The Next Generation
APRIL 1976
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA
From the time Carole Jane Brock was eleven years old and saw the ocean for the first time, its mysteries and its power had tugged at something deep inside her and always drew her back. She was born in Great Falls, Montana, but her large family had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968, first to Oakland and then a few years later to San Jose. In high school, Carole and her friends drove down Highway 17, over the coastal mountains to Santa Cruz. Sometimes they visited the boardwalk, where rickety amusement park rides swooped them into the sky and down again toward the white sandy beaches. But Carole preferred the Natural Bridges State Beach a few miles north of the city. Here the beaches were desolate, and she could walk among the tide pools, marvel at the thousands of sea creatures that scurried about, and feel the power of the ocean.
Carole was five three, with short brown hair and hazel eyes. She was an A and B student and graduated in 1975 from Piedmont Hills High School, set among the working-class tract homes on the east side of San Jose. There would be no higher education. Her father, an auto mechanic, had committed suicide when she was fourteen; her mother supported Carole and her four brothers and sisters by working as a cook in retirement homes. Carole did not want to continue her education anyway. But eight months out of high school, her job at an electronics plant had grown tedious. She wanted out of it all, but she could not conceive how to escape. Then she thought of the Navy, a way to combine work with her love of the ocean, a way out of San Jose.
But Carole was also a well-informed eighteen-year-old who had been paying close attention to the travails of Sergeant Leonard Matlovich. His problems were of more than casual interest to her because several years earlier she had realized that she was gay. It was not a particularly traumatic realization, although she gathered the fact was best kept to herself. By her senior year in high school, several others had come out, so she had a circle of lesbian friends.
About the time Carole decided to enlist, she had heard not only about Leonard Matlovich but also about an acquaintance of hers who was being kicked out of the Navy for being a lesbian. These were cautionary tales but not enough to deter Carole. It would not be that different from civilian life, she thought. At the Navy enlistment center in San Jose, she hesitated at the question about engaging in homosexual practices and then checked no.
For the two months before she was formally inducted into the Navy, Carole looked ahead to a new life and opportunities far beyond what a woman could expect to attain in the civilian world. Though the Navy could not guarantee her field of training, her choice was aviation mechanics, not a traditional field for a woman then. But in the Navy, the advertisements said and the recruiters assured her, sex discrimination in nontraditional jobs was a thing of the past. And Carole believed it.
By 1976, the determination of young women like Carole Brock to venture into fields long denied women was becoming a growing sociological trend. Though the political activism that marked the late 1960s and early 1970s had generally faded away, the burgeoning women’s movement had lost none of its momentum. Changes were evident everywhere in American life. The American Broadcasting Company hired veteran broadcaster Barbara Walters as the first female coanchor in television news history, at an annual salary of $1 million a year. In December 1975, Time magazine had named twelve women as its Man of the Year. The Episcopal Church was on the brink of voting to allow the ordination of women.
Unlike the corporate world, the military operated entirely under the control of political forces that could mandate changes. In 1975, the services stopped forcing discharges on pregnant women. Weapons training was made mandatory for women, even though the combat exclusion remained in effect. Officer Candidate School initiated an integrated program and the Army opened 92 percent of its job categories to females. Plans were in the works to eliminate separate women’s services such as the WAVEs, WACs, and WAFs in favor of a fully integrated military.
In 1976, the focal point of these changes were the service academies, which had been directed to include women in their fall classes. By late spring 1976, West Point had announced that 119 of its 1,480 new students that fall would be female. The Air Force Academy included 123 women among its 1,804 incoming freshmen, while Congress had authorized the Navy to admit 80 women to its freshman class of 1,250. Throughout all levels of the services, the numbers of women exploded. Between 1971 and 1975, the number of women in the Army tripled to 35,000, so that WACs comprised 4.5 percent of Army personnel.
Though women raced for the chance to enjoy new opportunities in the military, resistance to their growing presence was high. At the Air Force Academy, for example, the last all-male class adopted the motto Last Class with Bravado. Unofficially, the cadets understood that the motto’s initials, LCWB, stood for Last Class with Balls. As the first coed classes of college ROTC programs graduated their first female officers, senior enlisted men found themselves under the command of women for the first time.
For all the sweeping changes, inequities persisted. There seemed to be an obsession with ensuring that military women behaved like ladies, given the suspicion that women who wanted to enter what had always been a man’s world were not normal. In the Marine Corps, for example, female Marines attended classes on the proper application of nail polish and how to climb out of a car in a tight military skirt. At a number of bases, women were ordered to wear their skirts even in the most inclement weather rather than dress in more practical pants or fatigues. There was always an image problem. As The New York Times reported, “Back home, Army females are still regarded by many as heavies or lesbians, many female recruits said.… ‘I was amazed,’ said a male officer. ‘You get a few Paulette Bunyan types, but most of these girls are really good-looking.’”
Sexual harassment also was pandemic. WAC Tanya Domi learned this in her first assignment after leaving Fort Devens in Massachusetts. Domi had survived the lesbian purge that had ended the careers of Debbie Watson and Barbara Randolph, only to be assigned to a new job as a petroleum laboratory specialist at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. The Army had begun integrating women into their formerly all-male units, and Tanya was among the first women assigned to her unit. The problem was that a male noncommissioned officer was always fondling her. Tanya told him to leave her alone, but he persisted. Tanya complained to the female first lieutenant, who did not do anything; the same NCO was fondling her, too.
When an inspector general’s team came through the base asking questions about sexual harassment, Tanya told them her problems. A few days later, her first sergeant grabbed her by the arm and took her to the battalion headquarters, according to Domi’s recollections. “You’re disloyal,” he said, “you piece of shit.” The battalion commander complained that she should have gone to him before complaining to the inspector general. He promptly transferred her to the motor pool. For the next eighteen months, she swept floors.
In the Navy, the new front against women’s liberation was the issue of women at sea. Whatever changes were being made elsewhere in the services, the Navy was determined that women would not serve on ships. But for males as well as for females, going to sea was usually the prime reason for joining the Navy. Carole Brock knew about the prohibition against women at sea when she was sworn into the Navy in Orlando. But a year earlier, the Navy had said women would never attend Annapolis, either. Things were changing fast; her goal seemed within reach.
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE
LOMPOC, CALIFORNIA
The new generation of the all-volunteer military not only drew growing numbers of women but also an increasing number of ethnic minorities like Adam Gettinger-Brizuela. Gettinger-Brizuela was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in the lush green hills of the central California coast halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Though Adam’s father was from German-Irish stock out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, his mother was Mexican, born in Sonora. Adam had his mother’s dark hair, deep brown eyes, and the light brown cast to his skin that identified him as Mexican-American, particularly in his hometown of Spring Valley, California, a suburb of San Diego, where such distinctions were keenly observed.
Born in 1956, Adam had spent his childhood feeling embarrassed over his Mexican heritage. The role models offered him were Frito Bandito and Speedy Gonzalez. His favorite cartoon shows portrayed Mexicans as drunks, peasants, or bandits. In movies, one white cowboy could ride into a sleepy border town and single-handedly defeat scores of slovenly Mexicans. These were not images that did much for his self-esteem, and it was the same for others, such as those kids named Jesus who told everybody their name was really Jess. They were the acomplejados, those who accommodated.
The Chicano movement in the late 1960s instilled Adam with a new confidence and an entirely new personal identity. Its arrival coincided with his transfer from a suburban junior high to a school in San Diego where the Chicano kids were tough, good-looking, and did not accept trouble from anybody. If a white kid called you a beaner, the other Chicanos stuck up for you. You were in it together. Adam began to learn about Mexican culture. He became proud of his roots and added his mother’s name to his father’s Germanic surname, in the old Spanish style.
Being gay felt just as right to Adam as being Chicano, until the night his Anglo boyfriend said that he had more to lose than Adam if it was discovered he was gay. “You already are a minority,” he told Adam. “It’s different for you.”
Once again, Adam saw, he did not fit in. He started dating girls, trying to conform, but he still gave in to other urges. He was confused and became more so. He started taking barbiturates and finally dropped out of school. Seeing his life spiraling out of control, he took the one route that he thought might restore stability and his manhood. Ten days after his seventeenth birthday, in October 1973, he enlisted in the United States Air Force.
It was a tense time to join the military. The first Arab oil boycott found automobiles snaking around gas stations across the United States, and the Air Force was put on a quiet alert in the event that President Nixon decided to take some decisive measures against the country’s petroleum suppliers. Meanwhile, airmen had come back from Vietnam with a serious attitude problem toward any REMFs or stateside lard-ass officers who had not done any tough action overseas. A lot of these returning soldiers had gotten used to having sex with men, if only, they insisted, because they never knew what awful disease they might pick up from Saigon prostitutes. Adam had gone into the Air Force looking for his manhood, but there were all these opportunities for liaisons.
Adam was assigned to Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento in early 1974. He reaffirmed his commitment to be heterosexual until he met another young airman, also seventeen, and they became friends and roommates. Then they started sleeping together every night.
The growing numbers of WAF recruits also meant a growing lesbian presence on the base. Informal seventies-style segregation had relegated straight white women to the first floor of the women’s barracks, straight black women to the top floor, and lesbians of both races to the second story.
Even as Adam dabbled in Sacramento’s gay life, he was not sure he belonged there. This was not love, not in the pure romantic sense he had always wanted; it was just lust. He read some medical texts about homosexuality. Apparently, the condition could be reversed. People did change, the experts said, and Adam believed he might, too, if he got married. So he transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base, the third-largest Air Force installation, and he married a young WAF he had met in his technical school. She was Chinese and Filipino; like Adam, she did not really fit in anywhere, either. She cried when Adam confided to her about his sexuality, but they resolved to stay together.
There was also a growing gay community at Vandenberg. Bolstered by the assertive ideology of the women’s movement, a number of outspoken lesbians formed the community’s hub there.
“You got a wedding ring—you got a lover?” one lesbian asked Adam a few weeks after they had met.
“I’ve got a wife.”
“Honey,” the WAF answered, “you may have a wife, but you’re queer.”
Adam liked their candor and their politics. He felt it was bullshit the way the military kicked gay people around, how everyone kicked gays around. The entire system was screwed up. You did not have to look much further than the headlines to see the corruption that permeated the government from the top down. There was a time when such disillusionment existed only among hippies in Haight-Ashbury. Nearly a decade after the Summer of Love, however, disenchantment had spread across the country, even to military bases. The Watergate scandal proved to growing numbers of disaffected citizens that they should fight the system because it needed fighting. The recent controversy over Leonard Matlovich had fueled gay dissatisfaction. At Vandenberg, the black lesbians were the most outspoken about gay people standing up for their rights.
Adam agreed. In fact, it was easier for him to relate to being gay on a political level than on a personal one. Personally, he did not want to be a pariah; he was torn between his desire to live an open life and the fear of the rejection he might face if he did. At some point, he knew, he’d have to make a choice.
Adam had been on assignment at the Marine base at Camp Pendleton to cover the airlift of Vietnamese orphans for Airman magazine when he met a Marine Corps first lieutenant with whom he fell in love, The lieutenant was a Texan who was also married, but he said he would leave his wife if Adam would do the same. Adam might have left his wife, but by now they had a daughter, and he could never leave his daughter. He took a post office box so that he could correspond with the lieutenant, and he learned to express feelings he had not known he could have.
The affair reaffirmed Adam’s sexual identity and that strengthened his friendships with the lesbian and gay community at Vandenberg. In his weekly column for the base newspaper, a man-on-the-street profile called “Airman in Green,” Adam started featuring other gay airmen. Insiders joked that there was such a homosexual bias to his column that it should be titled “Airman in Lavender.” Nor was he likely to run out of subjects anytime soon. Every new gay friend seemed to have other gay friends on military installations throughout California, just as Adam’s Marine lover seemed to have uncounted gay military friends throughout the Southwest. All this gave Adam an idea: Maybe they should get organized. Within weeks, the Coalition of Gay Servicepeople was formed.
After the base newspaper was put to bed, Adam sometimes joined his gay friends in a barracks room to plan for their new group. When the hour grew late and it was time to turn the stereo down, they stayed together to talk about their hopes for the future. This all had to change, they agreed. And one day, they’d make a stand.