Home Front
SEPTEMBER 1968
FORT HAMILTON
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
After basic training Perry Watkins chose the job of chaplain’s assistant as his Military Occupation Specialty. On his second day at the United States Army Chaplain’s School, however, the commandant called Perry into his office.
“You have a statement on your record that you’re a homosexual,” the commandant said bluntly.
Perry said it was true.
Then it was not possible for Perry to become a chaplain’s assistant, the commandant said.
“I think that’s the dumbest motherfucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Perry answered. “I’m too queer to be a chaplain’s assistant, but I’m not too queer to be in the Army.”
Watkins demanded to be discharged immediately. The commandant seemed amenable, and sent Watkins to an Army psychiatrist as part of the initial screening for a discharge. The psychiatrist was one of the most effeminate men Perry had ever met, so much so that Watkins was never sure whether he was for real or merely being satirical. In any case, he began the interview by quizzing Watkins about his sex life. Perry said he was gay, but declined to give the names or dates of his sexual contacts. “Whom I sleep with is none of your business,” he said.
Army records confirm that once the interview was over, Watkins was pulled from classes and assigned to a small cleanup detail, mopping floors and tidying rooms with other soldiers who were waiting to get out. Watkins’s discharge never came through. Instead, he was informed that it could not be established that he was indeed homosexual, at least not enough to warrant a discharge. He would not be allowed to be a chaplain’s assistant, however, since he had said he was gay; instead, he would be reassigned to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and trained as a personnel clerk.
Watkins was only one of hundreds of gay soldiers who were learning the anomalies of military service during the Vietnam era. In the war zone, gays could sometimes live relatively open lives, but once out of Vietnam they could look forward only to the same bias gays faced in peacetime.
Roberto Reyes-Colon, an Air Force sergeant from a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City, was learning this well now. He had lived openly at the Little Alamo near the demilitarized zone—the same post where Airman Leonard Matlovich had served. On one very drunken evening, Reyes-Colon had staggered off the base in full view of Military Police while hanging on to a Marine corporal, kissing and carrying on.
The next day, the base commandant called Reyes-Colon into his office, Reyes-Colon later recalled. Two MPs from the night before were present; they accused him of leaving the camp, a violation of base security. “And we saw you guys kissing,” one of the MPs said, staring at him.
Reyes-Colon shrugged, noted that he had been off duty, and said, “This is a war.”
Later, alone, the base commander, a major, took the report on the incident and threw it away. It was the last Reyes-Colon ever heard of it.
When he was reassigned to work with the II Corps in the central highlands south of Pleiku, Reyes-Colon found the environment even more accepting of gay soldiers. He and other gay friends double-dated and even turned a small hooch into a makeshift gay bar where they danced with their boyfriends to the latest Temptations albums. The straight soldiers had their own hooch for boozing it up and dancing. Nobody cared.
But back in the United States, where Reyes-Colon was assigned to work intelligence at Lowry Air Force Base, people cared.
There were gay bars in nearby Denver, so it was easy for him to meet other gay service personnel. Within months of arriving at Lowry, there were about twenty gay friends in two squadrons with whom he palled around. But then, in early 1968, Reyes-Colon’s friends started disappearing. He did not think much of it at first. There was a war going on and Reyes-Colon was working intelligence now, meaning anybody could get twenty-four-hour orders that would dispatch them anywhere in the world without the time to say good-bye to friends.
He began to understand otherwise on the morning that two agents from the Office of Special Investigations, the agency that investigated wrongdoing among Air Force personnel, walked into the class where Reyes-Colon was giving a briefing on penetrating Polish air defenses. The two men ordered him out of the classroom.
They took him to a small room. Their opening comment was, “We’re agents of the OSI and we want to talk to you about being queer.”
Reyes-Colon denied it. The larger of the two agents said they knew he was queer anyway, and that he could make it easy on himself by giving them the names of other queers. Reyes-Colon refused.
The OSI then revealed it had been confiscating all Reyes-Colon’s letters and postcards mailed by Air Force friends around the world. Which were queers? Where did the queers hang out? Who else was queer around there? Reyes-Colon could be court-martialed, they reminded him. He could go to the stockade.
Reyes-Colon would not talk.
The OSI agents then marched Reyes-Colon to his barracks room, where they commenced a search of his locker and drawers. They tore apart his shoes, looking for contraband in the soles. They insisted the frightened sergeant explain every possession. At every opportunity, the agents used the words queer and fag. And then they found a book that confirmed he was queer—a copy of Naked Lunch by the homosexual author William S. Burroughs.
Reyes-Colon, who had just reenlisted, was terror-stricken. He was twenty-two years old, and suddenly his life seemed over. The only life he had known since he was seventeen was the United States Air Force. Aside from his indiscretions in Vietnam, he had played by the rules and been a star performer; he had won the Bronze Star before he was even old enough to vote. The Air Force had been his ticket out of poverty, and now it was all falling apart because he was queer. It was the kind of humiliation and disgrace he had always feared, ever since he had first suspected he was different from other boys. Now he was on his way to prison.
Reyes-Colon asked for a lawyer and was sent to a counsel for the Judge Advocate General. The JAG attorney advised him to tell the OSI the truth. The worst that could happen was that he would be kicked out. But Reyes-Colon did not want to be kicked out, and he would not give names, so he refused to confess.
Day after day, the OSI called him in for grueling interrogations. Usually, there was one harsh agent and one nice one. The questions were always the same, though: Who were the other homos? Did he want to go to the stockade? Somebody had turned him in, so why didn’t he return the favor? Still, Reyes-Colon would not confess to anything or give names. As the interrogations continued, his base commander yanked Reyes-Colon out of the training course he was about to complete, canceled his graduation, confiscated his passport, confined him to his barracks, and ordered him to report to the charge of quarters every two hours. Meanwhile, OSI agents fanned out across the country to interrogate Reyes-Colon’s friends. Civilians were usually contacted at their jobs in an apparent effort to maximize the potential for embarrassment. Reyes-Colon’s mother called, frantic, one night because OSI agents had come to question her at the factory where she worked as a seamstress in New York’s garment district. She had told him where they could stuff their investigation, but she was worried for Roberto. What was going on? Reyes-Colon was too humiliated to tell her.
Finally, the Air Force made a deal. Reyes-Colon did not have to submit a list or admit to anything; if he waived his right to a hearing, he would be discharged. Otherwise, he would be court-martialed and possibly sent to prison. He signed. Seven months after he had been pulled from his classes, an airman knocked on his door and told him he had twenty-four hours to leave the base. Reyes-Colon could not imagine returning home, so he bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles, where he would try to disappear—like the others.
The investigations sometimes took strange turns. Air Force Second Lieutenant Jeff Boler, fresh from Officers’ Training School, found himself caught up in one such OSI investigation while he was based in Orlando producing and directing Air Force films that documented flight exercises and training at various bases in Florida and the Caribbean.
Though he had ventured into the gay community only a year earlier, Boler was by now a regular at the Cactus Room, the local gay bar. Here he had met two sergeants from nearby McCoy Air Force Base, one of whom had been tipped off by a gay clerk in the OSI that a close friend of his was under investigation. The subject of the investigation, another buck sergeant, was currently stationed in the Philippines at Offutt Air Force Base. Boler’s drinking buddy wanted to warn his friend before the OSI got to him. But the OSI had already started interrogations of the sergeant’s friends at McCoy. By now, they figured all their phones were tapped. For the OSI, tapping phones was like intercepting mail—it was not supposed to happen, but any gay airman ever caught up in an investigation knew it did. The warning phone call needed to come from some base other than McCoy, and at that time Boler was working at the Naval Training Center in Orlando.
Boler made the call but was too late. OSI agents had already pulled the sergeant in. A few days later, OSI agents were in Boler’s office, too. The sergeant had written Jeff’s name and number down on his desk blotter. Did Jeff know this man? Did he know whether the man was a homosexual? Was he sure? Why had he called? Did Jeff know any homosexuals at all?
“Homosexuals?” Jeff asked in amazement. “Not that I am aware of,” he said. As for the call to Offutt Air Force Base, he said he had called about a film in production. How could he know on whose office blotter his name would end up?
The intensity of the investigation mystified Boler, until he heard why the OSI was so interested in this particular buck sergeant. His lover, it was said, was a four-star general in a top command position in one of the most strategically important branches of the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, a few weeks earlier, Boler heard that the general had abruptly retired.
FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA
It was a slow Sunday afternoon in the barracks. Private Perry Watkins was alone. Echoing through the deserted barracks, Watkins heard a group of men approaching his area. There were five of them, cooks from the floor above. They wanted blowjobs.
Perry said he was not interested. When the soldiers could not persuade Watkins to get interested, they tried to force him.
The rape attempt quickly turned into a noisy melee, with Perry leaping over lockers and shoving over bunks to protect himself. The soldiers grabbed him occasionally, but Perry discovered that terror gave him a strength he did not know he had, and even five men could not keep him down. Eventually, they tired of trying and sauntered away. Watkins was badly frightened. People got hurt in rapes; sometimes they got killed. The next morning, Perry was back in front of his supervisor.
“I want out of this motherfucker Army and I want out today,” he ranted. “You put me in here knowing I’m gay, and it’s your job to protect me.”
Records from the CID indicate that the official investigation started four days later. It was not, however, an investigation of the assault against Watkins in the barracks. It was an investigation of Watkins himself. If he wanted out of the Army, the CID insisted, he would have to prove he was gay and give them names of at least two people with whom he had had sex—one prior to his induction and one after. Watkins gave the names of two civilians. He also wrote out the names of the five men who had assaulted him in the barracks. He wanted them investigated, too, he said. The CID said it would get back to him on that.
Nearly two months passed. It was January 16, 1969, just four days before President Nixon’s inauguration, when Perry heard from the CID again. Both men Watkins named denied ever having sex with him. Therefore, the CID had concluded, “There is insufficient evidence to prove or disprove that Watkins committed acts of sodomy.”
Perry would stay in the Army. As to the men who had tried to rape him, the CID had never pursued that investigation, had not so much as spoken to any one of them.
Clearly, Watkins was stuck in the Army, and he would have to figure out his own way to cope, because he believed the Army would not help him one bit. A few days later, Perry asked his field officer to spread a simple message: If anybody ever tried to rape him again, he would not fight, he would take it. Sometime, whoever messed with him would have to go to sleep; when he did, Perry would rearrange his head with a bunk adapter—one of the steel rods that held barracks beds in place. The threat seemed to work; he was not bothered again.
Two days after Nixon’s inauguration, nine senators introduced legislation to abolish the military draft and institute an all-volunteer Army. Nixon was eager to cool down the potential for the kind of antiwar protests that had crippled his predecessor’s presidency and to fulfill his campaign promise to end conscription. Within a week, the new Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, announced that President Nixon had ordered him to devise a “detailed plan,” due at the end of the year, to replace the draft with a professional Army.
Meanwhile, antimilitary sentiment was spreading. The same day as the Laird announcement, the Yale University faculty voted to deny course credit in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). And, by faculty vote, ROTC instructors, who were mainly military officers assigned to the college, were no longer to be considered full professors at the university, as they had been in the past. A proponent of the move called it in keeping with “the temper of the times.” The military was furious at the civilian encroachment into a program that had long provided a majority of its officers. At the Pentagon, Brigadier General Clifford Hannum fumed, “Universities have a responsibility to do this job for their country.” But antiwar protesters argued the faculty had not gone far enough, that ROTC should be kicked off campus altogether.
The debate spread. ROTC buildings soon became a focus for peace-movement demonstrators across the country. Here was a thoroughly military institution right in their own backyard, one that could be held accountable to civilian values. It was the first time ROTC found itself the target of campus attacks for policies that were out of synch with the rest of the country. It would not be the last.
Two weeks after the Nixon administration launched its study on how to create a professional military, a small band of women walked into the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel, one of the most prestigious dining rooms in Manhattan. The head waiter and the maître d’ did their best to stop them. Women were not allowed in the Oak Room at lunchtime. However, the women would not be turned away. Well dressed in their best fur coats and heels, they strode across the burgundy carpet and seated themselves at two large, round tables. They asked for service. They were refused. They asked again, and were refused again. They waited, unserved, for a half hour and then went back outside for interviews with a mob of reporters. The demonstration, said members of a three-year-old group called the National Organization for Women (NOW), served notice that women would challenge discrimination against women wherever it existed in the United States.
There was more bravado to the protest than actual challenge. Few women were sympathetic to the cause. Writing about the incident in the New York Post two days later, columnist Harriet Van Horne asserted, “Women lose so much—beginning with charm, dignity and a certain mystery—when they carry on like strumpets in foolish causes.… A sexual ban in this context can hardly be termed illegal or immoral. It is simply the way of the world at lunchtime.”
Though the antiwar movement had spawned a New Left that challenged capitalistic ideology, there was little sympathy for redefining gender roles. At the “counterinaugural” protesting Nixon’s inauguration, participants booed off the stage those women who attacked male chauvinism. Still, challenging conventional male/female roles was so audacious it seized the nation’s attention. And it seemed that every day another sacrosanct cultural institution came under attack. A radical offshoot of New York City’s NOW, called the Feminists, picketed the city’s marriage bureau, claiming that marriage demeaned women. Another new women’s group, the Redstockings, began holding public hearings on the issue of abortion, advancing the notion that abortion should be legalized. A high school student sued the New York Board of Education because she was refused permission to enroll in a metal-shop class. Though it was not clear at the time, this new assertion of the right of women to participate fully in society would inspire dramatic changes in the U.S. military in the decades to come.
FEBRUARY 6, 1969
SHORT STOP DISCO
MUNICH, WEST GERMANY
Gay life in Europe was more exciting than Jerry Rosanbalm could have imagined: ski weekends in the Tirol and the Alps, exploring the gay bars in Innsbruck, meeting glamorous jet-setters. He had even dined with a gay German prince. Work was going well, too. In January, he had received his promotion to captain, and his officer-evaluation reports showed good performance in his intelligence mission. And then on an early February night at the Short Stop, a gay disco in Munich, he met Karel Rohan and fell in love. Tall and handsome, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes, the nineteen-year-old Rohan had fled Czechoslovakia five months earlier when Russian tanks had crushed his country’s brief attempt at liberalization known as the “Prague Spring.” It had been more than a year since Jerry had seen Don Winn fall from snipers’ bullets in Quang Nagh, and he was ready for love again.
GREENWICH VILLAGE
NEW YORK CITY
Roberto Reyes-Colon finally found the courage to write to his mother about what had happened in the Air Force. Ana gathered her other six children together and explained to them: Roberto had not done any thing illegal, and, no matter what, he was still part of the family. Roberto’s six brothers and sisters agreed on that, and Ana dispatched Roberto’s sister Carola to Los Angeles to check up on her younger brother. By Christmas 1968, Roberto was back in New York with his family and getting ready to go to college.
It was during the holidays that some of his friends took him down to Christopher Street, the gay strip in Greenwich Village. It seemed a wonderful time to be gay in New York, in spite of certain strictures. Most owners of gay bars, for example, enforced the rule that patrons at the bar could not face away from the bartender. The New York State Liquor Authority had ruled that homosexuals looking away from the bar were guilty of “accosting” with their eyes, an activity that, if permitted, could lose the bar its license. Homosexuals could not walk around in a bar, either, since they might use that opportunity to “accost” other men with their eyes. If someone at the bar wanted to join his friends at a table, therefore, the bartender accompanied him, carrying his drink.
There was a new place on Sheridan Square, however, a private club that charged a two-dollar membership fee and offered unparalleled freedom. You could walk around and cruise, and even dance, something few gay bars anywhere in the country allowed. The bar at 53 Christopher Street drew a party crowd of drag queens and a lot of young Puerto Rican men like Reyes-Colon. On just about any weekend night in the early months of 1969, you could find Roberto there, at the Stonewall Inn.