The Sanction of the Victim
MEMORANDUM
MUNICH STATION, 766TH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DETACHMENT
66TH MILITARY INTELLIGENCE GROUP
UNITED STATES ARMY, EUROPE
On 10 March 1969, Munich Station 766th MID, 66th MI Gp was informed by the Munich Office of the 13th CID that [an informant] had indicated that he had knowledge of homosexuals assigned to the 66th MI Gp, but would not disclose the information to the CID. Munich Station contacted [the informant] and, after five hours of discussion [the informant] admitted he had seen [Captain Gerald Lynn Rosanbalm] participate in anal so domy with a Czechoslovakian male national.…
On March 18, 1969, a secret cable was sent from Captain Jerry Rosanbalm’s commanding officer to the deputy chief of staff for intelligence for the United States Army in Europe:
This headquarters is presently conducting a Limited Counterintelligence Investigation to confirm or refute allegations of a serious nature against Captain Gerald Lynn Rosanbalm, 05 336 692, a member of this Group. The allegations concern Captain Rosanbalm’s moral turpitude, financial responsibility and continuing association with foreign nationals who may be of questionable character with interest inimical to the United States.… Request that this headquarters be authorized to conduct a Subject Interview of Captain Rosanbalm and, if he is willing, a polygraph examination.
Within hours, the interview was authorized.
The next afternoon as Jerry Rosanbalm lay in bed with Karel Rohan, he heard noises—someone was trying to force his way into the apartment. Naked and armed with a tennis racket, Jerry leapt into the hallway to investigate, when the door burst open and a cadre of military police crashed in. With guns drawn and cameras ready, military police shouted their disappointment at not having caught the two in bed. Karel made a vain attempt to hide under the covers as agents pressed into the bedroom and then tried to force Rosanbalm onto the bed for the photographer. After Rosanbalm fought off the agents with his tennis racket, somebody yelled, “Screw it—just arrest him.” The agents dragged both men naked out of the bedroom and pronounced Captain Gerald Lynn Rosanbalm under arrest for espionage against the United States.
The 727-page dossier on the investigation that followed does not record the content of the interviews between Rosanbalm and his interrogators, but it corroborates the substance of what Rosanbalm recalls in great detail. His first stop was his commanding officer’s desk, where the colonel told him what the Army believed it knew: Jerry was a traitor to his country and had become an agent for the Soviet Union. They had known this for months, the colonel said. They had been following him for months. They had tapes, photographs, witnesses, and all the evidence they needed to lock up Jerry for life. In a war zone he would be facing a firing squad. He said Jerry could make it easier on himself by admitting right now, “that you’re a queer and a Commie spy.”
Counterintelligence agents joined the colonel to question Rosanbalm. Military intelligence officers such as Rosanbalm—and his CO, for that matter—had little use for their counterintelligence colleagues. Military intelligence, which collected raw data through the glamorous business of espionage, considered counterintelligence personnel to be bimbos capable only of keeping filing cabinets locked. Counterintelligence thought members of military intelligence were prima donnas who believed they were better than everyone else. They clearly relished the opportunity to badger an MI officer, and a “queer” one at that. They used the word constantly. “You queer, you Commie spy queer,” they repeated ad nauseam, Rosanbalm recalled later. “Make it easy on yourself, you Commie queer, and tell us everything—who are your KGB handlers? Who are your Soviet contacts? Who else is a spy?”
Rosanbalm refused to talk. He knew they were lying. If they had suspected for months that he was involved in anything wrong, he would never have received his promotion to captain just six weeks earlier, and he would never have continued to have access to virtually all the classified Army intelligence in Europe.
When the first round of questioning failed, Jerry and Karel were taken to adjacent rooms in the Munich station of the Sixty-sixth Military In telligence Group. Rosanbalm tried to cut short his interrogation by asking for a lawyer. This was a national-security matter: Rosanbalm could not see a lawyer, counterintelligence agents informed him.
Then, according to the Army’s account, Karel Rohan freely gave a statement that he and Rosanbalm repeatedly engaged in “anal and oral sodomy.” Rosanbalm suspected the statement was not voluntary, because he could hear the sounds of somebody being beaten in the next room. Karel was shouting for help, and more shouts and scuffling ensued, and then more cries from Karel.
Jerry could make it easier on his “queer boyfriend,” his inquisitors said, even if he would not do it for himself. Rohan was an illegal refugee in Germany, fleeing a government that was not going to come to his defense, the agents reminded Jerry. They could beat him, they could even kill him, and nobody would care. They offered Rosanbalm a written confession that he was a Communist agent. “Sign it now,” they said. Jerry refused.
After a short break, MP interrogators resumed the questioning, focusing on gay issues. “Who else is queer?” they asked. He must know other queers in the Army, in intelligence. They would find out, anyway. He faced life in prison, they reminded him.
Rosanbalm refused to talk any more and the interrogation ended, after seventeen hours. Army intelligence records show that after about ten hours of questioning, Karel Rohan signed a statement saying he had participated in acts of sodomy with Captain Gerald Rosanbalm.
The next day, Rosanbalm was confined to his quarters. At the same time, cables flew across the Atlantic between Rosanbalm’s commander, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army in Europe, and the Pentagon in Washington. “Subject’s foreign service tour is curtailed and he will be returned to CONUS [continental United States] ASAP.… This action is necessary to prevent possible defection and/or to limit his opportunities to continue as a definite security risk.” Another cable warned, “Because he has occupied several extremely sensitive positions, his continued presence in the command could seriously jeopardize the accomplishment of the intelligence mission of this organization.”
The orders were given to bring Rosanbalm home immediately and for his diplomatic passport to be seized in order to prevent him from traveling elsewhere. Two days after his arrest, handcuffed and escorted by two captains, Jerry boarded a train in Munich bound for Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, a jeep loaded with armed guards took him directly to a commercial jet on the airport tarmac. Armed guards walked him to his seat, with the rest of the plane gaping at the drama. Jerry would be met in New York City by more guards, they told him, and they left.
Through the entire flight, Rosanbalm contemplated his uncertain future. Less than fourteen months after he had nearly died for his country in Vietnam, he was branded a traitor and faced jail time, not because of any evidence that he had done wrong but because it was assumed a homosexual was a Judas and that any homosexual contact with any citizen from behind the Iron Curtain entailed espionage. His record against Communists in Vietnam did not matter; his Purple Heart and his wounds did not matter. If they could not get him on the espionage charges, they would nail him for sodomy. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, that meant five years in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.
When his plane landed at Kennedy Airport, there was no military escort to greet him. Rosanbalm collected his luggage and reported to Fort Hamilton, New York, as per his orders.
The commanding officer looked quizzical when Rosanbalm appeared in his office. No one had alerted him to expect the captain. He could tell by Rosanbalm’s MOS number 9668 that he was military intelligence, and he knew military intelligence personnel trained in area studies were not supposed to be in the continental United States. But that was all he knew. He assigned Rosanbalm to officer’s quarters to wait for further orders.
MAY 1969
CHARLESTON NAVAL STATION
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
Jesse Helms had a way of talking out of the side of his mouth and he carried himself with a rigidity that people noticed, even then. But to young television reporter Armistead Maupin, Helms, the executive vice president of WRAL-TV in Raleigh, where Maupin worked, was downright fatherly, and Maupin was clearly Jesse’s golden boy.
Maupin had made a small name for himself in conservative circles with a column he had written for the Daily Tarheel, the campus newspaper of the University of North Carolina. The feature poked fun at the foibles of antiwar protesters and other assorted college lefties in a style that crossed the satire of Art Buchwald with the rock-ribbedness of William F. Buckley, Jr. Helms railed publicly at many of the same people in his five-minute televised commentaries every day. Some people even thought Jesse Helms ought to get into politics, in spite of the fact that he was a Republican in a state of “yellow-dog” Democrats—those who would vote for any yellow dog as long as he was a Democrat. Maupin, for one, believed this would change. By now, in the 1960s, it was the Republicans who addressed the issues of states rights, which the South held so dear. States rights was another issue upon which Helms and Maupin could see eye-to-eye.
But there was an issue on which they would never agree, an issue that emerged when Maupin was assigned to do a story on the marriage of a black man to the daughter of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Maupin had interviewed the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who said flatly of the Secretary of State, “What else could you expect from a man who is a practicing homosexual?” Maupin ran back to Helms with the quote, wondering whether to use it. Helms despised Rusk, Maupin knew, but still refused even to consider airing the film clip. “That’s the worst thing you can say about anybody,” Helms said solemnly. Maupin could tell Helms thought the issue should not even be discussed, because by now Maupin knew the rules: Don’t talk about it.
But in early 1969, at his first duty station at Charleston Naval Station in Charleston, South Carolina, Navy Ensign Armistead Maupin needed to talk about it. He had always known. He had had mad crushes on boys since he was thirteen. And all through college, his sexual fantasies were of other men, the strapping country boys he would see working in the tobacco fields. But the issue came to a head once he was out of Officer Candidate School and assigned to the USS Everglades, a destroyer tender. He had gone walking one night on the city’s old Battery, where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired. He had stopped and was looking into the cool black water of Charleston Harbor when he noticed a very effeminate-looking man watching him. After a while, the man walked over to him and asked the time.
“I’m not what you’re looking for,” Maupin said brusquely.
The man quickly apologized and left. Maupin continued staring into the water, knowing that indeed he was what the man was looking for. He caught up with the fellow, apologized, and brought him back to the carriage house he had rented for his off-base housing. At twenty-five, he had sex for the first time.
Afterward, Maupin worried because his officer’s cap had been in full view on his dresser. What if the man appeared on ship the next day to blackmail him? He had always heard that homosexuals got blackmailed. Still, he awoke the next morning feeling exhilarated, as if he had gone over the brink. The radio was playing the song “Good Morning Girl” by the group Neon Philharmonic: “Things look different now.…”
The panic only set in later. It lasted for days. He was a homosexual. Would they notice? Could he accept it?
He went back to the Battery after that, to more sexual encounters, and more guilt and confusion. He was not ready for the humiliation and disgrace. Nothing in his life had prepared him for that; he was the great-great-grandson of a respected Confederate general, Lawrence O’Bryan Branch. His distinguished family had been steeped in southern tradition for generations. He did not want to spend his life as an outcast. There was, he thought, one solution. Maupin’s father had always believed that history provided every generation of southern males with a war in which they could prove their manhood. Maupin could move beyond his guilt and prove he was a man: He would volunteer for Vietnam.
53 CHRISTOPHER STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Roberto Reyes-Colon was sitting on a stoop on Greenwich Avenue with some other young men when they heard a commotion a few blocks away near Sheridan Square. The group ambled toward Christopher Street. It was warm and the moon was full. At the Stonewall Inn, a crowd had gathered around a group of policemen who were trying to haul some drag queens out of the bar and into paddy wagons.
The raids were routine; there had been five on gay Village bars in the last three weeks alone; but the reaction on the streets was anything but routine on this night. The queers were fighting back.
They started chanting: “Christopher Street belongs to the queens / Christopher Street belongs to the queens.” Somebody threw something—a can, then a bottle, then a rock. The police looked mystified at first. When the crowd surged toward them menacingly, the police barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall and called for reinforcements.
Reyes-Colon felt his anger grow as new units of police arrived to rescue their comrades from the marauding drag queens. It was the same feeling of anger that had replaced his shame and humiliation over the Air Force discharge a year before. He was a decorated Vietnam veteran and had risked his life for his country, but in New York City he faced arrest if he did not sit on a bar stool facing the bartender. It felt exhilarating to pick up a rock and throw it at the police, who so personified the prejudice that had shaped the past few years of his life.
Rocks shattered the window of a jewelry store next to the Stonewall, but there was no looting. This demonstration was not about looting; it was about rage. It was about people insisting on their rights. It was not only the first gay riot; it was the beginning of a powerful new movement.
According to authorities, the Stonewall Inn was raided that night because the establishment had been selling liquor without a license. That the Stonewall lacked a license was true, but it had been selling liquor without a license just a few blocks from the Sixth Precinct station house for some time. Most people assumed the real reason for the raid was that the bar owners had fallen behind in their payoffs to the police department.
As Donn Teal recounted in his book The Gay Militants, protesters gathered for four nights thereafter to face off against the police. It was not your typical police/rioter confrontation. Tactical squads approaching Sheridan Square came up against the “Stonewall Girls,” who formed a kick line against them. As word of the riots spread through Manhattan, college students and political activists already familiar with the rhetoric of revolution from the antiwar movement joined the cause. By the last night, the Stonewall Inn had become something of a tourist attraction. Older gays fretted that nothing good would come of it, but others sensed the opposite. As poet Allen Ginsberg marveled to a Village Voice reporter, “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”
It was in those nights that the words gay power were first heard. Roberto Reyes-Colon came back every night to join in the low-intensity guerrilla warfare. Also there every night was Army Captain Jerry Rosanbalm, still on hold in Brooklyn at Fort Hamilton. The past three months had been the most painful and humiliating he had ever endured. He got the most embarrassing assignments the brass could dream up. He was put in charge of cleaning a warehouse, for example—alone. They insisted he be done with the sweeping in fifteen minutes, though it was a job that would clearly take two days. When he was not finished in the allotted time, he was written up for insubordination. He spent his days raking leaves and sweeping warehouses and waiting. No charges had yet been filed. Slowly, his humiliation was turning to anger, too.
That was why he had gone back to Sheridan Square every night, though he went with trepidation. Someone could be following him; he could be at risk here. But he could not pull himself away from what was happening. As the nights passed, Rosanbalm saw the street fighters increasingly made up of radicals and antiwar activists, and Rosanbalm was neither radical nor against the war. But he still responded to what was going on here. Something was changing.
What followed in the next weeks was an explosion of activism and organizing. Ten days after the first rock was thrown at the Stonewall, the first “gay power meeting” of young radicals wrote its first manifesto: “What Homosexuals Want.” From a twenty-plus-year perspective, some of the demands read like anachronisms of the time, such as a demand for the reform of the New York State Liquor Authority. Others were issues that would dominate gay organizing for the next generation, such as a demand for the repeal of sodomy laws and the enactment of gay civil rights protections. The substance of the manifesto, however, was less remarkable than its style. These were not polite homosexuals with discreet names such as the Mattachine Society. These were angry, in-your-face militants who were out to rock the boat. As one flier proclaimed, “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.”
Within weeks of the Stonewall riot, newborn Gay Liberation Front (GLF) chapters had sprung up in every major city in the United States, holding encounter groups modeled on the consciousness-raising groups of the new women’s movement. Leaders in other radical movements were wide-eyed at the fervor and seeming potential of these new activists. As the radical San Francisco Free Press observed, “Every homosexual is a potential revolutionary.”
But few mainstream newspapers found reason to cover the Stonewall riots and even in New York the organizing of homosexuals afterward received practically no media attention. So much else was happening—Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for instance. Actress Sharon Tate had died in a strange cultlike murder in Los Angeles. And the first man had walked on the moon. It would be years before the broader culture took notice.
AUGUST 17, 1969
DA NANG, SOUTH VIETNAM
Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich was a good Mormon, but it had not helped him contain his homosexual attractions. He had developed a crush on another airman in the Red Horse Battalion, to which he had been assigned. Like a lot of military buddies, they became an inseparable pair and Leonard wondered whether maybe his buddy felt the same way he did—until one day, the other airman started talking about faggots and queers. Lord, how he hated faggots, he said. Matlovich could not bear it; he asked to be reassigned to Da Nang.
He had tried so hard. He had prayed so fervently. Here he was twenty-six years old and he had never made love to another person. Sometimes he thought it would be better to die.
He wondered years later whether this was not what he had sought that early August, just weeks before his second Vietnam tour was to end, when he volunteered to clear a heavily mined area near Da Nang.
It was an agonizingly hot afternoon. After a few hours of digging, Leonard stuck his shovel in the ground and prepared to sit—except the shovel hit something hard. Leonard tried pushing it again, harder.
Later, Matlovich remembered watching the explosion rise out of the ground. His next memory was of thinking, My lung. Where is my lung? He knew he still had all his limbs, because every inch of his body was in excruciating pain. He told himself to remain conscious. If he slipped into shock, he knew he might never come back. After a while, he realized that he could take the pain. As he lay there, he discovered it was almost easy to accept, compared to the suffering he had felt in his soul. And for the first time he knew, truly, how much pain he had been in.
In the months during which Sergeant Leonard Matlovich was recovering from his wounds, Gay Liberation Front chapters were forming across the United States and shaping an ideology. By November, four months after the Stonewall Inn riots, a central article of faith had emerged from the new movement: Self-hatred was more crippling than the hatred of others. And something else became clear: Gay libbers would not respect society’s taboo, Don’t talk about it. They were going to talk about it whenever they could. As Craig Schoonmaker advised in Homosexual Renaissance, one of scores of gay papers that appeared almost overnight, “Homosexuals can effectively demand respect from others only if we first respect ourselves—as homosexuals. That requires that we admit to ourselves that we are homosexual; that we affirm it, understand it, realize it in all its implications. I am homosexual. Say it! aloud; ‘I am homosexual.’ Shout it, whisper it. Laugh it, cry it. State it, proclaim it, confess it in sobs, but say it.… Not ‘Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual,’ but ‘I am homosexual.’”
This demand for openness also created a tension among gays that would persist for the rest of the century. Not only was a heterosexual establishment to be fought, but so were gays who would not come out, the gay libbers believed. Closeted gay men, activists argued, tacitly consented to society’s prejudice. Cultural prejudice had not only succeeded in making most heterosexuals hate gays; it had succeeded in making most gay people hate themselves. This, more than anything else, was what the new movement was determined to change. Hence, gay pride became a movement watchword. “Coming out,” or acknowledging one’s homosexuality—either privately to oneself or publicly—became like a bornagain experience to the new gay activists.
In the first issue of the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper—Come Out!—the group declared, “The passive acceptance of homosexuality as a perversion or emotional illness IN YOUR OWN MIND plays into the hands of your persecutors. This is called THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM.”
The new gay movement quickly merged its aims with the panoply of liberation movements asserting themselves in that era. Committed GLFers, therefore, not only demonstrated for gay rights but were ideologically inclined to demonstrate for black rights, women’s rights, Third World countries, and farm workers. Some of these alignments—with women’s right to privacy in the abortion issue, for example—made sense, but others lacked much intellectual consistency. As Donn Teal later noted, gay libbers joined their leftist comrades cutting Cuban sugar in the Venceremos Brigade, despite the fact that Fidel Castro himself locked up Cuban gays in concentration camps. Gay lib leaders solemnly quoted Chairman Mao’s wisdom from their own little red books, though Mao’s Red Guards were known to castrate “sexual degenerates” publicly. GLFers handed out FREE BOBBY SEALE posters alongside Black Panthers, even though black liberation guru Malcolm X had commented, “All white men are blond, blue-eyed faggots.” Gays who had once been Uncle Toms to the Establishment were now Uncle Toms to the New Left.
The trend allied Gay Liberation to the crusade against the war in Vietnam, as well. Since the people who marched in the GLF protests were largely the same people who for the past two or three years had been attending antiwar pickets, the affiliation was natural. By November, at the second Moratorium Against the War, a contingent of fifteen thousand gay protesters joined the massive antiwar march in San Francisco. Heterosexual marchers shouted the then-routine chant:
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
Dare to struggle, dare to win.
While one gay contingent offered:
Ho Ho Homosexual
The status quo is ineffectual.
Favored GLF signs at such events included SOLDIERS—MAKE EACH OTHER—NOT WAR and SUCK COCK TO BEAT THE DRAFT.
The progay but antiwar alignment would have repercussions for decades to come, particularly for those Americans who were gay and chose to serve in the U.S. military. The gay movement was against all forms of oppression, but it wanted nothing to do with the anguish of gays in uniform. In late August 1969, a week after a land mine blew Leonard Matlovich apart, the radical Youth Committee of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Kansas City resolved, “The homophile movement must totally reject the insane war in Vietnam and refuse to encourage complicity in the war and support of the war machine, which may well be turned against us. We oppose any attempts by the movement to obtain security clearances for homosexuals since they contribute to the war machine.”
An editorial in the San Francisco Free Press agreed: “Homosexuals should not fight in a war propagated by a society that fucks us over in all its institutions. We will not fight in an army that discriminates against us … that rapes us and gives us less than honorable discharges.”
From the start, there were dissenters. When the New York City Gay Liberation Front collapsed amid internal ideological struggles, the Gay Activists Alliance took over its place, and a former Air Force sergeant named Roberto Reyes-Colon became one of its earliest members. He was a pacifist now and wore love beads, long hair, and bell-bottoms, but he sometimes argued that groups like the GAA should not turn their backs on gay soldiers. The Air Force had been his way out of New York’s mean streets; a way of easing the burden on his mother, who would die young, working three jobs to make sure all her seven children got a college education, a way for a better life.
GAA activists listened sympathetically and agreed that no matter what Reyes-Colon might have done to help the war machine in Vietnam, he had been a victim of the system rather than a despoiler. But at a time when the military represented everything that idealists in all the liberation movements wanted to change, few could muster much enthusiasm for helping anybody associated with the armed forces. Efforts for equal rights for gays would not extend to gays in uniform. The discrimination against them would, in effect, have the sanction of the gay movement for many years to come.
To say that these attitudes were dominant among gay Americans would be vastly inaccurate. At this point, gay libbers comprised only a fraction of a percent of gays, but, because they were the only people talking out loud about homosexuality, their voices were the only ones heard. For most gay Americans at the dawning of the 1970s, life continued to be lived as it had been for generations, in silence and in hiding.
In the autumn of 1969, during his long recuperation, Leonard Matlovich was the hero he had always wanted to be. His parents doted on him. Nurses took special care of him. He would soon receive his Purple Heart. Once he was well enough to be back in the barracks, he finally felt as if he fit in. He even went to great lengths to mock an airman who was caught with a gay porn magazine. Stupid little fairy.
Anybody suspected of being queer could expect a good razzing from Mat. He had proven his manhood. He was one of the guys at last.