The Mile-Wide Word
SEPTEMBER 16, 1975
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE
HAMPTON, VIRGINIA
With sleek blue jet fighters roaring overhead and huge gray battleships sailing in and out of its choppy gray channels, Norfolk, Virginia, lay at the hub of the most sprawling military presence in the United States. The Norfolk region, called Hampton Roads by locals, was not so much one metropolitan area as a collection of military installations hugging every available bay and ocean inlet. The Marines had bases here, as did the Army, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and even NASA. The Navy, of course, reigned supreme. The Hampton Roads area encompassed the greatest bastion of naval power in the world.
The region was steeped in U.S. military history. When General Douglas MacArthur died, Norfolk gave up its historic City Hall to serve as his tomb and memorial. A few miles down Highway 17 is Yorktown, where George Washington and Baron von Steuben defeated the British and gave birth to a new nation.
At 0900 hours on the rainy morning of September 16, 1975, a different kind of history was being made in Hampton. A horde of journalists had joined a group of tight-lipped Air Force officers on the staircase of a base building at Langley Air Force Base on their way to the administrative discharge hearing of Technical Sergeant Leonard P. Matlovich, Jr.
Matlovich was charged not with transgressing a criminal statute of the Uniform Code of Military Justice but with violating the administrative regulations that barred homosexuals from the service. This meant he would be subject to a fact-finding administrative hearing rather than a court-martial, which is a judicial process reserved for those who are charged with violating military criminal law. As a nonjudicial process, the administrative discharge board did not determine guilt “beyond a shadow of a doubt”; they established only that a “preponderance of evidence” existed that an administrative regulation had been violated. Since this was not supposed to be a trial, the prosecutor was referred to as a “recorder,” and Matlovich was named a “respondent,” not a defendant. But when the five-member administrative board took their seats at the front of the small hall and a silence swept through the room, it was clear to everyone that Leonard Matlovich was indeed on trial that day, as was the United States Air Force.
David Addlestone opened the hearing by asking each of the board’s five members about his attitudes toward homosexuality. The members tended to answer tersely. Did homosexuals try to “recruit” young men to their lifestyle? Two said maybe; three did not know. Did homosexuals impair morale? Two said yes; three said maybe. Was homosexuality an illness? Two said no; one said possibly; two didn’t know. According to writer Martin Duberman, who covered the hearing for The New York Times Magazine, half the questions concerning gay-related attitudes were answered with some variation of “I don’t know.”
Though the questioning was thorough, Addlestone had no intention of challenging board members. He simply hoped to mine some evidence of bias that would be documented in the hearing record. Even though Matlovich’s Air Force lawyer, Captain Jon Jaenicke, had succeeded in revising the original board, Addlestone still saw the panel as a stacked deck. These board members were much higher in rank, and therefore potentially susceptible to command pressure, than a typical administrative board. The recorder was not a captain from the local base, as was usual, but a lieutenant colonel brought in from Nevada. All Addlestone could hope to do was create a strong record for the more crucial constitutional challenge to the issue that lay ahead.
Toward that end, Addlestone’s associate, attorney Susan Hewman, immediately moved that the hearing be halted because the Air Force regulation against gays violated the constitutional guarantees to the right to privacy and equal protection under the law. The head of security for Langley Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel James Ramberger, seemed to bolster Hewman’s argument when he testified that while his office did investigate all homosexual allegations, it never investigated charges of adultery or wife swapping. Though such activities were just as illegal as homosexual sodomy under Article 125 of the UCMJ, they were “minor sexual matters,” he maintained.
“The regulation is a reflection of the Air Force’s unlawful conduct in imposing the morality of the majority on its employees,” Hewman argued. The prosecutor disputed this, saying the policy “is fairly related to the maintenance of military morals and is fairly related to the standards of the military organization.” The board’s legal adviser, who was appointed by the base commander, ruled against Hewman’s motion.
The job of prosecuting Matlovich went to the hearing’s recorder, Lieutenant Colonel James Applegate. Applegate had been a cannon cocker for the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He left the service to obtain his law degree from the University of Cincinnati; he joined the Air Force in 1960. By the date of the Matlovich hearing, he was only two years away from his retirement.
Friendly and casual in his manner, Applegate spoke with the slight drawl he had picked up from his childhood in the small hill towns of southern Ohio. As he saw it, there were specific scriptural prohibitions against homosexual practices. Homosexuality was wrong. Nor, on the more secular level, did Applegate doubt the legitimacy of the Air Force regulation he was bound to enforce. The presence of homosexuals would undermine military order, he believed. Still, he recognized Matlovich as a classic lifer and respected the service he had given his country. He held no personal animosity toward Matlovich; he was just doing his job for the Air Force and he believed the Air Force was in the right.
Applegate’s first witness personified all that was problematical about enforcing the homosexual regulations, not only against Matlovich but against so many others who would follow him in the years ahead. The purpose of Sergeant Armando Lemos’s testimony was to establish that Matlovich was homosexual and that he should be removed from the military. Lemos, who had served with Matlovich in Florida, told the board that Matlovich was gay, adding that the knowledge of Matlovich’s homosexuality had not hurt their friendship and that he believed Leonard was an excellent race-relations instructor and a fine member of the United States Air Force. Air Force lawyers cringed when Lemos casually estimated that there were at least three hundred gay Air Force personnel at Hurlburt Field alone.
The next enlisted witness, Technical Sergeant Michael Marotta, was also supposed to buttress the government’s case against Matlovich. Under cross-examination by Jaenicke, however, Marotta said that Matlovich’s homosexuality did not make him a poorer instructor of race relations but an even more valuable one, because he had firsthand knowledge of discrimination. No, he didn’t think the Air Force had any business booting him out.
What transpired next shocked Jaenicke. The senior member of the administrative board, Colonel David Glass, demanded a closed hearing, ejected the press, and then proceeded to castigate Applegate for his handling of the case. A second board member, Major Phillip Heacock, joined in. What was going on here? they demanded. These were supposed to be the prosecution witnesses and they sounded like defense witnesses.
Recorder Applegate appeared no less disturbed than the defense team. After all, the discharge boards were supposed to give at least the appearance of impartiality. Applegate knew that these statements would hurt the Air Force’s case when the matter went to appeal, because it would show the panel’s bias. For the first time he could remember in his fifteen years as an Air Force lawyer, Applegate demanded that Glass and Heacock be removed from the panel because of their prejudice against Matlovich. The board’s legal adviser, who also appeared aghast at their behavior, complied and the pair were dismissed.
That night, after the hearing, the defense team met with Matlovich to rehearse for the next day. Matlovich wanted to testify on his own behalf, but Addlestone warned him against his usual sentimental oratory for civil rights. Matlovich typically invoked Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to explain that homosexuality was another civil rights issue. The three remaining board members would not easily see it that way, Addlestone believed.
“Don’t you understand what it is these people think?” Addlestone finally exploded. “They think you’ll go into the showers and grab people by the genitals. They think you’ll sneak around the barracks at night, that you’ll be on your knees giving blowjobs in the latrine.”
Matlovich was speechless. Addlestone tried to explain. “They’ve got all these fears. You’ve got to overcome their fears.”
The next morning, when the hearing resumed, the rain had stopped and the air in Hampton was heavy with humidity. Matlovich took the stand and pleaded to be allowed to stay in the Air Force. He talked about growing up on Air Force bases around the world and the fears that had seized him when he began to be aware that he might be gay. With Addlestone’s advice in mind, Matlovich told the board that he had “thought that to be gay I had to wear women’s clothes, to go into the bathroom and watch people, to molest little children, all the stereotypes.” Pausing, he added, “Well, I’m gay and I never wanted to do any of those things.”
If the publicity over being homosexual troubled the Air Force, Matlovich said he would sign an oath then and there promising never to grant another interview or make another public statement if he was allowed to stay in the service.
In his cross-examination, prosecutor Applegate raised the ante. Applegate noted that every gay sexual act represented a violation of Article 125 of the UCMJ. “Sergeant Matlovich,” Applegate said, “would you sign a contract never to practice homosexuality again?”
Matlovich blanched. Such a demand would never be made of a heterosexual, he knew. “No, I would not,” he finally said. “That would be like making me a celibate for the rest of my life.”
The final two days of the hearing were devoted to what was in effect a Homosexuality 101 course. Outside, a steady drizzle had cooled the air to the low seventies. Inside, with expert witnesses offering voluminous and sometimes arcane testimony, Addlestone and the defense team laid out the scientific basis of fact that would later be presented in federal courts to buttress the constitutional arguments against gay discrimination. A central question was how sexuality is determined. If being gay was something immutable, established at a very young age without reference to choice, then lawyers could reasonably argue that gays were a minority who were being systematically denied their civil rights. The issue also would bear on whether a homosexual serviceman could indeed “recruit” or influence other soldiers to his or her lifestyle.
Addlestone called in two leading sex researchers, Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, a coauthor of the Kinsey Institute’s famous 1948 report on male homosexuality, and Dr. John Money, the head of psychohormonal research at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. The best evidence suggested that sexual orientation was not a matter of adult choice but a disposition established in the first years of life, perhaps even by hormones released by the mother while a child was still in the womb, he said. “By adulthood, we don’t have the potential any longer to be other than what we by then are—homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual,” Money said. “Once the die is cast, it’s impossible to turn the clock back.” As far as what represented the “normal” or the “natural” course of sexuality, Money noted, “Anything that occurs in nature is ‘natural’ and homosexuality is recorded among all primates.”
For his part, Pomeroy noted that his studies had shown that 40 percent of adult American males had had at least one sexual experience with another man to the point of orgasm. The defense used the expert’s testimony to undermine the other dark stereotypes of homosexuals, including the notions that they might betray their country, and molest young children. It was not merely the regulation that was being disputed here; it was every bad thing people thought about homosexuals, because those attitudes were the basis of the regulations.
The data left the Air Force attorneys disconcerted. Prosecutor Applegate asked Pomeroy, for example, how Matlovich would respond if he was assigned to the South Pole with ten other men for a year. How would it be for him to shower with these men? he asked. “You don’t understand,” answered Pomeroy. “Well-adjusted people don’t go around touching each other.” Pomeroy then mentioned that he had an admiral in therapy who had adapted to very similar circumstances.
As for Matlovich himself, Money concluded, “Sergeant Matlovich is extraordinarily stable. He has a history of having stood up under pressure. He’s just an unusually stable person.” Even the Air Force psychiatrist who had examined Matlovich conceded that the sergeant was “fully capable of performing his duties.” Another eleven race-relations instructors testified as character witnesses for Matlovich. In the end, the only testimony against him came from his commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Schofield, who argued that the sergeant’s ability to do his job was now “totally impaired” and that his existence in the Air Force would project a bad image of American airmen everywhere.
Matlovich awoke early the next morning and stared at the picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the wall across from his bed. He knew the hearing would reach its final moment that day and that the decision would come by nightfall. From the start, he had known that he would lose, but the past three days of testimony had reawakened his optimism. The facts were so plain. How could anyone dispute them? Outside, the sun broke through; it was going to be a beautiful day.
Back at the hearing, Addlestone closed his case by pleading with the board to note the clause in the Air Force policy that allowed for an exception to the gay exclusion rule in the “most unusual circumstances.” There were two issues here, he said, whether the sergeant’s homosexuality compromised his ability to serve effectively in the Air Force and whether “most unusual circumstances” existed in this case to allow the board to make an exception to its policy.
“No case has been made that his ability to serve has been compromised,” Addlestone reminded the board in his closing arguments. He pointed out that of fifteen hundred students, 93 percent had rated Matlovich as the finest instructor they’d ever had. “The most unusual circumstances,” Addlestone said, were “twelve years of unblemished service.”
In his closing argument, prosecutor Applegate scoffed at the idea that Matlovich deserved such consideration. He had given Matlovich a chance to renounce his homosexuality, he noted, and the sergeant had refused a pledge of celibacy. No exceptional circumstances applied, Applegate said, “when Sergeant Matlovich says, ‘I’m going to go out and do what homosexuals do.’” As for the lack of many witnesses to buttress the government’s case, Applegate demurred, saying the Air Force had consciously refrained from “seeking to overwhelm you with indignant bigots who would rant and rave that we couldn’t stand to have a man like Sergeant Matlovich in the Air Force.”
After the arguments, the legal adviser to the board took pains to order the board that they had but one duty, to “apply” Air Force regulations. They were not to decide whether the regulations were just, and they most certainly were not to ponder constitutional issues. Matlovich’s heart sank when he heard the words; he knew regulations would be obeyed and that he would lose.
The Administrative Discharge Board deliberated four hours and twenty-seven minutes before returning to the crowded room. Technical Sergeant Leonard P. Matlovich was “not considered a candidate for rehabilitation,” and the board recommended that he be “subject to discharge for unfitness.” Matlovich fought back tears while the word unfitness echoed through his mind. He was distracted to the point that the weightier implications of the next words were almost lost on him. The discharge board did not make the final decision on either dismissal or the character of discharge, but it would make a recommendation upon which the base commander and the Secretary of the Air Force would ultimately rule. And it was the recommendation of the Administrative Discharge Board that Matlovich not be granted an honorable discharge. Instead, he should receive a general discharge. He had known he might lose and be discharged, but he had never believed that the Air Force would claim he had not served honorably.
Matlovich had regained his composure by the time the hearing’s formalities were completed. As he stepped outside into a bright sunny afternoon, a crowd of forty uniformed airmen burst into applause and cheers.
The reporters all wanted a quote for their stories, so Matlovich pulled a bicentennial half-dollar from his pocket and read the inscription. “It says ‘two hundred years of freedom,’” he observed. “Not yet. Maybe someday. But not yet.”
As Lieutenant Colonel Applegate watched Matlovich parry questions from reporters outside the building, he felt sympathy for the sergeant. Given Matlovich’s outstanding record, Applegate had no doubt that he would have made chief master sergeant had he not launched this crusade against the homosexual regulation. Applegate believed that Matlovich was being used by the gay liberation movement.
For nearly the next two decades, when the homosexual-rights issue was debated, as it would be ever more ferociously, there would be few arguments posed for gays that had not first been lodged at the Administrative Discharge Board for Leonard Matlovich. On one side, an array of experts would present an impressive cornucopia of facts. The other side would argue, in effect, that this is the way it should be because this is the way it has always been. At issue were not the facts or the specifics of Leonard Matlovich in particular, nor of homosexuals in general. The true issue was about the limits of freedom in the United States.
Just three days after the Administrative Discharge Board ruled that Leonard Matlovich should receive a general discharge from the United States Air Force, a gray-haired lady in a blue raincoat pulled out a chrome-plated revolver and tried to kill President Gerald Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco. Oliver Sipple, a husky ex-Marine, wrestled the gun from the woman’s hand, probably saving the President’s life.
Sipple pleaded with the Secret Service not to release his name to the press; he wanted to be anonymous, he insisted. When his name appeared on front pages anyway, it was read with great interest by Harvey Milk, who was then running what would be an unsuccessful campaign, his second, for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk had met Sipple over ten years earlier, when Sipple was fresh from the Marine Corps and frequenting the gay bars of Greenwich Village. Sipple had had an ill-fated affair with one of Milk’s ex-lovers. Though Milk himself had remained firmly in the closet until he was forty-two years old, he was now of the opinion that all gays should be out of the closet, particularly those whose disclosure might help win a level of respect for gay women and men. Saving the life of the President qualified as that, so Milk mentioned to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen that Sipple was gay. Caen printed the item and it was quickly picked up by papers across the country.
This presented a dilemma for President Ford. Normally, a man who saves the life of a President of the United States could expect a Rose Garden invitation and profuse thanks. Indeed, the President dutifully thanked the Secret Service agents who had pushed him into his limousine after the assassination attempt. The White House was mute on the matter of Oliver Sipple, however, because the word homosexual had been applied to him. It was only after several weeks, and many newspaper stories instigated by an irate Harvey Milk, that Ford penned a short thank-you note.
This little incident said everything about the place of the homosexual in America. The government did not want to thank Sipple for the same reason that the Air Force did not want to retain Leonard Matlovich. They were homosexual—the word was a mile wide in its meaning.
One by one, those service members who had announced their homosexuality in the heady early months of 1975 were discharged from the service. Sergeant Skip Keith was judged “unfit” for service five days after Matlovich was, and discharged. In back-to-back hearings, Private First Class Barbara Randolph and Private Debbie Watson faced administrative discharge boards. As would become routine, defense attorneys presented voluminous evidence of their good performance. Coworkers testified that they were “dependable” and “dedicated to their jobs.” In her testimony, Randolph pleaded, “I want very much to be in the world to serve my country.” But the discharge boards ruled they were “unfit” for the Women’s Army Corps, and despite their outstanding records they received general, not honorable, discharges.
Altogether, seven women were ejected from the WACs as a result of the 1975 purge of lesbians at Fort Devens. Private First Class Tanya Domi survived the purge, in large part because of her audacious decision to fly to Washington and personally lobby her congressman about her case. Since a discharge hearing had still not been called, those efforts were enough. Within twenty-four hours, her case was dropped and she had new orders. Nevertheless, she would remember this close call nearly twenty years later when the President-elect of the United States asked her to develop new policies on gays in the military.
OCTOBER 14, 1975
CAMP MERCER, SOUTH KOREA
Specialist Five Perry Watkins and Captain Albert Bast drove together from Camp Jackson to Camp Mercer, where Perry’s discharge proceeding would be held. Watkins had been nervous, but he calmed down on the morning of his hearing and was once again feeling confident. Something told him he would win.
His discharge board, made up of two lieutenants, two captains, and a major, was clearly not stacked. Watkins’s attorney offered copies of Perry’s record, his award certificates, and the diploma he had recently received from the Eighth Army NCO Academy, all supporting his outstanding performance.
Testifying for the prosecution, Captain Bast said that Watkins was “the best clerk I have known,” that he did “a fantastic job,” and that “he has never approached other soldiers.” But he explained that he had initiated the action against Perry because of his reading of the regulations. Watkins had admitted to being gay and the regulations said gays could not serve in the Army.
The second witness for the prosecution, First Sergeant Owen Johnson, said he knew that Watkins was gay but made no bones about the fact that he would work with him again. “Everyone in the company knows that Watkins is a homosexual,” he said. “There have been no complaints or trouble.”
The prosecutor, however, aggressively pressed his case, contending that Watkins was “guilty of committing homosexual acts.”
“We don’t have anything here saying he was guilty of homosexual acts,” the chairman of the discharge board interrupted.
The prosecutor pointed to the statement Watkins had signed in 1968 after the attempted rape at Fort Belvoir. Nothing had come of that statement, however, because the CID had determined it could not be corroborated. Still, the prosecution maintained that it alone was enough to warrant his discharge now. The president of the board argued that the CID had not proved that the statement was true; the prosecutor countered that such proof was not necessary. Perry thought the prosecutor was missing the point.
“May I address the board?” Watkins asked. Permission was granted.
The crux of the matter, Perry began, was whether there was sufficient evidence to substantiate the CID confession. “Last night we both spent the night at the same installation,” Watkins said to the prosecutor in his perfect enunciation. “If I walked in here saying that I had sex with you last night, the board would have insufficient evidence to prove or disprove it. If you want them to believe everything I say, do you want me to say that?”
The prosecutor blushed, leaving the board chairman to break the embarrassed silence. “Thank you, Specialist Watkins,” he said. “That was a very good example.”
The board took thirty minutes to weigh the evidence before voting unanimously to retain Perry Watkins in the Army. “There is no evidence suggesting that his behavior has had either a degrading effect upon unit performance, morale, or discipline, or upon his own job performance,” it ruled.
The decision of this board, coming so close to Leonard Matlovich’s, convinced Watkins that the military did not so much want to remove all homosexuals from their ranks as it wanted to be able to say it did not allow homosexuals. The board based its retention on whether Watkins had “intention” to commit homosexual behavior. He did not, they ruled. But neither had the defendants in several earlier cases. The board retained him; the Air Force would have kept Matlovich, too, Perry thought, if they could have done it without anyone knowing.
“I can’t believe you won,” Captain Bast kept repeating on the drive back to Camp Jackson.
Watkins reminded Captain Bast about a fifty-dollar bet they had made earlier. But officers weren’t supposed to gamble, Watkins added. Bast could be in for some real trouble. Both men laughed.
That afternoon, Perry was back at work as company clerk in Bast’s office and planning Simone’s next USO appearance.
NOVEMBER 1975
NELLIGEN BARRACKS
STUTTGART, WEST GERMANY
Since he had first met Jay Hatheway, attorney Chris Coates had spent the intervening three months working on constitutional arguments against Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the sodomy statute. Although he knew no military court was likely to throw the statute out, he wanted his arguments on the record at every level of the trial. He began by including them in a series of pretrial motions to be considered by the military judge who would preside over Jay’s court-martial.
It was a time when optimism ran high about the ability of American courts to solve society’s injustices. Coates was thirty years old and just three years out of law school; he shared that optimism and worked carefully to develop his case. He relied heavily on the nascent right to privacy, which the Supreme Court had been expanding for the past decade in its decisions to allow birth control, interracial marriages, and abortion. But Coates believed his strongest case lay in arguing that the enforcement of Article 125 in the military clearly violated the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all Americans. Congress had enacted Article 125 to forbid sodomy among all military people. In practice, however, military officials enforced the law only against homosexuals, except in the most egregious circumstances. From where Coates stood, this practice was plainly unconstitutional and a violation of the equal-protection clause.
It was with this argument that Coates thought he might win, at least with the civilian judiciary, if not in military courts. He took the case very seriously and he hoped the military judge would take it seriously too, especially considering that Hatheway faced a federal felony conviction and prison time.
After Chris made his arguments, however, the judge, a colonel, called for a break in his chambers. Other participants in the proceeding, since lost in the military diaspora that rotates its players throughout the world, were unavailable to confirm Coates’s memory, but nearly seventeen years later Coates said he could recall the judge’s words precisely.
“I don’t have anything against queers,” the judge said, and added, smiling, “I’ve always heard a blowjob was as good from a man as from a woman—but I don’t know about that.”
Later, the judge ruled Article 125 constitutional.