The Gayest Ship in the Navy and Other Stories
In May 1978, Gene Barfield graduated from the Navy’s nuclear training school, and he was given his first assignment aboard the submarine USS Nathanael Greene, where he was detailed to the blue crew and soon won the coveted silver dolphins of those qualified for submarine duty. Gene did his best to be extraordinarily discreet, given what he had heard about the Naval Investigative Service. Even as Gene concealed his sexuality, he registered the casual comments straight sailors sometimes made about this or that crew member who was gay or lived with another guy. Gene was struck not because the gay sailors were so well known but because the straight crewmates were not derisive or threatening in their conversations, just matter-of-fact.
Barfield was not sure what to make of this. Finally, he sought out a gay sailor about whom he had heard gossip. Before long, he had hooked up with a half-a-dozen other gay enlisted men on the USS Nathanael Greene. When the ship put in at Newport News, Virginia, for an overhaul, the Navy rented an apartment complex for the crew. Gene lived with two gay crewmen in a garden apartment surrounded by other shipmates. While the straight sailors lived like college students, with cinder-block bookshelves, secondhand furniture, and TV dinners, Barfield and his roommates tossed out the Salvation Army furnishings that had come with the apartment, redecorated in high House & Garden style, and took turns preparing gourmet meals for one another. At about five o’clock every weekend, their straight sailor friends started dropping by, knowing they could wangle an invitation to dinner.
Gene and his roommates got talked into hosting a Tupperware Party for the apartment complex. On the appointed Friday night, twenty-five sailors and their wives and girlfriends filed into Gene’s apartment for a congenial mix of drinking and Tupperware demonstrations. As soon as the married sailors’ wives got home, however, phones began to buzz. Those guys just had to be gay, they agreed. Their apartment was far too tasteful for them to be anything but. Within days, everyone knew about the gay apartment, but, as far as Gene could tell, it was not a problem. The next Monday the ship’s captain called Gene into his office.
“I heard you had a Tupperware party on Friday,” he said.
Gene was petrified. “Yeah, it was fun,” he replied.
The captain had heard as much and was concerned that no officers had been invited and all the enlisted wives were talking about what a good evening it had been. After this, the captain said, he wanted invitations to go out to officers, too.
In the months that followed, Gene and his gay friends introduced their fellow sailors and their wives to the local gay dance bar. For dinner parties, enlisted wives usually issued invitations to a gay sailor with permission to bring a date—“as long as he’s good-looking.”
Many gay sailors throughout the Navy during this period enjoyed a comparable level of acceptance. On the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, the Connie Girls conducted their own shipboard socials, where they served little sandwiches and introduced new gay sailors to the old hands. It was at such a gathering that Petty Officer First Class Jim Frisbie met a gay member of the SEALs, the most prestigious unit with the most macho image in the Navy. Although the enlisted man’s team members all knew he was gay, SEALs stuck together. Nobody turned him in. Aboard the USS Ranger, the Rangerettes typed up a regular newsletter and gay yeomen photocopied it on the ship’s Xerox machine before the carrier pulled into a new liberty port. The newsletter informed sailors of the local gay bars and other points of interest, whether in Nairobi or Diego Garcia. When the Ranger docked in San Diego after a six-month cruise, the local gay discos were packed with young sailors in their Philippine-embroidered Rangerette jackets.
By 1979, there was a significant gay presence at the Navy installation on Diego Garcia, a remote atoll in the Indian Ocean that was used largely for refueling and bringing aboard new supplies. Within days of entering the base aboard the USS Dixie, Petty Officer Wayne Walls found a thriving gay underground at the First Class Club. There, a dental technician known as Tinker Belle worked part-time as a bartender. Everyone knew he was gay and nobody complained. The Dixie, a destroyer, had its own gay community. Wayne knew two gay corpsmen, and gay sailors, in the engine room and the personnel and supply departments. During their week-long stay on Diego Garcia, they might be found making assignations on the bucolic white sandy beach outside the First Class Club or sharing drinks with the ebullient Tinker Belle.
Even the Marine Corps was seeing the beginnings of gay awareness, as was evident at the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort, South Carolina, where Lance Corporal Art McDaniel had met three other gay Marines from the base at a gay bar in Augusta, Georgia. They called themselves the “Four Musketeers” and hung out at the Enlisted Club. One night, after three of the Musketeers had spent a long evening playing “quarters” and imbibing far too many pitchers of beer, seven other beefy Marines came over to their table and announced they were going to “clean up the pansies.” After several shouts of faggot and queer, a fight broke out. One of the Musketeers, a mechanic named Bud, was an experienced brawler and quickly laid out two of their assailants, breaking both their noses. Art was from a family of five brothers and had learned young how to fight dirty. He slammed a pitcher down on the head of one Marine and a chair into the chest of another. The third Musketeer knew karate. By the time the fight was over, the three had meted out a broken leg, a broken arm, two broken noses, two concussions, several fractured ribs, and numerous stitches. Art’s commanding officer knew he was supposed to scold McDaniel over the fracas, but Art could see that his CO was secretly proud that he had won the fight when he had been outnumbered seven to three.
Bud, the brawling mechanic, was dating Danny, who performed in drag as “Danielle” in the gay bar in Augusta. Danny was a spectacular female impersonator with a waspish waist, small hands, and his own dark long hair cascading over his shoulders. No one would ever know he was a man unless they saw him in the morning when he needed a shave. It struck Bud that he could get subsidized housing off the base if he was married, so into the housing office he walked with Danielle in full drag, explaining that they were newlyweds and therefore qualified for married quarters. The Marine Corps complied and the happy couple moved into their Marine-subsidized love nest.
The security clearance investigation conducted on Specialist Five Perry Watkins in early 1978 also reflected the spirit of the times. Superior officers went to great lengths to ensure that the Army’s only officially acknowledged gay soldier would be treated fairly. Perry had been transferred to the Thirty-third Field Artillery Detachment when the security clerk reviewing his records noted that Watkins had long ago said he was homosexual. The message went out to the command that “records indicate [Watkins] is an admitted homosexual” and was “not medically suitable for assignment” for a security-related job at the base.
Perry immediately went about appealing the disqualification. As had happened before, his superiors rallied to his defense. In pleading Perry’s case, Captain Dale Pastian wrote that the “disqualification resulted from an erroneous, subjective ruling based wholly upon a cursory check of his medical records. This was not an adequate, nor just, evaluation and his reliability was misjudged.” Pastian went on to praise Watkins’s “outstanding professional attitude, integrity and suitability.” Wrote Pastian, “He has, in fact, become one of our most respected and trusted soldiers, both by his superiors and his subordinates.”
On June 18, 1978, word came down from Colonel Marvin Simmons at the headquarters of the Fifty-ninth Ordnance Brigade that Perry Watkins should be requalified for service in the program.
Watkins put the requalification in his own personnel file, right next to the letter he had received the previous year commending him for his “impersonation pantomimes” as Simone at the Noncommissioned Officer’s Dining Out, a formal Army event. “Where comradeship is evident, so is high morale and good discipline which are the signs of a great unit,” wrote Sergeant Major Walter Pederson. “The Dining Out could not have been a success without your full support, enthusiasm, initiative and imagination.”
One ironic emblem of the new tolerance for gays in the services were the problems soldiers had when they tried to get out of their enlistment contracts by admitting their homosexuality to superior officers. Aboard the USS Nassau in 1978, for example, two young enlisted men decided to leave the Navy to start a new life together. They went to the ship’s Executive Officer to explain they were homosexual and therefore could not stay in the Navy. To the first sailor, the Executive Officer said, “What else is new?” To the second, he said, “So what.” The two sailors stayed aboard.
Of all the air bases, naval installations, and Army posts in the U.S. military, there was one command that clearly had the highest proportion of gay personnel of any in the late 1970s: the USS LaSalle. By the account of nearly everyone who served on or near the intelligence ship, the LaSalle was the gayest ship in the Navy. A number of circumstances contributed to this distinction. First, the ship was permanently ported in the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain, which kept strict limits on how many Americans could be stationed there. No families could accompany servicemen, which meant that few married sailors wanted to be assigned to the ship. Second, as one of the military’s chief intelligence stations in the increasingly turbulent Gulf, the ship drew its crew from the most specialized areas of military intelligence, which have historically been among the most predominately gay job categories. As the flagship for the Commander of Middle East Forces, the vessel housed a command staff who also tended to draw heavily from gay personnel. Speculation about the preponderance of gay personnel included suggestions that job detailers in Washington ensured the choice assignment for their gay friends. No matter why, gay officers and crew who served on the ship in the late 1970s and early 1980s later estimated that at least 60 percent of the five-hundred-member crew was gay. The ship was also one of the most continuously decorated vessels in the modern U.S. Navy, winning numerous awards and citations.
Of all the places in the Middle East for the USS LaSalle to set anchor, Bahrain was a particularly fortuitous port. A former British protectorate, the tiny island has few of the harsh restrictions on alcohol and socializing common among its Islamic neighbors. The island was a veritable playground for the Middle East jet set, where oil-rich sheikhs flew in on their private planes for weekends with Western airline stewardesses and American servicemen. Numerous LaSalle crew members tell stories of sex-starved Arabs offering them gold bracelets and substantial cash for a weekend of pleasure.
The best parties on the island were reputed to be those given by a prominent member of Bahrain’s royal family, a notorious party animal given to an interest in both genders. Though most celebrated for his imaginative positioning of American airline stewardesses on glass-topped coffee tables, the prince hosted huge outdoor orgies, according to several LaSalle crewmen.
Early in the evening, the prince sometimes led a caravan of Land Rovers into the desert, near the emirate’s legendary Tree of Life. According to legend, this was the site of the Garden of Eden. There, under the ancient tree, servants erected large tents and spread out huge Persian rugs and the prince would pass around a water pipe to relieve any inhibitions the LaSalle sailors might feel. After nightfall, countless sexual fantasies were realized in the desert, in the dark. The next morning, crewmen staggered up the LaSalle’s gangplank, usually a little richer for the experience. Just as heterosexual sailors had their favorite sex ports in the Philippines, the gay sailors on the LaSalle had Bahrain and long nights under the Tree of Life.
Painted white to deflect the harsh Middle Eastern sun, the LaSalle was distinctive as the only white ship in the U.S. Navy, leading to its official nickname: “The Great White Ghost of the Arabian Coast.” Given the libidinous pastimes available in Bahrain, gay crew used their own sailorly variation: “The Great White Whore of the Arabian Shore.”
JUNE 25, 1978
SAN FRANCISCO GAY FREEDOM DAY PARADE
SAN FRANCISCO
An estimated 375,000 joined the march, making the parade the largest single demonstration for any political cause in the United States since the days of antiwar protests. Only the news helicopters hovering overhead could take in the full sight. Everywhere, huge flags the colors of the rainbow fluttered under a spectacularly blue summer sky. The rainbow flags had been the creation of a gay designer who had once served in the Army in San Francisco, a man from Chanute, Kansas, named Gilbert Baker. Baker’s design became part of the official logo of the parade, a rainbow surrounded the Greek symbol lambda, long identified with the gay movement. But these were a chain of lambdas; collectively they looked like a long strand of barbed wire. Concentration-camp motifs were de rigueur for this year’s parade.
The trend spoke volumes about the drift that had begun to separate the zeitgeist of the gay community and mainstream America. While the rest of the country enjoyed the carefree somnolence of the apathetic era, watching “Happy Days” and Saturday Night Fever, gays were beginning to see ominous signs. In the first months of 1978, fundamentalist Christians organized in city after city to repeal gay-rights ordinances. And they won every election. In California, voters faced an unprecedented attempt to stigmatize gays with a statewide referendum that would ban gays from teaching, as well as anyone who publicly endorsed homosexual civil rights. It was becoming an article of faith among gay activists that these fundamentalist campaigns would lead to barbed-wire concentration camps for homosexuals and that the Christian fundamentalists would ultimately seek their own final solution for the “homosexual problem.” The more outspoken conservative preachers were already citing the Old Testament verse that recommended homosexuals be stoned to death.
In his speech to the huge crowd massed in front of San Francisco City Hall that day, Supervisor Harvey Milk recalled that Hitler had killed 300,000 homosexuals in his concentration camps; Milk invoked the potential of gay Buchenwalds arising in modern-day America. Another new symbol of gay liberation to appear that day was the pink triangle—the identifying patch that Nazi camp guards forced homosexuals to wear.
To many heterosexual observers, all this talk of death camps and extermination sounded paranoid. There was really not that much discrimination against gays, they argued. In fact, it had become a standard argument among moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats that they would vote against gay-rights bills not because they were for discrimination but because the legislation was not needed.
Gays, meanwhile, saw that the fundamentalists’ successful national organizing was due in no small part to the emotional appeal of their antigay message. Gays saw that they were losing jobs. They also knew that the government spent millions of dollars in its investigations and purges of gays in the military. What was more galling than the antigay campaigns was the fact that so few heterosexuals rose to object. President Carter had made the principle that “Human rights are absolute” the centerpiece of his foreign policy. That sentence adorned a banner that led the San Francisco gay parade. Still, Carter refused to take a public stand on the gay teachers’ initiative, even though it had received a huge amount of international publicity, until the eleventh hour of the campaign, when the President appeared in Sacramento with Governor Jerry Brown. Carter had completed his speech and was about to leave the stage when a live microphone picked up Brown advising Carter to say he was against the initiative. “You’ll get your loudest applause,” Brown said. “Ford and Reagan have both come out against it, so I think it’s perfectly safe.” With the assurance that it was “perfectly safe,” Carter weighed in against the referendum.
Five months after the parade, when Supervisor Milk and the city’s liberal mayor George Moscone were assassinated by the city’s most outspokenly antigay politician, former supervisor Dan White, the alienation grew. A jury on which no gays were permitted to serve declined to find White guilty of murder, instead convicting him of voluntary manslaughter, which meant that for two killings, he would serve only five years in jail. The verdict set off gay rioting, which caused heterosexuals to be outraged, again indicating the gulf that was coming to separate the gay and straight worlds. To gays, both the murder and the trial verdict were acts of homophobia, plain and simple. Straights were often reluctant to accept this assessment, leading gay people to mutter about the denial that appeared to envelope heterosexuals whenever they were forced to confront the fact that they had created a very prejudiced society. Denying a problem, after all, is easier than trying to repair it.
Such episodes had begun to drive a wedge between homosexual and heterosexual America, and the gay community’s view of their place in the world began to diverge from that of the majority. The growing acceptance of gays in the military, after all, only reflected the comparable experience of gays throughout American society, but this acceptance came less because heterosexuals had changed their attitudes than because homosexuals were simply not willing to live the furtive lives they had before. When push came to shove, many heterosexuals really did not care that much one way or another about homosexuality, so there was a modicum of acceptance when gays asserted themselves, just as there was a modicum of acceptance for those antigays who were also asserting themselves. The two forces, however, were beginning to collide.
After eighteen years in the Navy, Commander Vernon E. Berg had been on a fast track to his admiral’s star, but his promotions came to an abrupt halt when he testified on behalf of his son at the 1976 hearing. By July 1978, he received word that he had been passed over for promotion to the rank of captain for the second time. Berg knew the rules: Passed over twice, he would never be considered for promotion again. His career in the Navy was over.
In fact, it had been over since the day Berg took the stand. Officers who had once been friends had been giving regular reports to the Pentagon about Berg’s activities ever since the hearing, in case he tried to start any further trouble. His comments about gay admirals and captains had other chaplains muttering that Berg had betrayed the sacred confidence chaplains should honor. In truth, none of Berg’s knowledge of high-ranking homosexual brass had come out of his work as chaplain. He knew about the gay admirals because they had made passes at him. Though the Presbyterian Church was edging toward a position of moderate acceptance concerning homosexuality, there were still church officials who were embarrassed that a high-ranking Presbyterian clergyman in the military had countenanced a challenge to the military’s homosexual regulations. Berg found little support in the church hierarchy.
Though only forty-seven, the older Berg was beginning to suffer health problems, a result of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Given his situation, it seemed wisest to take a medical discharge. Once he had believed in the Navy and the ideal of service to his country that it represented, but Berg no longer believed much in either anymore.
Once out of the Navy, Berg gave up the ministry, moved to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and cornered the market on duck blinds there. In the years that followed, he grew his hair long, wore a cowboy hat, lived on his retirement, and guided duck hunters to the choicest blinds. The bond he had developed with his son never lessened over the years, and Copy’s admiration and concern for his father deepened. Copy saw that his dad had lost much: his belief that had translated as charisma, his friends, his service, his country, and even his church, and Copy hated the Navy for taking all this away from him.
About the same time Commander Berg left the Navy, an account of Copy’s own tribulations was published. Penned by Lawrence Gibson, Get Off My Ship! faithfully recorded every twist and turn of the Berg hearing. Though the book received plaudits from some gay critics, several homosexual newspapers refused to review or even note its existence. These papers considered it inappropriate to support such a cause.
A mysterious coda attaches to the book’s publication. Gibson had included excerpts from the long-suppressed Crittenden Report in his appendix. But the book was published without those excerpts. Neither the book’s editor nor publisher nor printer could explain what had happened to those pages; they had apparently just disappeared from the printer’s plates and were never run. Gibson’s publisher destroyed the first twenty thousand copies of the book and ran off another twenty thousand under tight security. It was the first publication of the report that had been secret for two decades.