Days of Future Passed
JUNE 1968
GOLDEN GATE PARK
SAN FRANCISCO
In the crush of people, Jerry Rosanbalm worried that his wounded right arm, still in a brace and badly aching even after five months, would be jostled. He tried to protect himself, at the same time trying to make out the words everybody in the crowd was so enthusiastically singing along with Country Joe and the Fish while he sang his antiwar anthem with its famous chorus: “One-two-three what are we fighting for?”
The song confused Army Lieutenant Rosanbalm. Were they for Communists? Do you just let the Reds overrun another country?
The scene was as exotic as anything Rosanbalm had seen in Da Nang or Saigon. The young women were barefoot and wore calico dresses and flowers in their hair. The young men dressed in brightly patched blue jeans and tie-dyed shirts and cinched rags around their waists for belts. Everyone had uniformly long hair and painted faces and wore love beads. They smiled a lot and said “far out.” People carried radios that played songs entirely unlike the pop music Jerry once listened to: “All You Need Is Love,” “Light My Fire,” “White Rabbit,” “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”—songs about sex and drugs and love and peace.
His recuperation at Letterman had been slow and painful. Once he was well enough, because of his officer’s status, Jerry was allowed to move off the base and into San Francisco. He got an apartment on Broadway Boulevard overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. After his daily physical-therapy sessions, he would venture into San Francisco, where he discovered the wild “happenings” going on in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Those afternoons were electric with excitement. Once he had stumbled on a performance by a band from Los Angeles named The Doors. They were great, and Jerry found himself swaying to their music with the rest of the hippies, caught up with them in what the papers called the Youth Revolution.
It was strange and kinetic, like a Fellini movie but infinitely sweeter, and it touched Jerry. But the songs against the war and the government challenged and confused him. When he heard Country Joe singing, “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” and everybody sang along to “what are we fighting for?” Jerry thought he could get up onstage and tell them precisely what they were fighting for. They were fighting to contain communism: Communism was wrong; political power should not come from the barrel of a gun. Communism should not be permitted to expand; it must be stopped. Obviously, these people had never heard the explanation, and Rosanbalm felt betrayed.
He was not the only one. Lying there with their arms and legs blown off, their heads bashed in, watching TV, the other guys in the Letterman ward shared their disbelief that the media had turned against them. Where was the support? Why did somebody not ask them what they thought? To a man, all sixty soldiers on Jerry’s ward had believed in what they were doing in Nam, no matter what it had cost them personally.
The feeling of betrayal cut deep. Prominent on Jerry’s nightstand was an autographed photo of Lyndon Johnson, taken at the President’s home on the banks of the Perandeles River. “I’m very proud of your fine record in Vietnam,” Johnson had written. “The example of your courage, your convictions and your awareness of the vital role that America must play in the defense of Southeast Asia are an encouragement to all who persevere in search of peace.”
Days after arriving at Letterman and receiving the letter, Jerry had turned on the TV set to watch LBJ decline to seek reelection. Everyone knew it was because of the unpopularity of the war. The ward was stunned. Jerry cried. Suddenly, the men could feel their country moving somewhere, and it was leaving them behind.
Despite his sense of dislocation, Jerry was nonetheless drawn toward the vibrant, strange scene in San Francisco, and he looked forward to his afternoon excursions to Golden Gate Park. There was an openness about people, a sense of acceptance that gradually led him to think in new ways about his homosexuality.
When historians later reviewed the era, most agreed that no decade of the twentieth century would change the United States more than the 1960s, and no year of that decade would have greater impact than 1968. Most of what happened over the next generation was either because of or in reaction to the social forces let loose in that turbulent year.
By 1968, the attitudes of the counterculture had permeated the nation and had inspired millions of young people, not merely intellectual malcontents in coastal cities and college towns. And this had happened because of the draft. Because at this time, any male under twenty-seven might be sent off to die in a country nobody had heard of a few years before and for reasons that were never clearly defined. The questions this raised set off a chain reaction of other questions.
So many contradictions in American life had so long been endured that some type of massive cultural paroxysm may have been inevitable. In the United States, everyone was created equal, but that equality did not seem to extend to nonwhites. The United States was supposed to be a godly nation, but the post–World War II prosperity had clearly mired the culture in the grossest materialism to be found anywhere in the world. People talked about peace on earth at Christmas, but nobody thought twice about escalating the war, with Presidents holding their obligatory prayer sessions with the Reverend Billy Graham before sending thousands more to die in Vietnam. The hypocrisy was so blatant that it was difficult not to take note. A counterphilosophy to the mainstream culture emerged, rejecting materialism, violence, prejudice, and hypocrisy in favor of vaguely defined precepts of universal love and peace, brotherhood and liberation. The split in the cultures left the nation more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, people of color against white, parents against children. Every passing week in 1968 seemed to exacerbate the tension.
After a young peace activist named Gerry Studds organized Senator Eugene McCarthy’s upset victory over Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary came Johnson’s decision in late March not to seek reelection. Senator Robert F. Kennedy chose to run, inspiring some with the dream of a new Camelot. That April, the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., unleashed fierce race riots across the country. A few weeks later, striking students seized the Columbia University campus. Six weeks after that, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and fatally wounded, moments after claiming victory in a bitter California primary that might have carried him to the Democratic presidential nomination and the White House. This event, perhaps more than any other, resounded like a call to war among the newly political youth.
In August, the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew for President and Vice President and riots erupted near the Miami convention site. George Wallace selected former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay as his running mate in what was shaping up as the century’s strongest third-party challenge for the presidency. Three weeks later, open warfare erupted in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention when Hubert Humphrey, who had barely won any primaries in the Democratic presidential campaign, was nominated in an electoral process dominated by party bosses. On television, the world watched police brutally beat the protesters. In the same days, the Beatles released their new song “Revolution.” The country was coming apart.
All the changes came as very bad news for the U.S. military and a sign of much worse to come. The military represented all that was dehumanizing, conformist, and violent in American society. For generations, the lure of the military was that it would make boys into men, but suddenly being a man, in the conventional sense, was not considered all that desirable anymore. Under almost every hippie’s black light was the popular poster: JOIN THE ARMY—TRAVEL TO EXOTIC, DISTANT LANDS, MEET EXCITING UNUSUAL PEOPLE, AND KILL THEM!
There were other changes that were to affect the military in years to come. Even women were acting crazy. In Atlantic City, just days after the Chicago riots, female protesters picketed the Miss America pageant, decrying inequitable treatment of women in society. They called themselves by a new name—feminists—and they talked about something called sexism. As the young black militants had iconoclastically adopted the name of the Vietcong resistance—the National Liberation Front—and called themselves the Black Liberation Front, so had the feminists announced the Women’s Liberation Front.
The best-selling novel in the United States was Myra Breckenridge, the story of a cheerful transsexual, by Gore Vidal. And for the first time, homosexuality was discussed publicly in a presidential campaign. In his short, ill-fated bid for the Republican nomination, California governor Ronald Reagan called homosexuality “a tragic disease” and said it should be kept illegal. Allusions to homosexuality, however, were rare in 1968. That it was addressed even in passing by Reagan, whom nobody outside the state of California took even remotely seriously as a presidential candidate, was a measure of what an utterly trivial issue it was.
The 1968 presidential campaign was dominated by an agenda largely written by young activists. Former Vice President Nixon favored lowering the voting age to eighteen and pledged “a generation of peace” by ending the war, though he didn’t say how. Nixon also adopted a platform that had long been a dream of libertarian-oriented Republicans: the abolition of the military draft. Though polls showed that most Americans supported conscription, Nixon maintained that the armed forces could be better staffed by a professional, all-volunteer Army. In any case, few took the pledge seriously, given the fact that it was, after all, a campaign promise. Certainly, with the cities burning in race riots, campuses in rebellion over the war, and every traditional value in question, the call to end the draft received far less attention than the Republican campaign’s promise to bring law and order to the United States.
Order.
It was what Leonard Matlovich, Jr., a young sergeant in the Air Force, wanted more than anything else. The rest of the country may have been rejecting tradition, but Matlovich was trying to find a tradition by which to live. He was looking for structure, for something larger than himself—for the security of knowing just where he fit. It was why he had joined the military as soon as he could.
His father had had something to do with it. Leonard Matlovich, Sr., was a career Air Force man who had enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939 and served thirty-two years before retiring. These were the years during which U.S. air power was built from the ground up. The military hospital near the air base at Savannah, Georgia, was so new that when Vera Matlovich gave birth in July 1943, her son, Leonard Phillip Matlovich, Jr., had the distinction of being the first male child born there.
Leonard senior was a strict, chief master sergeant and he raised his son with a no-nonsense approach. The family lived the military life, moving from base to base around the world. When his dad was stationed in Guam, Leonard sometimes took boat trips to the tiny uninhabited islands nearby, their beaches still littered with the rusting shells of Japanese landing craft. Leonard fantasized about landing on the islands with World War II fighting men, all working together to take the islands back. Later, when the Matloviches moved to Charleston, South Carolina, Leonard’s fantasies turned to fighting alongside the Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg. In his daydreams, young Lenny was the hero whose courage earned the respect and approval of one and all.
Matlovich’s dreams and fantasies were always male-dominated. They nearly always took place in a military setting, where the absence of women was routine, and that made them permissible. But as Lenny entered his early teens in the mid-1950s, he began to feel the first urges of his sexuality and he understood his fantasies were no longer acceptable.
Being tall, skinny, and loquacious, the young Matlovich stood out among his classmates. Maybe they noticed that he paid more attention to other guys than to girls, Matlovich later told his biographer, Mike Hippler. In any case, by the sixth grade, Leonard was taunted daily with shouts of queer and faggot. At night, he got down on his knees and prayed to the crucifix he kept in his room, like all good Catholic kids. He begged God to change him, but, as he said later, the harder he prayed, the queerer he got.
Leonard graduated from high school in 1962. On May 7, 1963, with his dad at his side, he was accepted into the United States Air Force. He was now part of a great order in which you could read everyone’s entire career in the medals and ribbons on their chest; a structure in which you knew exactly where you fit in.
More than anything, Leonard hoped that the military orderliness would enable him to overcome his homosexuality. He had read that it was just a phase people went through and outgrew, and he figured the quickest way to outgrow it, to prove his manhood, was to go to war. He immediately volunteered for Vietnam. He waited out his first year, however, at Travis Air Force Base, working as an electrician, worried that the war was going so well, it might be over before he could get there. He became involved in Republican party politics during this time, serving as president of the county Young Republicans and campaigning for Barry Goldwater—until somebody pointed out this violated the Hatch Act’s ban on political activities by federal employees.
Leonard was by then, however, a staunch conservative Republican. The Catholic Church had betrayed him with the radical reforms of Vatican II. Nuns no longer wore habits, you did not have to eat fish on Friday, and they did not even say Mass in Latin anymore, he fumed to friends. Where was tradition? Thank goodness for the Republican party, which stood for tradition in Leonard’s mind, and whose platform complemented his fervent patriotism.
Matlovich arrived for his first tour of Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day, 1965. He was assigned to “Little Alamo,” a remote and embattled base ten miles south of the demilitarized zone. Soon he went to work creating a new system of perimeter lighting that warded off nighttime sniper attacks from the Vietcong. One night, heavy fire knocked out the lights and Matlovich went out to repair the damage, crawling from light to light on his belly, replacing and repairing the wiring, under heavy machine-gun fire. For his performance, the Air Force awarded him their Commendation Medal and the Bronze Star in March 1966, a rare achievement for a mere airman first class.
Matlovich had demonstrated his courage and earned the respect of one and all, but he had not fulfilled his fondest hope—to get over his deep longings. He was always getting crushes on his buddies. Now his fantasies were that someday one would reciprocate. Unfortunately, he was drawn to people who shared his conservative political and religious views—the very people most likely to reject him.
By July 1968, when Matlovich flew into Cam Rahn Bay for his second tour of Vietnam, there was nothing he wanted more than a lover—someone who would make a place for him in his world. That was still the fundamental problem, he realized: He had not found his place.
Then, in the summer of 1968 in Vietnam, Matlovich listened to a Mormon missionary and learned about the Mormon celestial hierarchy that extended from the upper reaches of heaven, to earth, and into hell. Like Catholicism, Mormonism was an authoritarian religion, which appealed to Matlovich, as did the belief that the United States was a divine nation destined to help solve the problems of the world. Even his military service was part of a godly plan in supporting America’s destiny, according to the Book of Mormon. Matlovich believed he had found the answer, and in the warm blue waters of the South China Sea, he was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Mary Hall returned from her nursing duty in Vietnam to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in July 1968, thoroughly drained. Not long after, her gay friend Jerry also came home. Jerry ordered his lover not to meet him at the airport. When he saw him for the first time, Jerry wanted to be able to hold him; he knew he would probably cry. And he could not do any of that in front of other Army people.
Jerry’s lover had planned a big party for him and invited many of the gay medical personnel with whom he worked. Mary was invited, of course, but she declined to come. Guest lists at gay parties sometimes wound up in the hands of the Criminal Investigation Division.
“You know I love you,” Mary told Jerry, “but I’ve got too many years invested in the Army to go to your party.” She felt sheepish but also felt she had no choice. She was a captain now and had a Bronze Star for her work under fire, but she was not out of danger.
In spite of that, her deep affection for Jerry, the kind of affection you have only for someone with whom you have shared the ordeal of combat, took hold. She could not stay away, though she came late, after everybody else had left.
At the Presidio in San Francisco, at about the same time that Leonard Matlovich shipped out for his second tour in Vietnam, Sergeant Daniel Flaherty was seeing his last days in the United States Army, assigned to the Military Police unit at Fort Scott. Danny even had a regular boyfriend, another MP, Rick Kellogg, also Army. The two spent most weekends off the base, attending psychedelic concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and Winterland, becoming part of San Francisco’s counterculture.
It was beginning to affect the way they viewed the Army and the war. When Kellogg was assigned to guard prisoners who were mainly conscientious objectors, he handed his rifle to his first sergeant, saying that if any of them tried to escape he could not in good conscience shoot them. The Army was starting to have these kinds of problems all over the world now.
The sixties had changed a lot for both young men, but it had not yet profoundly affected the way they lived their lives as gay people. So when Danny packed up his Purple Heart, folded his uniform, and prepared to return to civilian life, he returned to the same kind of hiding he had known in Spring Valley and in the Army. At his first job at Levi Strauss, he pretended to be talking to his girlfriend when Rick called.
He did know he could never return to Spring Valley. He understood who he was now and he realized there was no place for him in Illinois. Danny stayed in San Francisco, even though he was not much more open about being gay in California than he had been in Bureau County, Illinois. It would be a few years before this changed.