Triangulates
NOVEMBER 1975
HAMPTON, VIRGINIA
With every passing day, new invitations to speak, new awards, and new opportunities arrived at Leonard Matlovich’s home on Marion Road. Every news organization in the United States, and many from outside the country, appeared at his doorstep demanding interviews. Not only had Matlovich achieved unparalleled status within the gay community; he had managed to capture the sympathy of the mainstream as well.
Even as he attained a level of celebrity heretofore unknown within the gay movement, his life was losing direction. The gay military friends he socialized with at The Cue wanted little to do with him now, fearing that the OSI was probably following him and that anyone associating with him would be implicated. An even greater loss came three weeks after his hearing, when he received a letter from the Norfolk Stake of the Mormon Church.
This is to formally advise you that the High Council Court of this Stake … took action to excommunicate you from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.… You have stated your intention to continue activism in a practice which is abhorrent to and in direct violation of the laws of our Heavenly Father. We cannot accept that you cannot change or be helped. It is our prayer that you may come to realize that you can indeed be changed and that you will seek such help as is necessary to accomplish it.… Our Heavenly Father loves you, brother Leonard, as we love and appreciate you. We are deeply concerned for your welfare and your eternal salvation, but our duty is clear. We urge you to study the scriptures and pray that you may come to know the truth, and to ignore the rising popular clamor for liberal practices in conflict with God’s laws and eternal purpose. We believe that within your heart you know that the Gospel is true.
Religion had always been one of the most significant aspects of Leonard’s life. The excommunication robbed Matlovich of his religious foundation. For the rest of his life, he disavowed all organized religion. Though he wryly kept the excommunication letter framed on his wall for years, next to his Time cover and his discharge certificate, there was an unspoken despair in Leonard’s newfound atheism. Those close to him understood that he rejected God in large part because he felt God had rejected him.
After his religious beliefs, Matlovich’s faith in America had been the second most important point upon which he triangulated his identity. He truly believed, as he would for years to come, that the courts would eventually order his reinstatement in the Air Force. He hoped this would happen sooner rather than later so that he could get on with his military career. Days after his excommunication, however, Air Force Secretary John McLucas accepted the separation board’s recommendation to oust the sergeant, though with an honorable rather than a general discharge. This was David Addlestone’s first opportunity to take Matlovich’s case to federal court. The Air Force planned on moving immediately to discharge Matlovich, he knew, so Addlestone asked a federal court in Washington for a temporary restraining order to block the separation.
The case went before Judge Gerhard Gesell, who made it clear that his sympathies lay with the gay sergeant. “I would simply comment that in this test case … involving a man of exceptional qualifications for the military, who has served his country well both in combat and in peacetime, that the Air Force is proceeding by the book when possibly a more compassionate view could have been taken of this situation pending the resolution of these serious and important issues.”
Despite these sentiments, which he said he “felt quite strongly,” Gesell ruled that no legal rationale justified halting the separation. Gesell noted “a clear but unfortunate trend” by the Supreme Court “strictly limiting the opportunity for servicemen in the modern Army to raise Constitutional issues.” Given this, he wrote, “The chances of ultimate success in this particular matter are not great.” Matlovich would have to be discharged and then seek normal redress through the courts, Gesell ruled. Gesell did allow the case to be put on a fast track, and he ordered the Air Force to come up with a justification for their policy of excluding gays. His orders left little doubt that he thought the policy could not be justified. Still, he maintained, Matlovich would have to leave the Air Force to fight the exclusion.
The next day, Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich drove into Langley Air Force Base for the last time, for his final processing out of the United States Air Force, his family for the past twelve years. A few hours later, he drove out again, Citizen Matlovich now.
On one level, he felt relieved that he had been able to weather the past eight months without the Air Force discrediting him or setting him up on some specious charge. And he still believed that one day he would be back. He would win.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK CITY
A gay conference? It had never occurred to Ensign Vernon Berg that there were such things. His only experience with the gay community was what he knew through his older lover: Georgetown cocktail parties, where sly but vaguely bitchy witticisms were bandied about. But here at Columbia University were people like himself, winners, who were doing more than mouthing clever bon mots, who diligently pondered how to refashion the world and eliminate prejudice and discrimination.
Berg and Lawrence Gibson had come to New York City to see whether some of the gay activists there could help them with Copy’s increasingly problematical relationship with the Navy. Somebody mentioned a gay symposium at Columbia University that weekend. The conference was a mélange of what was old and what was new in the burgeoning gay movement. In some rooms, participants engaged in “rap sessions” in which they discussed the traumas of coming out to families that could not understand. Every gay man, it seemed, had thrown out his battered copy of Gore Vidal’s City and the Pillar and was now reading the new book in vogue, Society and the Healthy Homosexual. The new word of the hour, introduced in the volume, was homophobia, meaning an irrational fear of and prejudice against homosexuality. Every gay woman, meanwhile, had discarded the former lesbian Bible, the depressing Well of Loneliness, and was quoting from Rita Mae Brown’s sassy Rubyfruit Jungle. Such sessions, throwbacks to the early movement’s borrowing from feminist consciousness-raising, were now supplemented by new seminars favoring more prosaic political strategizing. What was the best way to lobby the legislature for sodomy repeal? What approach was most effective in getting a city council to enact a gay-rights ordinance? What legal strategy would best win civil rights guarantees in the state and federal courts?
Throughout the day, Copy Berg listened as the gay conference unfolded. For the past six months, he had considered his interrogation and pending discharge as a singular ordeal, something just between himself and the Navy. Suddenly, he understood that there was more to his case than his Navy career. His story had to do with the relationship of all gay people to the military, and, in a broader sense, with the question of where homosexuals fit into American life as a whole.
At the end of the conference, as the sun set across the Hudson River and a winter chill settled over Manhattan, in a crowded classroom where the subject of discussion was discrimination against gays in the military, Copy Berg stood and told the assemblage that he was in the process of being thrown out of the Navy for being gay. And then he said he had decided to fight it. The crowd burst into spontaneous applause. An attorney from a new gay advocacy group called Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund slipped Copy his card; they would help him with a lawyer, he said. And Copy Berg, a Naval officer who was the son of a career Naval officer, knew that from that moment on his life would be very different.
In July, Berg would have been happy enough to have had his resignation accepted and to have quietly left the service. Why the Navy did not immediately accept the resignation would become a matter of some conjecture. Perhaps it hoped to find evidence of a judicial offense for which it could prosecute Berg criminally. Perhaps the Navy simply wanted to make Berg’s life difficult as their punishment for his being homosexual. Certainly the Navy believed it could decide Berg’s fate in its own time and in its own manner. After all, no officer in the history of the United States Navy had ever picked a public fight over this issue before.
In the beginning, after his return to Norfolk from Italy, Copy had confidently taken weekend trips to New York and New Jersey to apply for jobs. He hoped to have a decent position waiting for him when he was discharged. The country was gripped by a recession, but Copy’s Annapolis education made him an enviable catch for a number of corporations. Invariably, though, a prospective employer asked precisely when Copy Berg would be leaving the Navy, and since the Navy had still not set a date for a discharge hearing, Berg could not even guess.
Nor was there an easy answer for why, just one year after graduating from Annapolis, Berg was exiting so abruptly. Every employment application also asked about the character of discharge for an ex-military applicant. This was when Copy began to understand the long-term implications of even a general discharge. He needed an honorable discharge, and it was increasingly clear that the Navy had no intention of issuing such a separation. Copy’s frustration had been mounting for months before the gay conference in New York. But he had certainly not gone expecting to make his case a cause célèbre. By the end of his first day in Manhattan, though, his impromptu announcement at the Columbia University conference had accomplished just that.
A few hours after Berg left the Columbia campus, he and Gibson were talking about the case with Bruce Voeller, executive director of the National Gay Task Force, at Voeller’s apartment. Though many of the older hands of the gay movement had cut their political teeth in the antiwar movement and were reluctant to take up the cause of allowing gays into the military, Voeller had appreciated the potential influence of the issue from the start. But then Voeller’s entrée to the gay movement had been unconventional. Voeller had worked for twelve years as a molecular biologist at Rockefeller University when his wife, a pediatrician, sued him for divorce in order to marry another doctor. Voeller had long struggled against what was then called “latent homosexuality,” but he realized there might be another way to live when he saw a David Susskind show featuring a number of well-adjusted homosexuals such as himself. They were members of New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance. A few weeks later, Voeller cautiously took his first steps into the church on Ninth Avenue where the group met.
That was in 1970, when Voeller was thirty-six. He was much older than the typical GAA member and extraordinarily articulate. He was also exceptionally good-looking, six feet tall, with white-blond hair and a model’s face, which may have contributed to his rapid rise in the organization. By 1973, he was the group’s president and pushing to change the focus from local issues to national concerns. With Washington activist Frank Kameny, Voeller aggressively lobbied both the American Psychiatric Association and the federal Civil Service Commission to make what would be historic changes in their antigay policies. He also began cultivating relationships with national news organizations, believing media exposure, not radical confrontations, was the better means of educating the country about gay injustices.
His actions antagonized those radicals who had long dominated GAA. All these meetings with reporters and psychiatrists and politicians put the gay movement in bed with the dreaded Establishment, they argued. That was so much blue-denim elitism, Voeller retorted, and it was scaring mainstream gays away from political activism. A schism developed. Voeller insisted that the gay cause would be best served as a mainstream liberal reform movement along the lines of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); his militant detractors wanted a “liberation” movement to agitate not only against discrimination but for fundamental restructuring of the economic system. As the arguments became fiercer, Voeller and his supporters left GAA and formed the more moderate National Gay Task Force.
Gays such as Leonard Matlovich and Copy Berg were precisely the people for whom reformers like Voeller were scouting, responsible homosexuals with impeccable credentials. Though Time magazine had originally planned to use a photo of Voeller and his lover on the cover of its 1975 gay issue, it was Voeller himself who had argued for Matlovich’s, sensing a stronger public-relations coup if a serviceman’s image was used. The evening after Berg’s dramatic announcement at the Columbia conference, Voeller was excited at what Berg’s case might accomplish. But he did not minimize the problems or the risks.
Voeller described the custody battle he himself was fighting against his wife for visitation rights to his three children. Most state courts were so steeped in the notion that homosexuals were child molesters, he noted, that few would allow gays any form of parental rights, even to their own children. Voeller’s lover, meanwhile, was the unnamed plaintiff in a lawsuit, Doe v. Commonwealth’s Attorney, making its way through the federal courts. Already, a federal judge had decided that the Commonwealth of Virginia had every constitutional right to punish homosexuals with three years of prison every time they made love. No matter what changes had transpired in the past several years, acknowledged gay people could not expect meaningful redress against discrimination for many years to come, Voeller warned Berg.
Much to Voeller’s relief, none of these arguments deterred Berg. As far as Berg was concerned, his life could not get any worse than it was now, his future clouded by the prospect of a less than honorable discharge. Lawrence Gibson, still indignant at his treatment by the NIS and Civil Service, was ready to fight, too.
Berg and Gibson spent the weekend at Voeller’s refurbished brown-stone on Spring Street and West Broadway, taking in the Manhattan gay scene, which still astounded Copy. They visited gay restaurants and gay discos crowded with thousands of successful young gay men. It was a world Berg had never imagined in his days as a lonely Academy student.
When Copy returned to Norfolk, he wrote a brief letter to the Chief of Naval Personnel, withdrawing his resignation and requesting a hearing on the matter of his separation. “I have compiled in my six years of service a record of which I am proud,” he wrote. “I feel strongly that I bring to the Navy talents which are versatile and unique … Upon reflection on my actions I now feel that my submission of a letter of resignation was neither in the best interest of the naval service nor myself. My actions were completed naively with undue haste while under duress.”
Two days later, Berg contacted a reporter for the Newport News Daily Press. The Navy would be forced to give him a fair hearing if they knew the media were watching, Copy thought, and he wanted the case to be scrutinized from now on. The Daily Press story immediately went over the Associated Press national wire. “Ensign Vernon E. Berg III, a homosexual, may be forced out of uniform,” the story reported. “Berg, 24, a 1974 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, has become the latest serviceman—and the first officer—to fight the military’s traditional ban on homosexuals.”
After months of drifting aimlessly, Copy felt a new resolve, his optimism renewed. Though his lawyers cautioned that it would be unprecedented for an acknowledged gay officer to be retained, he believed that he could win a fair fight with the Navy on the issue. All he had to do was present the facts of his case. In a few months, he believed, his Navy career might be back on track.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
The overflow crowd in the hotel ballroom roared their approval when Leonard Matlovich began his speech with his famous epigraph about getting a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one. By now, he had logged tens of thousands of miles to give his speech scores of times. In truth, he had only modified his race-relations presentations to suit his new role as the chief spokesman for the gay-rights movement.
His new navy blue blazer hung loosely from Matlovich’s lanky frame. Since departing from the service, he had not let his neatly trimmed red hair grow out even an eighth of an inch. He kept his mustache clipped, too, not like the bushy mustaches that were becoming de rigueur in gay bars. After all, Matlovich expected to be back in the Air Force before long. He exuded a calm professionalism and self-confidence in his appearances, characteristics commonplace in a military setting, but in a civilian world unfamiliar with military bearing it was something novel, and something quite unlike the angry gay spokesmen of years past. Matlovich was a hit with his audiences.
Rather than bemoaning oppression and homophobia and heterosexism, Matlovich spoke of the victories ahead. It was inevitable that gays would gain their civil rights, he said. It was the right and just thing, and in the end America always did the right and just thing. The only question was how many people would suffer before the heterosexual majority acquiesced to the actions its conscience would ultimately demand.
By December, three months after his board hearing, there was a barely discernible undertone of melancholy to his appearances. That it was heard by so few was only because so few wanted to hear it from someone who had come to symbolize homosexual wholesomeness. But it was there that afternoon in Seattle, where a crowd of eight hundred sat in light blue upholstered chairs finishing their Dijon chicken luncheon. It was time for Leonard to take questions from the audience.
“I know what the first question will be already,” said Matlovich before anyone could raise a hand. “And the answer is no, but I’m looking.”
The largely gay crowd laughed appreciatively. Matlovich’s canned answer, of course, was a pitch for his availability. In almost every interview, he also talked about believing in monogamy and said that he was looking for that right man with whom to settle down.
Though Lenny was not movie-star handsome, he had a charisma that made him irresistible to some men, particularly so soon after he had been on the cover of Time magazine. Most of these men were not looking for long-lasting relationships, though it was years before Lenny understood the difference between fans and potential lovers. What he had in late 1975 were not boyfriends but fans, and lots of them. By the end of December, they had also left him exhausted and confused.
To make matters worse, Matlovich could barely keep up with the gay movement’s growing demands. Almost every gay group in every city wanted to host a fund-raiser with Matlovich as its guest of honor. A string of volunteers working out of his small house was poorly coordinated and frequently scheduled him for appearances on different coasts for the same night. Some charlatans even announced events to feature Matlovich, without consulting him first. Meanwhile, other gay activists who had been jealous of his meteoric rise started muttering about his shortcomings. The old arguments against aiding gays in uniform resurfaced. Why should the movement support anyone who wanted to participate in a warmongering antigay military? We should be fighting to keep people out, some radicals said, not to keep them in.
It was during this time that The Advocate’s editor, John Preston, asked Matlovich how he was doing with all the celebrity and attention, and Matlovich started to cry. “No one,” he said, “has ever asked me that.”
DECEMBER 21, 1975
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA
The Navy set a January hearing date for Copy Berg’s separation board. Copy assembled a team of five lawyers, including an Air Force lawyer from Langley Air Force Base who was familiar with the gay regulations from the Matlovich case, a Navy attorney, and E. Carrington Boggan, a gay ACLU attorney who had been brought on board by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. There was one key piece to Copy’s case that was not yet in place, however, even as the hearing neared. He wanted his father at his side, in uniform, during the hearing.
Four days before Christmas, during a monsoonlike rainstorm, Commander Vernon Berg, Jr., and his wife drove their camper van from Chicago, where the elder Berg served as senior chaplain for the Services School Command at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. From the beginning, the commander had encouraged his son to fight the discharge, largely because he assumed Copy had been falsely accused. Copy had dated girls all through high school and through much of his Naval Academy career, his father knew, in spite of Lawrence Gibson, who he felt was obviously the cause of all Copy’s problems. Meanwhile, Copy’s mom wandered through the tiny house the two men shared, came upon the one bedroom with its one bed, and burst into tears.
When his parents left, nothing had been decided. Copy did not know whether his father would stand with him or not. Over the next days, Copy bore down on his case with his attorneys. The Navy planned to introduce new evidence in the hearing: a statement from Journalist Second Class Laurent Crofwell asserting that Berg had made a pass at him the previous February. Then on Christmas Eve, the NIS released a new five-page report indicating that it had used “confidential informants” to spy on Berg while he was aboard the USS Little Rock.
One informant, identified only as GAP-1 in the report, was clearly another officer, most probably another ensign. GAP-1 had told the NIS that he had noticed Berg writing numerous letters to Gibson before the latter’s arrival in Gaeta and that he had actually read the letters and seen that they included “various romantic endearments.” The fact that at least one other officer had read Copy’s private correspondence was troubling enough, but the report also noted that GAP-1 was aware of “some additional letters further indicating a homosexual relationship between subject and Gibson,” which told Berg that the ensign had rifled through his private residence to find evidence for the NIS investigators. Copy’s lawyers moved to delay the hearing to investigate this breach, which again raised questions as to how the Berg probe had begun, but their request was denied.
While the attorneys dug into their law books, Copy worried about whether his father would make the trip to Norfolk when the separation hearing began. His lawyers were unanimously opposed to having the senior Berg appear. No one was sure what he would say. He could hurt Berg’s case if he came down on the side of the antigay regulation.
Copy did not think his father would hurt his case. On one level, he appreciated the significance of walking into the hearing alongside his father, a career Navy man like those who would be judging him. This, however, was an almost trivial consideration in comparison with the main issue. He could stand losing his bond with the service, but he could not stand losing his father. It would be like losing a part of himself.
As the date of the hearing neared, he awaited word from Chicago; finally it came. When did the hearing start? Commander Vernon Berg asked Ensign Vernon Berg when he finally called. He wanted to be there.