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Transitions

MAY 28, 1976

NORFOLK NAVAL STATION

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

Ever since Ensign Berg had gone public about his fight with the Navy seven months earlier, he had been assigned the most obscure job the brass could find, which meant working in the Naval base’s Civilian Personnel Office. His coworkers were largely civilians who had been extraordinarily supportive of him throughout the hearings. When the Navy set May 28 as the date of Copy’s discharge, they planned a going-away party. Legal delays postponed the discharge for several days, but the party went on as scheduled. The secretarial pool awarded him a civilian shirt and a large sheet cake inscribed, “Good Luck, Copy! We’ll Miss You.”

It was odd to be partying, given the other than honorable discharge the Navy had handed him. This decision meant no benefits for his education. The Veterans Administration listed homosexuals in the same category as mutineers, spies, and convicted felons when deciding who should receive benefits. The Navy had also decided to withhold substantial back pay Berg had accrued from unpaid leave.

On June 1, Judge Gerhard Gesell refused to issue a temporary restraining order to bar Berg’s discharge. As he had in Leonard Matlovich’s case seven months earlier, Gesell made it clear he would hear arguments against the Navy’s policy but that he could find no legal reason for obstructing that policy now. With that, the Navy ordered Copy Berg to be gone by midnight the next day.

As Berg was being processed out the next afternoon, a cluster of reporters gathered around him to ask whether he would continue to fight—he said he would—and to ask about his plans. A slight rain had begun to fall when Lieutenant Commander C. W. Albaugh broke through the circle of reporters and ordered Berg to remove the base sticker from his car. “Make sure I get it before you leave the base,” Albaugh said.

The drizzle turned into a heavy downpour, many of the reporters scattered, and Copy Berg spent his last minutes in the United States Navy scraping the blue parking sticker from the rubber bumper of his station wagon. It was an automobile-age version of ripping the shoulder boards off a disgraced officer’s jacket, one reporter joked. The ordeal delivered the desired humiliation. By the time he had returned the pulpy remains of a parking sticker to Albaugh and was ready to leave the base for the last time, Copy was soaked, his dress white uniform splattered with mud.

In the months that followed, Berg granted endless interviews and appeared on countless talk shows to advance his cause. There were two striking things about Copy’s surge into media prominence during those months. First, he had the words to articulate ideas that he could barely have conceived of just a year earlier. Second, there were people ready to listen.

Copy Berg’s experience was not singular. Across the nation in the second half of the 1970s, people were taking the gay-rights movement more seriously. It was not a widespread acceptance, to be sure, but gay demands were being discussed with earnestness in some quarters, which was a remarkable achievement considering that just a few years earlier gay activism had seemed an utterly fringe cause.

Former Navy Lieutenant Armistead Maupin was learning this was the case the same week as Copy Berg’s going-away party in Norfolk. On May 24, Maupin’s new column, called “Tales of the City,” started appearing as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. The column included a panoply of San Francisco characters, such as a pot-smoking septuagenarian landlady named Anna Madrigal, an aspiring young career girl named Mary Ann Singleton, and her best friend, Michael Tolliver, a young gay man perpetually seeking romance. Maupin fashioned these characters’ lives into a newsprint soap opera that was an instant sensation and made Maupin a national celebrity. He became the best-selling gay fiction writer in America, and from then on, no one could write honestly of life in urban America without including gay characters.

Maupin’s work challenged the later consensus that nothing happened in the 1970s in American society. Much later, in his sixth best-selling book based on the “Tales of the City” characters, Armistead Maupin wrote that only heterosexuals assessed the decade that way because most certainly something did happen in the 1970s, and arguably the most important development was the growth of the gay movement. Though born from a riot at the very end of the 1960s, the new community that sprang up in major cities across the country was entirely indigenous to the 1970s. The gay and feminist movements were, in fact, the only new movements to emerge in that decade. Both movements shared one feature that lent them far greater power than was then evident to the politicians courting them or the media writing about them. More important than changing the way people thought, these movements changed the way hundreds of thousands of Americans lived. This was surely the most powerful kind of change.

The evolution in lifestyles was most obvious in major cities, where one of the most significant, though overlooked, urban migrations since the days of the Dust Bowl had occurred. Publicity about the burgeoning gay-liberation groups in the early 1970s had created gay meccas to which tens of thousands of young gay people, mostly men, streamed each year. In San Francisco, for example, later studies showed that gay refugees arrived at a rate of nearly five thousand a year through the late 1970s. Many of them were like Danny Flaherty from Spring Valley, Illinois, and Gilbert Baker from Chanute, Kansas, who were all at the Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 27, 1976. They were living in San Francisco in large part because their own hometowns were so entirely inhospitable to them. Because of refugees like this, within five years of that June day, gay men accounted for 40 percent of all single males in San Francisco. Other major urban areas were also sites of the new “gay ghettos,” including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, and Seattle. More than mere gay neighborhoods, these were nascent communities with social institutions and newspapers. Typically the newcomers revitalized and spruced up older and sometimes rundown neighborhoods. A new word, gentrification, was introduced to the urban vocabulary.

Gay organizing continued to explode. Most major cities now saw the first meetings of gay businessmen. Gay Democratic clubs now existed in every major city in the country. Most significantly, one-quarter of the nation’s college campuses had gay organizations by 1976, which meant that a whole new generation of gay organizers was being inculcated with the philosophy of the gay-rights movement. The National Gay Task Force estimated that by 1976 there were nineteen hundred homosexual organizations in the United States. A decade earlier, there had been a dozen at most.

The Democratic campaign for President in 1976 reflected the gains gays had made, at least among the opinion leaders of the more liberal political party. The gay issue was deemed serious enough that all but one of the ten Democratic presidential aspirants had position papers on the subject. Only Alabama governor George C. Wallace took no position and only conservative Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson was forthrightly opposed to gay rights. The three most liberal candidates strongly endorsed federal gay-rights legislation; the five others were more comfortable with statements in support of “equal rights for all Americans” and vaguely opposed to “discrimination of all forms.”

The man who broke out of the pack, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, claimed, “I oppose all forms of discrimination against individuals, including discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. As President I can assure you that all policies of the federal government would reflect this commitment to ending all forms of discrimination.”

But once it began to look as if Carter might be nominated, his campaign backed down: “I have never told anyone that I favor total equality,” Carter later told The Advocate. As for the gay-rights bill, which he had earlier said he would sign, Carter now said, “I have not made up my mind on it. I do not feel that people should be abused because of their sexual preference, but I don’t know how we could deal with the issue of blackmail in federal security jobs. But with that possible exception, I would probably support this legislation.”

The Carter campaign wanted to downplay the whole gay issue as much as possible. At the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City, delegate Jim Foster f6und little support for a gay-rights plank to the platform. Instead, all he and the four-member gay caucus could get accepted was a vague promise to oppose “all forms of discrimination.” The Democrats were intent on winning this time and were not going to allow McGovernesque fringe groups to take over the convention, Foster heard again and again. Foster and his colleagues in the national gay political leadership did not complain too loudly about this because it did appear that change was in the air again, after eight years of Republican administrations. The pendulum was swinging the other way, they assured themselves. There was plenty of time to push for their demands once the return to a progressive agenda was complete. Given the sweeping changes that had occurred in the seven years since the Stonewall riot, optimism seemed entirely reasonable.

For the gay community and for the nation as a whole, the late 1970s was a period of transition. Gays were evolving from a radical fringe group to something of a new ethnic minority. The rest of the country had emerged from a period of intense change and turbulence, ending with President Nixon’s resignation, and seemed headed for a time of great reaction. The movement for greater rights for women and homosexuals advanced on the previous years’ momentum. Meanwhile, careful observers saw the forces coalescing to create the more conservative epoch that lay ahead.

It was significant, for example, that Carter, a devout Southern Baptist, was the first presidential candidate in modern history to acknowledge publicly that he was a born-again Christian. When Carter emerged as the Democratic front-runner, the media suddenly discovered vast numbers of born-again Christians, particularly those in Carter’s home turf of the Deep South. The phenomenon was discussed and written about endlessly. Even President Gerald Ford felt obliged to announce that he, too, was born-again, which was rather uncommon for an Episcopalian to claim. In 1976, in analyzing the impact of the southern born-again vote on the presidential election, the question was whether these people would vote for one of their own for chief executive rather than for any specific political agenda they expected one of their own to stand behind. Throughout the campaign, Carter kept his rhetoric vague to avoid alienating fundamentalists. Enough of them did vote Democratic that year to break the back of the Republican party’s “southern strategy” and narrowly win Carter the presidential election.

The political phenomenon that was second only to the born-again vote in the 1976 presidential election was the surprising strength of former California governor Ronald Reagan in his challenge to incumbent Ford in the Republican primaries. The term Reagan Republican had for years been the political pundits’ shorthand for right-wing extremist. In 1976, that very extremist came within a hairbreadth of unseating an incumbent President of his own party. It was the last time pundits would ever sneer at Ronald Reagan.

JULY 4, 1976

NEW YORK HARBOR

NEW YORK CITY

From a hill at Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn, near the graceful Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Copy Berg, Lawrence Gibson, and a group of friends watched fireworks burst, flare, and flourish in red, white, and blue, celebrating the nation’s bicentennial. Around them was spread a picnic of Virginia baked ham and fried chicken, deviled eggs, and three-bean salad. Though the harbor was crowded with extraordinary tall ships from fifty-five nations, Copy’s attention focused on the USS Kennedy, from which President Ford was watching the largest pyrotechnic display in American history, and on all the other Navy ships that glided through the calm harbor. He knew the sizes and classifications of all of them, had served on one of every class during his summers at the Academy. But his civilian friends had little interest in the facts and figures he rattled off to them. Like most civilians, they felt a complete disconnection from the military. Copy watched the gray ships that had once been his home float past one another and a deep regret seized him. This was something he had once been a part of, but he was part of it no longer. He was, in fact, not much of a part of anything.

Copy was in the process of learning some painful truths about the gay community to which he had migrated. Although there were thousands of social activists devoted to changing the plight of homosexuals, there were millions who were indifferent. Many people wanted to meet Berg when he moved to New York, but to a large degree this stemmed from the fact that his picture had appeared in almost every gay publication in the nation and he took a very handsome picture. Berg met with people who he hoped would offer him a job, only to find that their interests resided elsewhere. Because of the publicity surrounding his case, there were no job offers from defense contractors. Berg tried for work as an illustrator in the heavily gay field of advertising. Gay advertising executives insisted that it was all right with them that he was openly gay, but if their clients knew they had hired an avowed homosexual … Berg, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, pieced together an income by cleaning apartments and doing house painting when he could.

His deliverance from poverty came with the unexpected aid of an artist named Charles Bell, a man with a unique appreciation for what Berg had been through. Bell was a former Navy officer himself, having entered Officer Candidate School in the summer of 1957 after his graduation from the University of Oklahoma. He had known he was gay since he was very young and had first entered gay life when he had an affair with the artist Harold Stevenson. He fell into the Navy’s discreet gay networks of the late 1950s, even as he earned a stellar service record.

It was on a routine cruise of the western Pacific that Bell went on a double date with a friend and two buddies—a thoroughly forgettable evening except for the fact that his friend’s date got picked up by the Office of Naval Intelligence in a gay bar in San Diego some months later. After intense interrogation, this sailor named eighty-four other homosexuals in the Navy. They were then questioned and they named more. By the time ONI agents got to Charlie, they had evidence not only that he was gay but that he had fraternized with an enlisted man, his date from that night a few months before. Bell was told to resign or face a court-martial, so resign he did, resisting the ONI’s assurances that things would be much easier for him if he provided a list.

Had he been heterosexual, Charlie Bell later recalled, he believed he might have ended up an admiral. Instead, he ended up disgraced with a discharge under other than honorable conditions. He moved to New York and took a corporate job as a systems controller at International Nickel, where his boss and mentor was a former Under Secretary of the Navy. Every time he received an unexpected call from this man, he steeled himself. The jig is up, he thought. They’ve found out. By the mid-1970s, he was launching what would be a very successful career as a fine artist, but he had not forgotten the shell shock he had felt over his separation. When he met Copy Berg and heard he needed a job, he hired him as an assistant. By the end of the year, Copy had decided to pursue his own career as an artist, and the next year he enrolled at Pratt Institute.

Leonard Matlovich was having an even more difficult transition to civilian life. At the end of 1975, he had moved to Washington, D.C., hoping to work for gay civil rights. There were not many paying jobs in that field, however; Matlovich got by on paid speaking engagements. He never turned down an opportunity to speak, even if the groups couldn’t pay his expenses. His life belonged to the gay movement now, and for the next three years he’d survive on an annual income of about $4,500.

The made-for-TV movie about him should have provided some income, but in signing away the rights to his story, Matlovich soon learned, he had also signed away the rights to all future income from any projects based on his story. And even though NBC wanted to produce the movie, Robert Weiner was holding out for more money. Matlovich was appalled; he wanted his case to gain the wider exposure that a television movie guaranteed. At a tense meeting with Weiner and NBC executives in New York, he pleaded with the producer to let the network purchase the story.

“This is my life. I’m entitled to own it,” he begged. When Weiner would not budge, he cried, “Give me my life back. I want my life back.”

Attempts to nail down specific times and places would be forever elusive, but it was probably at this time, during the summer of 1976, that something else of great import for the history of the gay community came to pass. Something new and frightening began to stalk gay men in America. It was a virus, but not an ordinary virus. It was uniquely insidious because it could lie dormant for many years. By the end of 1976, a small handful of gay men in New York and in San Francisco were already feeling a vague malaise that would later be traced to infection with this virus. There was a nightmare waiting to happen, but no one then could have known.