object to the war or to service in it, Slater wrote, just to the hypocrisy of publicly saying gays could not serve in the military while privately drafting them. “If homosexuals are to be drafted, we insist that it be done under a publicly acknowledged policy change regarding their fitness, and that it be conducted according to uniform national standards rather than under the secret and divergent judgments of local induction center personnel.”
At this point, Slater changed his strategy from merely fighting the ban on gays in the military to helping to keep gays out of the military until the armed forces openly accepted them. In ads in underground papers, Slater warned that “homosexuals are secretly being drafted into the Armed Forces even though they do not ‘measure up’ to the medical, mental and moral standards established by the Defense Department.… Every homosexual has a right and a duty to refuse induction.”
The tougher stand by the Selective Service System was more than just hypocrisy. To a large extent, the policy was a response to the fact that a lot of people who were not gay were claiming to be so in order to get out of the draft. As the war grew increasingly unpopular, particularly among those of draft age, the problem of “gay deceivers” turned into a major Selective Service headache. Across the country, growing numbers of draft counselors added detailed advice for gay poseurs to their standard draft-resistance manuals.
“Dress very conservatively. Act like a man under tight control,” advised one pamphlet. “Deny you’re a fag, deny it again very quickly, then stop, as if you’re buttoning your lip. But find an excuse to bring it back into a conversation again and again, and each time deny it and quickly change the subject. And maybe twice, no more than three times over a half-hour interview, just the slightest little flick of the wrist.”
Draft Help, a San Francisco group, advised that “overt feminine behavior or drag costume or affected mannerisms may convince the psychiatrist that one is trying to evade the draft through pretense.” And they warned, “The journey to the psychiatrist may be punctuated by a few derisive remarks from doctors or other personnel along the way, and perhaps from other registrants, but everyone has his mind on other things, and a man is not likely to be submitted to extensive humiliation.”
An article in the radical magazine The Realist asserted that being a “hoaxosexual” was the best way out of military service. “Trick knees, bad backs, migraines, etc. are so hackneyed by now that they’re generally ignored altogether by the time-wizened staff physicians.… Homosexuality is the bomb that unhinges the escape hatch for any and all disgruntled draftees who are determined enough to take advantage of its somewhat inviting provisions.” Among those taking advantage of such advice was an aspiring actor and comedian named Chevy Chase.
At one point in 1967, between thirty and forty men a day were claiming “homosexual tendencies” at the Los Angeles Examination and Entrance Station, according to an officer there. It seemed that heterosexuals were far more likely to say they were gay than gays themselves. Heterosexuals were also far more naïve about the lasting stigma of being branded gay in those days.
Gay groups commenting on the gay exemption were less cavalier about using confessional statements as a means to avoid military service. In San Francisco, the Society for Individual Rights issued a 1967 brochure that cautioned, “If you wish to serve you may do so knowing that countless homosexuals have, but you must at the same time weigh the real danger that you may receive a less-than-honorable discharge that will create serious difficulties for you in obtaining employment.” It went on to outline the lack of confidentiality of records at local draft boards, as well as the problems one would face in getting any type of Civil Service employment after such a declaration.
Ironically, authentically gay men also tended to be less successful than the gay deceivers in convincing draft boards they really were gay. The trick to convincing the Army psychiatrist, after all, rested not in behaving the way gay men actually behaved but in acting the way the psychiatrist imagined they did. Fulfilling the heterosexual fantasies of homosexuality was, of course, an easier task for a heterosexual than for someone gay.
Army efforts to thwart gay deceivers, however, violated regulations meant to eject anyone gay or with “homosexual tendencies,” whether or not these tendencies had been acted upon. But at this time, it was not for “the convenience of the government”—as the informal military phrasing went—to enforce these regulations against feigning or bona fide homosexuals alike.
During the Vietnam era, of 5 million men exempted from military service because of their draft physicals, only 1 percent was deferred because of a “moral defect.” Gay men who realized their orientation only after they joined the service also discovered by the late 1960s that the U.S. military had sometimes achieved a newfound acceptance of homosexuality—at least in the foxholes for the duration of the war.
Army Private Darryl West was on his last leave before going to Vietnam when a group of high school friends took him to his first gay bar, allowing him to accept what he had long denied about himself—that he was gay. Convinced he would be killed if he went to war, West wrote President Johnson and explained that he was gay. Although he wrote that he did not object to Army service in the United States, he worried how he would resist temptation in Vietnam, when there were only men around. West hoped the letter would save him from Vietnam, but it did not.
After West had been in Vietnam several months, CID agents burst into his hooch and took him off for interrogation. The agents held up the letter West had written the President and demanded that West sign a statement saying that he was heterosexual and had just written the letter to get out of going to Vietnam. West refused. After threats of informing his parents failed to secure a recantation, one of the CID agents pulled out his service revolver and put it against West’s head. According to West’s recollection, the agent said, “We can shoot you and tell your parents you were killed in action.” Or West could sign a statement saying that he was not homosexual.
West signed. The agents seemed satisfied and sent West back to his company, where he continued his military service uneventfully.
Few Vietnam-era veterans have such extreme stories of coercion, but a surprising number of active-duty personnel relate instances of commanders overlooking the most blatant homosexual behavior.
Army Private First Class Dennis Seely broadcast “Lover’s Concerto” by The Toys over his military field radio and dedicated it to Steve, another private. Seely was busted back to E-1 for the infraction, not for directing a romantic song to another man but because his commanding officer was miffed that he had endangered the lives of troops by disobeying a military radio ban with the love song.
During basic training at Fort Leonardwood, when Army recruit Herb Lotz confided to the chaplain that he was worried about being put in barracks with men only, the chaplain told him to “hang in there,” and that Lotz w6uld be able to relieve his sexual tensions by getting away to gay bars on weekends.
Airman Jeff Boler was in his first day of basic training at Lackland Air Force Base when he checked yes on a form that asked about “homosexual tendencies.” He did so because his platoon sergeant had warned that if airmen were not honest in filling out all their forms, the truth would catch up with them later. Boler had checked yes on his enlistment form as well, but his Air Force recruiter said that since Boler was still a virgin he could not really say he had any sexual tendencies yet. The recruiter then changed the answer to no.
Now, standing in formation with the other new recruits, Boler did not know what to expect when the ugliest master sergeant in creation shouted out, “Boler, get up here.” Once in front of the assembled recruits, the sergeant shouted again: “Boler, you say here you’re a queer. Do you suck dick?”
Everybody laughed. Boler blushed with embarrassment. The master sergeant boomed at him, “You wanna suck my dick?”
“Good God, no,” Boler answered truthfully.
“Then you ain’t queer,” the sergeant yelled.
None of this could possibly have happened, of course—at least not according to Department of Defense regulations. “Personnel who voluntarily engage in homosexual acts … will not be permitted to serve in the armed forces, in any capacity, and their prompt separation is mandatory,” read the Army’s regulation. “Homosexuality is a manifestation of a severe personality defect, which appreciably limits the ability of such individuals to function effectively in a military environment.”
The Navy’s official regulations were no less insistent. “Homosexuals and other sexual deviates are military liabilities who cannot be tolerated in a military organization. Their prompt separation from the naval service is essential.” And the Air Force publicly maintained, “Participation in a homosexual act, or proposing or attempting to do so, is considered a very serious misbehavior.”
But the military’s own statistics offer the most compelling evidence that the exigencies of wartime overrode the military’s usual antipathy for those with nonconforming sexual orientations. Between 1963 and 1966, for example, the Navy discharged between 1,600 and 1,700 enlisted members a year for homosexuality. From 1966 to 1967, however, the number of gay discharges dropped from 1,708 to 1,094. In 1968, the Navy ejected 798 enlisted men for homosexuality. In 1969, at the peak of the Vietnam buildup, gay discharges dropped to 643. A year later, only 461 sailors were relieved of duty because they were gay. These dramatic reductions occurred during the period of the service’s highest membership since World War II.
The flexible enforcement of the antihomosexual regulations was not without precedent. From their adoption in 1943, implementation of such rules has been almost entirely dependent on the manpower needs of the services at any particular time. In his research on gays in World War II, Allen Bérubé discovered that during the height of the final European offensive against Germany in 1945, Secretary of War Harry Stimson ordered a review of all gay discharges during the previous two years, with an eye toward reinducting gay men who had not committed any in-service homosexual acts. At the same time, orders went out to “salvage” homosexuals for the service whenever necessary. The War Department also considered releasing convicted “sodomists” to fight in separate combat units with other freed prisoners. The Army’s official history of psychiatry in World War II reports that in the Thirty-eighth Division, commanders often merely reassigned to different regiments those soldiers who made passes at other men. In these cases, the history records, “this was the last that was heard of the case.”
Overlooking homosexuality sometimes required great effort. In his book, Bérubé describes a gay torpedo officer who frequently walked around the decks in a bathrobe, hair net, and slippers. This surely would not have been tolerated on many ships, but by all accounts the man was the best torpedo officer in the Seventh Fleet, and good torpedo officers were hard to find. The ship’s captain squashed any gossip that the sailor was gay and, during his subsequent service, personally pinned the Silver Star on the man’s uniform.
The Korean War also saw a dramatic plunge in gay-related discharges. In the fifteen years before Vietnam, for example, the Navy, the service that kept the only records on the issue, typically meted out 1,100 undesirable discharges a year to gay sailors. In 1950, at the height of the Korean War, that number was down to 483. The next year, it was 533. But in 1953, when the armistice was signed at Panmunjom, the Navy cracked down again with vigor, distributing 1,353 gay-related undesirable discharges in that year alone.
In conflict after conflict—from World War II to Desert Storm—the paradox has persisted: during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and a generation after Vietnam, when the United States went to war again in 1991. The gay exclusion policies were enacted ostensibly to ensure good order and discipline in the military. At no time is order and discipline more essential than in combat. History also demonstrates that at no time are the regulations banning homosexuality more routinely sidestepped. What made things different a generation later was that the world changed immensely between 1968 and 1991—and life changed profoundly for people who were homosexual. The first signs of those changes were already visible in certain places in the United States in 1968.