The Family
JANUARY 1977
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE
LOMPOC, CALIFORNIA
After the surge of the Coalition of Gay Servicepeople in late 1976 and the first months of 1977, Adam Gettinger-Brizuela was sure that the genie was out of the bottle for good. The CGS was refashioning the way that thousands of lesbians and gay military personnel at California bases lived. The fear and paranoia that had attended interactions among gays in previous years was falling away. Instead of worrying whether this or that gay airman or sergeant or lieutenant would turn you in during the next witch-hunt, you could look at him or her as a brother or sister. You were family now.
In an editorial on behalf of the CGS written for a Santa Barbara alternative newspaper, Adam wrote, “A ‘Family,’ as a group of gay GI’s is known, has the potential for becoming a powerful social force. If a given member of a Family were to be busted for being gay (in private with another consenting adult) the group would come to his or her aid.… The world would be amazed, and maybe enlightened, to see gays standing up for their Brothers and Sisters. We could surprise everyone, and begin decreasing their bigotry, by showing a little concern, a little courage.”
As lesbian CGS members traveled through the Southwest on the military’s intramural sports circuit, they built enormous networks of gay service people. During championship tournaments, when large numbers of teams came together, the parties were massive. Sports events with military bands guaranteed larger attendance, since the bands seemed second only to the military’s medical corps in their proportions of gay members. CGS organizers at different bases kept in touch via the military AUTOVON phone system. Even if the callers did not know one another, saying “I’m CGS” established rapport.
At Vandenberg, CGS members created their own old boy’s network on the sprawling base. Family in the motor pool assured CGS associates the pick of the best vehicles. Other CGS members at the military police could tip off the Family if an investigation seemed about to begin. Hundreds of gay service people now came to Family parties, held discretely off the base at the suburban homes of CGS members’ civilian friends. Every day at lunchtime, CGS members referring to one another as “girlfriend” and “Miss Thing” filled long tables in the enlisted mess hall. None of this was terribly subtle, but it seemed to Adam that few of the heterosexual enlisted people on base cared. They had their own problems. Besides, Adam figured, about half of the straight airmen smoked marijuana, which did not put them in a position to snitch on anyone else for being queer.
Still, organizing put CGS members in potential danger, so organizers took precautions. Every CGS participant had a code name, usually taken from the menagerie of Disney characters. Men took female names, women took male names; everyone wanted to be Bambi or Dumbo. In the end, there were not enough characters to go around. Adam was named for rock star Adam Ant and became the “Ant.” In the CGS newsletter, The Voice, distributed late at night to all barracks, references to an upcoming party were amended by such comments as “Call Goofy and she’ll tell you where.” Base security officials tried vainly to figure out who was sneaking onto the base in the middle of the night to pass out The Voice, unaware that gay military police dropped off the bundles themselves during their routine rounds.
The group established several rules. First, no one should keep lists of other CGS members. Phone books should contain only the Disneyesque code names and there was to be no central phone list of CGS participants. In investigation after investigation, such lists had been gold mines for agents from the Office of Special Investigations. The golden rule was: Don’t snitch on your brother or sister!—under no circumstances, even under the harshest interrogation.
The group also offered informal mediation for feuding gay friends. One of the least savory aspects of military witch-hunts was that they were often instigated not by heartless heterosexuals but by vindictive gay friends or lovers. To avert such reprisals, CGS teams visited both parties of an intragay dispute and conveyed a simple message: “Resolve this. It could affect us all.”
As these ideas spread and gay service people throughout California and then the Southwest began referring to themselves as Family, Adam was thrilled at the implications. The CGS was building a homosexual Utopia in the heart of one of the most antigay institutions in the United States. CGS was multiracial; its members were black, Chicano, and white. And while separatism was in vogue among lesbians in the civilian world, CGS was a model of cosexual integration. Even more significantly, Adam thought, by refusing to cooperate with interrogations and purges, gay people had at last said that they would no longer offer the military the sanction of the victim. That would make their subjugation infinitely more difficult, he knew; ultimately, it would end it.
Though he had been in the Air Force over three years, Adam was only twenty years old and still given to idealistic lapses. He talked about starting Operation TMT (Take Me, Too.) According to this plan, when the OSI asked gay service people for the names of other homosexuals, gays would respond, “Take me, too.” If every gay person in the military came out, he argued, then the investigations would have to end, because the military could not function if it truly kicked out all who were homosexual.
Though the creation of CGS marked a singular event in the late 1970s, it reflected the new phenomenon that was unfolding for lesbians and gay men in the U.S. military during the late 1970s: the creation of gay communities within the service. Networks of homosexuals had existed within the armed forces at least since World War I. Now, however, the military’s gay members were connecting with one another not just for sexual reasons, but because they understood they shared a common bond and common dangers. The creation of gay communities at military bases throughout the world only mirrored what was happening to gay people in civilian society, as gays spent most of the late 1970s building up their neighborhoods and institutions in major cities across the nation. The big difference between civilian gays and their military brethren was that gays in the armed forces still needed code words to conceal themselves. They chose “The Family” for their new communities.
The military was as powerless to prevent this coalescence of “Family” on its installations as it had been in trying to stop the spread of African-American pride among black service members in the 1960s or in trying to hinder a broader role for women in the 1970s. Changes in society inevitably flow into the military; officials could slow and frustrate the trend, often with great short-term success, but they could not halt it.
Optimism continued to infuse the gay movement through those early months of 1977. Despite the previous year’s setback at the Supreme Court, federal courts continued to deliver surprisingly strong decisions in favor of gay civil rights. In February, a federal district court judge in San Francisco ruled that the Navy’s policy of mandatory discharges for gays was unconstitutional. The case in point was that of sailor Mary Saal. Saal, a Navy air-traffic controller, had come under investigation as a lesbian in 1973 but had gone to federal court to halt discharge proceedings. Before the court could grant a final ruling, Saal’s term of enlistment expired. The Navy then dispensed with the matter by not allowing Saal to reenlist, citing the gay policy.
Judge William Schwarzer, however, ruled that Navy policies should be “free of any policy of mandatory exclusion.” As for the Navy’s contention that the presence of gays would create “tensions and hostilities” among heterosexuals and frighten parents away from allowing their children to enlist, Schwarzer ruled: “… The particulars specified could in each case be grounds for excluding others as well. Thus ‘tensions and hostilities’ could justify exclusion of members of minorities or other persons who may also be ‘despised’ by some.… Parents may become concerned over their children associating with Navy personnel who may gamble, use alcohol or drugs.… [The Navy] does not, and presumably could not, contend that such blanket exclusion of persons who engage in homosexual acts would eliminate or substantially reduce these problems. Yet those persons alone are classified as ‘intolerable’ and singled out for ‘prompt separation.’”
Schwarzer’s ruling did not order Saal’s reenlistment but said her application should take into account her entire previous career and not be denied solely because she was gay. The Navy, he added, should strive to maintain its “traditional position in the vanguard of providing equal opportunities.” The government promptly appealed, but attorneys were heartened by the ruling, which resurrected hopes for future court victories after the judicial battering gay rights had suffered a year earlier.
In Washington, fifteen gay leaders made their first official visit to the White House, meeting with four domestic-policy aides of the newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter. Presidential staff went out of their way to insist that the meeting did not represent an endorsement of any gay agenda. White House press spokesman Jody Powell announced on television, “What I feel about gay rights or any other group doesn’t have a thing in the world to do with it,” but he said every American should have a right to talk to government officials. The meeting did not produce anything substantive beyond an administration pledge for further meetings. Nevertheless, gay leaders pronounced the two-hour encounter a breakthrough. A White House visit conferred legitimacy.
A Democrat in the White House also seemed to presage a more amiable bureaucracy, even if this did not herald sweeping changes in the government’s attitudes toward gays. The most immediate impact for gays was the opportunity to upgrade gay-related discharges as part of President Carter’s sweeping amnesty program for Vietnam-era draft evaders, deserters, and service members. The upgrade program drew the vitriolic opposition of such veterans groups as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but for gays who had been haunted by undesirable or other than honorable discharges it was a godsend. One of the first to receive a new honorable discharge was Robert A. Martin, Jr., the radioman third class who in 1972 was the first sailor to publicly acknowledge being gay.
On a state level, progressive moves were being made in legislatures across the country. In February, Wyoming became the nineteenth state to repeal its sodomy law. Four more states were debating measures to decriminalize all sexual activity between consenting adults, and eleven legislatures were considering whether to amend their civil rights statutes to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
On the local level, forty cities had enacted gay civil rights ordinances. The most important breakthrough came in January 1977 when the Dade County Commission, the governing body for the Miami metropolitan area, voted five to three to enact a gay civil rights law, the first such ordinance to be enacted in a major city south of the Mason-Dixon line. The excitement over this victory at first overshadowed something new that arose from a Miami effort: organized opposition. In this case, the opposition came from a loud contingent of Southern Baptists on hand for the final vote on the gay-rights law. Their spokesman was a woman instantly familiar to anyone who had ever seen an orange-juice commercial on TV. In Miami, Anita Bryant was a local celebrity, and she was outraged. She would fight this ordinance, she said, and even go directly to the voters to have it repealed.
The notion that an orange juice-industry spokeswoman could offer a serious political threat seemed fairly outlandish, however, so not very many gay activists paid Anita Bryant much attention.
Even while gay civilians savored their gains, gays in uniform began to experience a disquieting sense that a heavy hand might come down on them. An increase in gay-related discharges had begun slowly in 1975; by 1977, it was a discernible trend. The manpower exigencies of Vietnam no longer existed; though the all-volunteer military struggled to maintain its recruiting quotas, the times were not as desperate as during the height of the war. According to Department of Defense figures, all the services discharged 937 enlisted personnel for being gay in fiscal year 1975. That number rose to 1,296 in the following year and to 1,442 in 1977. The Carter years would prove to be even worse ones for homosexuals in the armed forces.
One of the broader investigations from the mid-1970s occurred at the Woman Marine Company at Camp Elmore, near Norfolk, Virginia. When news of the probe hit the newspapers, however, the Marine brass halted discharge hearings, which prompted a group calling itself the Committee Against Homosexuals in the Marine Corps to respond with anonymous letters of protest. This campaign led base officials to begin separation hearings. According to a spokesman for Atlantic Fleet Marine Force Headquarters, the investigation resulted in the discharge of five women. Two more women were denied reenlistment and several more remained under investigation. The one investigation had cut out about 10 percent of that installation’s eighty-seven-woman company.
Several months later, a purge at Malstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana, put forty gay servicemen under investigation. A dozen airmen lost their military careers, according to the last public accounting from Malstrom officials.
The Navy continued its record as the most enthusiastic distributor of gay discharges. In fiscal years 1976 and 1977, it gave out more separations for homosexuality than all branches of the military combined, 54 and 57 percent, respectively.
At Castle Air Force Base in Merced, California, a full-fledged purge was launched after an airman, discharged for homosexuality, took a group of gay Air Force friends to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for his going-away party. The Office of Special Investigations heard of the party and used the threat of jail to pressure one of its only heterosexual guests, a female airman, to name the gays present. One sergeant who worked at the base personnel office at the time later recalled that those names led to still more naming until he counted twenty of the twenty-four beds at the base transient barracks filled with gay men awaiting separation.
The only thing new about all these investigations was the rising number of them. What was striking, in fact, was how old-fashioned they were, using the same techniques that the military had used to discover homosexuals since the days of Tom Dooley and the enthusiastic purges of the McCarthy era.
MARCH 1977
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE
LOMPOC, CALIFORNIA
At Vandenberg, senior enlisted personnel who had weathered years of witch-hunts and OSI interrogations warned the younger, more militant airmen that trouble lay ahead. Plans such as Operation TMT might look good on paper, but, when the whip came down, people would want to protect themselves. One lesbian master sergeant cautioned Adam Gettinger-Brizuela that he and his friends would be caught if they did not cool it. Somebody would confess and all hell would break loose, she said. But the CGS would hear nothing of it. Her warning only reflected the fear that had always kept gay people apart, Adam thought. In 1977, Adam capsulized his ideas in an essay that became the CGS manifesto.
We are a legion that dares not speak its name.
The military knows this. Their philosophy is one of public contempt and private tolerance. They say they want no gays, but in truth only drum them out very selectively.
It is government policy to keep straights paranoid about gays and make gays afraid of each other.… If gays in the Navy, or any other service get to know each other and trust each other, there won’t be any further reason to fear. If every gay man and woman in uniform knew that he or she was not alone—a new day would dawn.…
The essay was published in the Santa Barbara News & Review under the signature of the Coalition of Gay Servicepeople. Adam considered it a brazen challenge to the status quo of the United States Air Force and this made him very proud. The CGS was on a roll; to its members, it seemed unstoppable. Lately, members sometimes joked among themselves that the OSI must be really stupid. They had founded and operated what was becoming a national network of gay service members and the OSI had not even noticed—or so it seemed.