21

The Color Purple
(Part I)

MAY 20, 1975

LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE

HAMPTON, VIRGINIA

“Under the provisions of AFM 39–12, Chapter 2, Section H, paragraph 2–104b(1), I am initiating action against you with a view to effecting your discharge from the United States Air Force.”

Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich received the neatly typed letter as he arrived for work. Until that day, Matlovich had done nothing to pursue publicity for his case. The ostensible point of his letter had been to convince the Air Force to allow an openly gay member to serve, and a small part of Matlovich actually believed that an exception might be made in his case. Within days of his request, however, it was clear that the Air Force would handle the case as a routine gay discharge. Agents from the Office of Special Investigations suggested that Matlovich might be faking homosexuality to make some political point. They demanded proof that he was gay, including confessions to specific sexual acts and the names of other gay airmen. Though Matlovich declined to name others, he did write a letter acknowledging “mutual masturbation, anal intercourse, and fellatio.” The final OSI investigation included the admission, as well as evidence from another sergeant that “he suspected that you were homosexual.” The official notification that discharge proceedings would begin jarred Matlovich and removed the final impediment to notifying the press. That afternoon, his civilian attorney, David Addlestone, called a New York Times reporter and arranged an interview.

Matlovich also needed a military lawyer, willing to launch a broad attack on a Department of Defense regulation. It would not be easy; many Air Force lawyers were unsympathetic to the cause, and even those with private sympathies were bound to be reluctant to go after the organization that issued their paychecks twice a month. After much investigation, Matlovich heard about one attorney among them who would not be afraid to buck the system. That was Captain Jon Larson Jaenicke.

Jaenicke had served four of the five years he owed the Air Force for financing his college education through the ROTC program. The twenty-eight-year-old attorney knew he was not going to make a career in uniform. Though he had grown up in South Carolina, his attitudes toward homosexuality reflected the fact that both his parents were from New York City and he had attended law school at New York University. He was cool, everyone told Lenny.

Both Sergeant Matlovich and Jaenicke remembered the afternoon when Matlovich walked into the legal office late on a Friday afternoon and handed Jaenicke the letter he had sent to the Air Force Secretary, admitting to homosexual acts.

“This is dumb,” Jaenicke said. “Why did you do this? I could have gotten you out without anyone ever knowing you were gay. You shouldn’t have told them.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Matlovich said. “Read the letter again.”

When Jaenicke did understand, he was intrigued. Matlovich was going to challenge the military’s entire policy. That night, Jaenicke went home and mixed one martini for himself and another for his wife. Settling into his easy chair, he told her, “The next six months are going to be incredible.”

Three days after Leonard Matlovich received his notification of discharge proceedings, Staff Sergeant Rudolf “Skip” Keith raised his hand in a race-relations class at Dover Air Force Base near Washington. As an African American, Keith was certainly sensitive to the issues of racial discrimination, but, Keith asked, “What about discrimination against gays?” That question sparked a lively discussion during which somebody asked Keith whether he was gay.

Yes, he was, Keith said, adding that just as many negative stereotypes of blacks had evaporated once white people actually got to know and work with them, so would stereotypes of gays. The problem was that most gay people concealed their homosexuality. Therefore, heterosexuals lacked an accurate perception of the reality of who homosexuals were and what kind of people they were.

All of this was pretty heady stuff for what was normally a fairly predictable hour of antiracist indoctrination. Keith himself was surprised that most of the class seemed genuinely interested in the issue.

Keith’s roommate was less receptive, however, and abruptly moved out of the apartment they shared when he heard of Keith’s candid disclosure. There might be repercussions at work, Keith realized then, and the next day he called together his crew. After seven years in the Air Force, the twenty-five-year-old had still loved his job. He had known since he was eight growing up in the black neighborhoods of Washington that he would serve in the Air Force, where he had become a jet maintenance specialist. At Dover, he was crew chief on a team that serviced the huge C-5A cargo planes. They consistently received top ratings for their work and they worked together like the pieces of a finely synchronized watch. Still, Keith knew that the OSI often assumed guilt by association and he did not want anyone on his crew to suffer for his remarks. He offered to transfer out if any of his crew was uncomfortable working with an openly gay man.

“Your personal life is your business,” said one man, to general nods of agreement. Though he heard nothing from the Air Force about his disclosure, he girded for a possible confrontation. He resolved he would go to court to stay in if he had to.

At about the same time, Private First Class Barbara Randolph and Private Debbie Watson of the Women’s Army Corps at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, had some unsettling news for their commanding officer. They were going public with their case, becoming the first women in the history of the military to challenge the regulation excluding homosexuals. The newspapers loved their story, since there was no question that both Randolph, twenty-two, and Watson, twenty, were very good soldiers. Randolph had only recently been Fort Devens’s “WAC of the Month” and “Soldier of the Month.” Both women had resolved they would go all the way to the Supreme Court to stay in if they had to.

Meanwhile, in the fashionable seaside city of Santa Barbara, California, the Navy was gearing up for its own homosexual battle. In early 1975, the state was in an uproar over legislation to repeal California’s law banning sodomy. At a public meeting, Gary Hess, forty-four, a respected member of the community who was on the Santa Barbara County Board of Education and vice president of Santa Barbara Educational Television, argued with two local conservative politicians who spoke against the repeal. For normal citizens, asserting an opinion on a controversial issue was an inalienable right. However, Hess was also a commander in the United States Naval Reserve, with twenty-three years in active-duty and Reserve service. According to documents later filed in federal court, those conservative politicians whom Hess had challenged contacted the Naval Reserve. An investigation found evidence that Hess, a divorced father of four, was bisexual, and the Navy started proceedings against him.

Once again, the military faced an unfamiliar response. Hess went public with his case and resolved to go to court to stay in the Navy if he had to.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, a former Navy ensign named Jim Woodward filed his first papers in what would become a nearly two-decade-long battle against the military’s antigay regulation. In late 1974, Woodward was on the USS Constellation during its WESTPAC cruise when he fell in with the ship’s notorious “Connie Girls” and learned of the daily harassment of gay enlisted men. Though he had only recently come to grips with his own homosexuality, he wrote a letter to his commanding officer explaining that he was gay and that he wanted to continue serving in the Navy. Since the missive was obviously framed to instigate a court case, Woodward was not discharged but transferred to the inactive Reserve. Since technically he remained in the military, the move denied him a discharge that he could legally contest. Woodward resolved to fight the maneuver just the same, all the way to the Supreme Court, which is precisely where his case ended up.

Most remarkable about all these cases was that, though they were all percolating simultaneously at different bases throughout the country, none of the people contesting them knew of the others. These were all separate, spontaneous acts of insurgence. Ohio State University legal scholar Rhonda Rivera, a leading expert on issues of sexual orientation and military law, later noted that between the Korean War and this moment in 1975, the U.S. military drummed out between forty to fifty thousand people for being homosexual. Only a handful challenged their separations in court, and when they did, Rivera wrote, they “did not voluntarily admit their homosexuality and, in fact, all but one person consistently denied it.” Furthermore, challengers argued against their discharges on procedural grounds of insubstantial evidence, improperly obtained evidence, or improperly placed burden of proof. None challenged the legality of the government’s policy itself. In the first weeks of May 1975, however, a critical mass had been achieved and the old era had come to an end.

Notice of the new era appeared on page one of The New York Times on May 26, Memorial Day. Matlovich’s challenge, the story reported, “was the opening round of a classic test case—a clear-cut challenge by a ‘perfect’ challenger.… At stake are major, possibly competing, issues and rights—the military’s interest in having rules it deems necessary to maintaining an adequate armed service system; the homosexuals’ constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection of the laws. Perhaps also at stake is the future of thousands of other service personnel.”

Speaking for the Air Force, Major General Jeanne Holm, a champion of the right of women to serve in the military, became a champion against the rights of gays. The gay exclusion, Holm said, let young people going into the Air Force “know they aren’t in the company of people who have what they consider aberrant behavior.” Parents would surely object to gays in the military, she continued. “Can you imagine, for instance, being on a submarine, isolated, and being concerned about having homosexuals around preying on young people, or being leaders?” Holm asked. “I think it would be intolerable.” Nobody would want to take orders from a homosexual; few would want to serve with them, she said, adding, “People don’t like it.”

Matlovich’s phone started ringing the morning the story appeared, and it did not stop. Every news service wanted a quote. Time magazine was preparing a story. “CBS News” chartered a plane to fly to Norfolk to tape a piece for that evening’s news. Still, Matlovich needed to tend to one unfinished piece of business. He had told his mother he was gay on the day he gave his letter to the Air Force. Mrs. Matlovich was not convinced that Lenny really was gay; she rather thought this was all part of his newfound crusade for human rights. But the two had grown so close over the years that even if he was a homosexual, she would not reject him. Matlovich had not told his father, however. On the morning of May 26, Leonard Matlovich, Jr., phoned home.

“We’ve got to tell Dad right now,” he said.

It was not necessary, his mother answered. The Times story had appeared in their hometown newspaper. After reading the piece, Leonard Matlovich, Sr., had locked himself in his bedroom and cried. But the next time Lenny visited his parents in Florida, his father greeted him at the door, paused a moment, and then wrapped him in a bear hug, the first he had given Lenny since he was a kid.

JUNE 5, 1975

SUEZ CANAL

EGYPT

Ensign Vernon “Copy” Berg stood on the bridge of the USS Little Rock, snapping pictures of Egyptians berserk with joy. The Suez Canal, devastated by the Six-Day War in 1967, had been reopened at last. Thousands lined the banks, climbed up phone poles, piled into little boats, and waved from the roofs of buildings. The USS Little Rock, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, in “full-dress ship,” would lead all other ships through the narrow channel of water into the Red Sea.

The mid-1970s was not an ideal time to be part of the United States military stationed overseas. The Vietnam War had been even more unpopular in Europe than in the United States, and American ships found themselves unwelcome in the ports of such traditional allies as Greece, Spain, and France. The Little Rock was home-ported in Gaeta, Italy, near Naples, a pit of a town with no base or facilities. Morale among the sailors and their families was low. Of the five ensigns on the Little Rock, Berg was the only Academy graduate, which presaged jealousies. But his positive attitude saw him through his service, and he managed to have a pretty good time aboard the “Show Boat,” as he called the Little Rock, though he formed no intimate relationships. There had been a close encounter when a journalist second class named Laurent John Crofwell showed interest. Crofwell even went to Berg’s villa one night and was about to spend the night, but he left abruptly, before any physical contact, as Berg recalled. He thought Crofwell was struggling just as Berg had years earlier. He did not think much more of it and over the ensuing weeks the two resumed a normal working relationship on the Little Rock.

Meanwhile, Berg looked forward to Lawrence Gibson’s imminent arrival. Gibson would arrive while the Little Rock was visiting Yugoslavia, so Berg left notes for his lover throughout the apartment. It was at about this time, while Berg was still in Yugoslavia and Gibson had not yet arrived, that Berg’s sister came early for a visit. Another ensign’s wife, a dour Mormon as it turned out, let her into Berg’s apartment, where they found the little notes everywhere, with affectionate allusions obvious to anyone who saw them, all addressed to Lawrence.

By then, however, Berg was already under investigation, as he had been for several months.

JUNE 29, 1975

CENTRAL PARK

NEW YORK CITY

The crowd stretched on for blocks in front of the makeshift stage, here for the Gay Pride March commemorating the sixth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Their placards promoted the slogans of the day:

HOW DARE YOU PRESUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL?

YOU CAN OVERCOME YOUR HETEROSEXUALITY

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CANNOT BE DEFEATED

AVENGE OSCAR WILDE

Leonard Matlovich surveyed the throng with wonder. Two years earlier, he had believed he was the only homosexual in the world. Now he was one among tens of thousands. How had he allowed so much of his life to be wasted in loneliness? A cheer rose from the crowd when Matlovich delivered the line he had used in every newspaper and television interview since his case went public. “The military gave me a medal for killing two men,” he said, “but it wants to give me a discharge for loving one.”

With Matlovich were the other heroes of the moment: Staff Sergeant Skip Keith in his blue Air Force uniform and Barbara Randolph and Debbie Watson from Fort Devens. When the four of them stood side by side at the microphone, waving to the crowd that billowed through Central Park, a huge ovation rose up and it felt as if their spirits had also lifted into the air and soared over the city’s skylines. It was a moment Leonard Matlovich would cherish for the rest of his life.

“If every gay person turned purple, there wouldn’t be any prejudice anymore.”

Events a decade later would imbue this statement with an eerie irony, but, in the early 1970s, it was the central article of faith for young gay activists. They believed if people knew how many of their friends, family members, and acquaintances were homosexual—because, for example, they had all turned purple—the stereotypes would fall under the weight of their own fraud. For years, earnest activists had insisted at press conferences that the greater population of gay people remained in hiding. The assertion was problematic. All the public ever saw of such press conferences were wild-eyed, long-haired militants who did not look a bit like the average Americans for whom they claimed to be speaking. The appearance of Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich and other gay military personnel began to change that.

The pace of change had been so fast, it was hard for Roberto Reyes-Colon to believe it had been just six years since the Stonewall riots and, as he surveyed the thousands in Central Park, it was also hard to believe that the movement had grown so large. Like Matlovich, Reyes-Colon was living quite differently from how he had ever imagined he would when he cowered in the face of Air Force purges. After earning his college degree and serving two years in the Peace Corps, Reyes-Colon, now twenty-nine, had returned to New York City to teach grade school. But before he took the job at a school on West Ninety-first Street, he told the school board that he was gay. If they had any qualms about hiring homosexuals, he wanted to know it up front. When he became involved in neighborhood community-action groups, he also let everyone know, believing that attitudes toward gays would never change until every homosexual asserted himself or herself in this way. These were bold times, but Reyes-Colon was confident that with the changes coming so fast, antigay prejudice might be wiped out in four or five years. At The Advocate, the nation’s leading gay newspaper, editors privately debated whether final approval for a federal, gay-rights bill would come when the Congress convened in 1979 or whether it would be delayed until 1981.

The gay liberation movement of the early 1970s had become the gay-rights movement, focusing less on personal liberation and more on working within the political system to achieve gay rights. Though these more moderate leaders were under constant attack from radical factions of harder-line organizations, their patient lobbying was paying off in a string of heretofore-unimaginable successes. In statehouses across the country, legislatures took up gay-related issues. Nine legislatures were considering gay civil rights bills, and in three states the measures passed at least one legislative house. In 1975 alone, ten cities and three counties passed gay-rights ordinances. Scores of colleges passed policies banning discrimination by anyone recruiting employees or doing business on campus. There was even talk of organizing efforts for gay-rights laws in such conservative cities as Miami.

The day after the Gay Pride rally in Central Park, the state of Washington’s legislature made that state the twelfth to repeal its sodomy law. Within weeks, the move was followed in such disparate states as California and Nebraska, where Christian fundamentalists dubbed the reform the “Child Victimization Act of 1975.” By international standards, the legislation to repeal sodomy laws was not a remarkable occurrence. France, for example, had tossed out its sodomy laws in 1810. The United Kingdom repealed its “unnatural acts” statutes in 1967. Though tardy, the United States reforms represented an essential step toward equality, since the sodomy statutes, even if unenforced, had the effect of bestowing on all homosexuals the legal status of unapprehended felons.

The most significant legal breakthrough came four days after the Gay Pride March, on July 3, when the U.S. Civil Service Commission announced it would end its policy forbidding the employment of gay people in federal jobs. The decision followed a federal court decision that ruled that the Civil Service must assert a nexus, or a rational connection, between employees’ conduct and the ability to perform their jobs. Since no connection could be found between homosexuality and job performance, the Civil Service was forced to open its 2.6 million positions to gays, removing those barriers that had been put in place by President Eisenhower at the height of the McCarthy era.

Another telling sign of the times from this period was the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Some psychoanalysts among APA members rebelled and led an unsuccessful attempt to recertify homosexuals as sick, but they were soundly defeated by a vote of the full membership and the change stuck.

The rapid remodeling of society’s view toward homosexuality was felt in the military as well. Throughout the services, the number of gay-related discharges in fiscal year 1975 dropped to 937, the second lowest number since the Korean War—and the lowest number of any year to follow. At the National Security Agency, which was not covered by the Civil Service reform, there was even a move to allow gay employees. “To exclude an individual from employment purely on the basis of sexual preference … is considered discriminatory,” one NSA official wrote in a private memorandum. Terminations of course continued, but in hundreds of other smaller moments, it was evident that the changes were seeping into the armed forces.

When Petty Officer First Class Jim Wagner came under investigation for homosexuality at Misawa Air Base in Japan, Naval Investigative Service agents contacted his base chaplain, coworkers, and other Navy friends. Most of these people knew Wagner was gay, but all of them insisted to NIS agents that he was heterosexual.

At the Presidio of San Francisco, a twenty-two-year-old Army medic named Bob Stuhr told his colonel that he was gay and wanted out. The colonel begged him to stay. According to Stuhr’s memory of the episode, the colonel said he did not care whether Stuhr was gay; nobody did. He could have a good life in the Army, the colonel said. Everybody knew that a certain general in charge of one of the Army’s most prestigious medical commands on the West Coast was gay and married to a lesbian officer. Stuhr turned himself in as a homosexual anyway, but the colonel delayed his paperwork; it took six months for the discharge to be processed.

When military hard-liners later recalled the year 1975 and the evolution of attitudes toward gays in the military, they were far less apt to remember Leonard Matlovich at Langley Air Force Base than three enlisted men at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a major Army artillery training center. On the same day Leonard Matlovich handed his letter to Captain Collins, court-martial proceedings had begun against the three men, all accused of sodomizing and then murdering Private Anthony Ray Jaurigui.

According to the story that unfolded in the courts-martial, the three men had been smoking marijuana and drinking with Jaurigui, a twenty-two-year-old private in their battery, when they decided to rape him. When Jaurigui started screaming, they stuffed paper in his mouth and then took turns holding their hands over his mouth and nose to keep him quiet. Jaurigui died of suffocation. The three privates, two eighteen-year-olds and a nineteen-year-old, concealed the body behind a panel in the recreational dayroom of their barracks and left it there. An unpleasant odor led to the corpse’s discovery a few days later.

When all the macabre details came out in the young men’s trials, officers assured one another that this was where admitting homosexuals to the armed forces led: to homosexual rapes and murders. Not believing gay-activist rhetoric, they did not buy the notion that even if these were gay men, they were aberrants, not typical of other healthy homosexuals who served in the military. As far as they were concerned, these three men were indeed homosexuals and they may well have been the only homosexuals at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. For years, in the artillery branch of the Army, the gay issue meant only rape and murder at Fort Sill.

The six-year-old gay movement had only barely nudged these beliefs. If some officers in the field showed a more laissez-faire attitude toward homosexuality, that was not the case in the upper ranks of the Pentagon. The Department of Defense became even more strident in its opposition to any loosening of attitudes toward gay soldiers. In a new official “rationale” for its ban on gay sailors, the Navy wrote, “Parents would be more than reluctant, to say the least, to permit their sons and daughters to join the Navy if the Navy had the reputation as a haven for homosexuals.” Even almost twenty years later, former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird would refuse to utter publicly one syllable on the issue.

The Air Force asserted that gays should be banned because they were prone to alcoholism, drug abuse, abduction, and child molestation. “By way of example, we have documented cases of homosexuals (former Air Force members) assaulting and even kidnapping individuals for the sole purpose of sexual gratification,” wrote Colonel Ronald Skorepa to Congressman Fred Richmond, a critic of gay exclusion. “Within this area of deviant behavior, minors are often the target.… A team research study (also) concluded that homosexuals have a particularly difficult time coping with combat and group pressures.”

Washington officials were even harsher. While discharge boards on the field level increasingly recommended honorable discharges, their decisions were frequently overruled at the Pentagon in favor of less than honorable discharges. A private review of pending gay discharges from the Navy in November 1975 revealed that the Chief of Naval Personnel had downgraded the discharge recommendations of administrative panels in four out of five cases, all of which involved sailors with records rated as either “excellent” or “outstanding.” In Washington, it seemed that a discharge was used not to characterize a sailor’s service but to punish him for being gay.

In Congress, the Navy helped buttress the opposition to gay civil rights legislation. Since the federal gay-rights bill was introduced by Congresswoman Bella Abzug in 1971, it had accumulated twenty-three cosponsors. An April 1975 memorandum from the head of the Navy’s congressional liaison branch shows that the Navy prepared point papers and fact sheets for Congressman Bill Chappell “to refute the bill which Bella Abzug is preparing” and “to assist him in his efforts.” According to the memo, released later under the Freedom of Information Act, the documents were passed to the conservative Florida congressman through a retired rear admiral on his staff.

JULY 1975

424 MARION ROAD

HAMPTON, VIRGINIA

Leonard Matlovich was sound asleep when the first shot rang out. Three tours in Vietnam had taught him what to do at the sound of incoming fire. He dived onto the floor. Two more shots echoed in the humid night. He heard a car speeding away. Matlovich put on a robe and went outside. The three shots had ripped into his house. All of his neighbors were on their porches, too, in housecoats and robes, staring at the man whose name was in the local newspapers every day now.

For all of the genuine social change occurring across the country, back at Langley Air Force Base, Matlovich was still a target of intimidation. Since there was no evidence of any improper homosexual activity on his part, it appeared that the Air Force would try to manufacture some. They pulled Matlovich from his job as a race-relations instructor and put him in charge of a barracks full of young airmen. Soon after, a first sergeant appeared late one night and ordered Matlovich to conduct an inspection. Though such after-hours probes were contrary to Air Force policy, the sergeant then roused the sleeping airmen from their bunks and made them stand at attention, even though many were nude or dressed only in their underwear. Matlovich adopted his most professional demeanor. The point of the inspection, he felt, was to gain testimony that he stared longingly at the naked airmen.

It was also essential to rewrite the past whenever possible to justify the Air Force’s course of action. The Air Force was arguing that a homosexual was not fit to serve, so it was necessary to show that Matlovich’s service was unfit. In the military, the past could be altered. While Matlovich’s supervisor, Captain Dennis Collins, had given him top ratings on his most recent evaluation, calling his job performance “outstanding,” Lieutenant Colonel John Schofield interceded and reduced them after the sergeant became a cause célèbre, giving Matlovich a zero rating on a scale of ten in three categories. The lower evaluations were necessary to support the argument that the Air Force had decided to advance: Not only did it want to kick Matlovich out; it wanted to give him a less than honorable discharge.

Matlovich believed that the desire to accumulate evidence for a bad discharge lay behind the long delays in getting a separation hearing. By early July, four months after he had notified the Air Force of his homosexuality, no hearing had been scheduled. Even the Air Force Times commented that the delay represented “an unusually long time.” And while a number of airmen and officers privately congratulated Matlovich for his stand and wished him success, a number of others wished that the Air Force would crack down harder on him. As Matlovich recalls his first sergeant bluntly telling him one day, “If I were in charge of this, I’d get rid of you in a week. We’d set you up so fast your head would swim.”

A few weeks after the gunfire was aimed at his home, Matlovich received a phone call. The voice sounded concerned: “I’m not trying to scare you,” it said, “but a group of men met last night and they’re coming to get you. They’re going to cut your tongue and your balls off and put lye in your eyes. They have surgical instruments to do it with and something to stop the bleeding, because they don’t want you to die.”

Before he hung up, the caller concluded, “I’m worried about you.”