Thoughtcrimes
JANUARY 1981
GUERNEVILLE, CALIFORNIA
Watching the sky and the river in the hills of rural Sonoma County was a particular responsibility of Cliff Anchor, the owner of KRJB-FM radio, which transmitted the clearest signal for miles around and therefore played a central role in alerting locals to potentially dangerous weather conditions. In the first weeks of 1981, as clouds drifted darkly toward Guerneville from the north, Cliff Anchor had this and former Air Force Sergeant Leonard P. Matlovich on his mind.
Though Anchor’s interest in politics had lent his broadcasting a discernible political edge in the twenty years since he had first approached a radio microphone in San Francisco, he lived a discreet life in terms of his sexuality. Local meddlers might gossip that the local radio station’s owner was “light in the loafers,” but Cliff had not come out in public. He was deeply afraid that something dreadful might happen to him if he declared the words publicly. He struggled with this fear, and it was perhaps what made his attraction to Leonard Matlovich so strong. Cliff had enormous respect for Lenny’s courage in standing up to the government and challenging the military’s discrimination.
They had met two years earlier in San Francisco shortly after Cliff had accepted a commission as a major in the California State Military Reserve. Cliff had never heard of Lenny, but, by the end of the evening, Anchor felt he had found a soul mate. They saw each other in San Francisco when Cliff could get away from the station, which was rare because he was the station’s announcer, newscaster, programmer, and repairman, as well as the owner. When Lenny finally said he was moving to Guerneville to open a pizza parlor, Cliff saw their futures running together into one stream at last.
There was only one other person Cliff had ever met who had attracted him this way, driven by inner hurt and public fearlessness. Later, he saw that the two men stood like bookends on either side of his adult life, his first lover and his last.
Cliff Anchor had first heard of Dr. Tom Dooley in 1958 when Dooley announced that he had cancer. Cancer was a word rarely spoken in those days; Dooley hoped that his public admission would diminish the stigma endured by those suffering from the disease. Privately, he also knew that his plight would help raise millions more for his hospitals, which it did. His cancer operation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City was even filmed and televised nationally on CBS, along with Dooley’s solemn pronouncement that he was cured. By then, of course, everyone knew of Dr. Dooley’s work in the jungle of Southeast Asia, all retold in books, four of which had made the best-seller lists by the time Cliff met him in December 1959, just days after the Gallup poll had rated Dooley as one of the ten most admired men in the United States, right after President Eisenhower and Pope John XXIII.
Young people all over North America were taking up Dooley’s call to help the less fortunate of the world. This appealed to Anchor, but just as intriguing was Cliff’s sense that Tom Dooley, like himself, was, well, artistic, as Cliff’s mother might have delicately put it. Cliff was pleased when Dooley suggested they talk at his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. After an evening discussing the work Cliff could do for Dooley’s foundation in Laos, Tom suggested Cliff not rush home. They soon became lovers.
As Anchor labored to secure the necessary visas to fly to Laos for Dooley’s foundation, MEDICO, Dooley’s condition deteriorated. Still, he continued to plot public-relations forays and fund-raising schemes. Sometimes, Anchor thought the work helped Tom remember what his life had been about; at other times, he thought it was helping him forget. For all Dooley’s fame and celebrity, Cliff saw some damaged part of the man, some hurt that had never healed.
After Tom died, Cliff’s plans to work in Laos were lost in the general chaos that engulfed MEDICO. Cliff moved to California to start a career in broadcasting. He always felt that fate had robbed him of his chance for a singular love with a truly remarkable person, so when Leonard told him he was moving to Guerneville, Cliff promised himself that he would not let such an opportunity elude him again.
JANUARY 16, 1981
THE PENTAGON
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Graham Claytor’s office overlooked the grassy parade ground in front of the Pentagon’s River Entrance. In the distance, across the Potomac, the dome of the Jefferson Monument rose above the barren branches of cherry trees. A few doors down the hall was the office of the Secretary of Defense, the only man whom Claytor called boss. The sixty-eight-year-old Claytor was Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon’s number-two man.
The post capped forty-five years on the periphery of power in Washington, a career begun in 1937, when, fresh from Harvard Law School, Claytor served as a law clerk for the legendary Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis. After many years as a railroad lawyer, including ten years as president of Southern Railway, Claytor had joined the Carter administration in 1977 as its first Navy Secretary. It was he who had signed the final order to discharge Ensign Vernon “Copy” Berg. After two years at the Navy Department, he was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense; to him fell the nuts-and-bolts running of the nation’s military establishment, which freed the Defense Secretary’s time for less prosaic matters.
By this, the third week of January in 1981, most of the other Carter hands in the Pentagon had cleared their desks to make way for the appointees of Ronald Reagan, who was to be sworn in as President in just four days. But W. Graham Claytor, Jr., had a major piece of business to accomplish. The business was a two-page memo addressed to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
“I am promulgating today a change to DoD Directive 1332.14 (Enlisted Administrative Separations), including a completely new Enclosure 8 on Homosexuality …” Claytor wrote. “I have personally worked on this problem from time to time during most of the four years I have served in the Department. I firmly believe that the most important aspect of our policy is the ability to keep homosexuals out of the service and to separate them promptly in the event they are in fact enlisted or commissioned.”
The new policy voided all clauses in military regulations allowing for the retention of anyone who could be discerned to be homosexual. It was these rules allowing exceptions that had proved so problematic for the Defense Department in the Matlovich and Berg cases. Now there would be no exceptions. The new posture, Claytor wrote, “should enable the Department to sustain its position in the courts.”
Along with the ironclad ban on gays in uniform, the new policy had a second aim. Claytor ordered that “the mere fact of homosexuality” should not be grounds for a less than honorable discharge. As Navy Secretary, Claytor had pushed for an end to the use of less than honorable discharges as a punitive vehicle against gays, and in 1978 he had ordered that gay sailors guilty of no misconduct should receive honorable discharges. He wanted this position to be reflected in the policies of all services.
The rewriting of the regulations had been in the works since September 1977, when the Defense Department began a grueling review of its rules for the administrative separation of enlisted personnel. In 1978, a Defense Department study group proposed shifting gay discharges from the category “misconduct,” for which commanding officers could give bad discharges, to “unsuitability,” which would allow for honorable discharges in cases where there were no aggravating circumstances. “Although the subject of homosexuality and the question of whether or not homosexuality is a mental disease are controversial, the Study Group felt that by and large, homosexual acts were in the nature of non-volitional acts and therefore absent certain aggravating circumstances, individuals discharged for this reason should not be stigmatized with a less than honorable discharge,” the report concluded. “While the language in the proposed directive may at first blush seem excessively liberal, it is not a significant departure from what the Services are already doing in this area.”
To the top echelons of the uniformed military, the new language for the gay discharges did seem excessively liberal. When Claytor announced he was expediting his review of gay policies in the wake of the Matlovich ruling in late 1980, the Joint Chiefs launched a series of delaying actions. The closing weeks of the Carter administration saw a flurry of memos from the Joint Chiefs. More than a decade later, the Pentagon would still be censoring much of these memoranda, but those that were released indicated that the Joint Chiefs hoped they could stall Claytor’s reform until the Reagan administration took office and hard-liners presumably ran the Defense Department again.
Air Force Colonel Harold Neely, Secretary for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that “homosexual acts committed by Service members are in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as being service discrediting and prejudicial to good order and discipline. While administrative discharges have proven to be an expeditious means for separating the unfit or undesirable, these precepts must not be slighted.” When Claytor was unmoved by this argument, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Jones, formally wrote the Defense Secretary complaining that “The Joint Chiefs of Staff feel that, with an issue of this importance and long-term consequence, it is essential that the services complete their evaluation. In light of this, they request that the proposed policy revision be delayed until the Joint Chiefs of Staff make their recommendation on the issue.” But any delay would have put the matter into the hands of the Reagan administration, so the appeals were ignored.
The essence of the new gay policy was to be found in a four-page statement that accompanied Claytor’s letter. The new policy regarding the service of homosexuals in the United States armed forces was contained in three sentences, only 123 words:
Homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The presence in the military environment of persons who engage in homosexual conduct or who, by their statements, demonstrate a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct, seriously impairs the accomplishment of military mission. The presence of such members adversely affects the ability of the armed forces to maintain discipline, good order and morale; to foster mutual trust and confidence among service members; to insure the integrity of the system of rank and command; to facilitate assignment and worldwide deployment of service members who frequently must live and work in close conditions affording minimal privacy; to recruit and retain members of the armed forces; to maintain the public acceptability of military service; and to prevent breaches of security.
The policy was the rationale; the rationale was the policy. These 123 words had taken months to craft, reduced from a six-page memorandum completed in September 1980. The earlier draft gave a much more detailed explanation of the arguments so tersely summarized in the new policy, and more deeply reveals its logic. “Surveys show that the vast majority of Americans, in and out of the service strongly disapprove of homosexuality, and homosexuals are estimated to be a small percentage of the population,” the earlier draft read. “The inclusion within a military unit of members of a group whose behavior in such a fundamental area is viewed as deviant and wrong by the majority of the unit would frustrate formation of close personal bonds and would fragment the unit.… Even if a service member known to be homosexual were accepted by others in a particular military unit, that acceptance would likely dissipate as old members are transferred and replacements arrive or when the homosexual is routinely transferred to another location or unit.”
The only way to get around soldiers’ fears of roving homosexual eyes would be to install separate shower and toilet facilities for “heterosexual males, known homosexual males, heterosexual females and known homosexual females,” and this solution “would be costly and would fragment small unit cohesiveness.”
Central to the exclusion of gays were concerns about the continued viability of the all-volunteer military. “Allowing known homosexuals to be members of the Armed Services also would damage the image of the military in the eyes of the American people, our allies, and our potential adversaries and make military service less attractive,” according to the draft statement. “This impact on the military’s public image would also cause great difficulties in recruitment and retention of service members.”
Gays in leadership ranks also posed a threat to good order, discipline, and morale, it was argued, because the presence of gay commanders would “increase the potential for improper fraternization among ranks, and improper sexual advances and sexual harassment by leaders.”
Remarkably, the new policy had hardly anything to do with homosexuals or their fitness for service. Except for those words concerning national security, nothing in any private or public Pentagon statements suggested that homosexuals themselves were not fit to serve in the military. Instead, the policy’s justification rested solely on the supposed reaction of heterosexuals if they had to serve with homosexuals—whether they would take orders from, sleep in the same barracks with, or serve in the same Army with homosexuals. The new policy was not a statement about homosexuals but about heterosexuals.
In its fashioning of the military’s gay policies, the Armed Forces was following the same path that it had in the early 1940s when it sought to justify the segregation of black and white soldiers. Since it was no longer politically tenable to argue that anything innate about African Americans made them unfit to serve, the arguments for segregation rested on the notion that whites would not want to serve with, take orders from, or sleep in the same barracks with black soldiers.
The distinguishing aspect of the regulations concerning gays was to be found elsewhere, buried in the sections that delineated how a homosexual would be defined for purposes of administrative separation. One clause stated that a homosexual was anyone who had ever engaged in a homosexual act at any time in his or her life. This included sexual acts performed before military service. Another way to identify a homosexual was if a serviceman attempted to “marry” a person of the same sex. Anyone who told another that he or she was gay could also be ousted from the military. This clause was added to cover servicemen such as Leonard Matlovich, who had come to the attention of military authorities not through any homosexual conduct but because he had said he was gay.
The most startling new clause in the Department of Defense regulations on homosexuality, however, was the simple declarative sentence: “Homosexual means a person, regardless of sex, who engages in, desires to engage in, or intends to engage in homosexual acts.” Later, this language was refined to include people who by “their statements demonstrate a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct.” There was no longer any talk in the regulations of “homosexual tendencies” or of having “homosexual associations.” There would no longer be any need to establish that a suspect had ever engaged in homosexual behavior. Instead, the mere “desire” or “intent” to engage in a homosexual act at some unspecified time in the future, even if never acted upon, was enough to warrant separation from the armed forces. The military had, in effect, banned homosexual thoughts.
Meanwhile, commanding officers would do their best to circumvent the more merciful provision of the regulation. While the proportion of honorable discharges increased among those separated for homosexuality in the years that followed, commanders were still issuing less than honorable discharges to homosexuals a decade later, blatantly violating the Defense Department guidelines laid down in 1981.
For all the efforts of many governments to suppress homosexuality over the centuries, there had been only one other government in modern history that sought to punish those who harbored homosexual thoughts.
In 1934, the Ministry of Justice of Germany’s Third Reich ordered that homosexual behavior was not necessary to warrant punishment under the German laws against homosexuality. The “intent” to commit a homosexual act could result in imprisonment. Homosexual thoughts, one Nazi theoretician said, represented “abstract coitus.”
The National Socialist party had always opposed a broader role for women in society, abortion, and gay rights. The Nazi’s “profamily” program saw the suppression of feminism and homosexuality as inextricably linked. In fact, the Nazi campaigns against abortion and gay rights were mounted from the same agency, the Federal Security Office for Combatting Abortion and Homosexuality. By 1938, under the ban on homosexual thoughts, the Gestapo was already sending homosexuals off to death camps, where they were forced to wear the inverted pink triangles that distinguished them from the Jews, who wore yellow patches in the shape of a Star of David.
The National Socialists were also preoccupied with gathering lists of homosexuals. Their goal to make Germany homorein, or homo-free, was not possible without the lists. Arrested homosexuals were pressured to name other homosexuals, who were pressured to name more, and so on. Address books were culled for more names. German pamphlets distributed to the Hitler Youth included charts nearly identical to those in the U.S. Navy’s Crittenden Report that recorded one homosexual’s sexual contacts and his contacts’ contacts. Though records are imprecise, Nazi documents chronicle the arrests of between 50,000 and 63,000 homosexuals from 1933 to 1944. Most of them were later exterminated.
The Nazis were also intent on ridding the German armed services of homosexuals. Charges of homosexuality were used to harass officers whom Hitler considered too timid. Even the commander in chief of the German armed forces, Baron Werner von Fritsch, once faced homosexual charges after the Gestapo claimed to have discovered a hustler who had had sex with the general. Primarily, the military focused on rooting out anyone in the enlisted ranks who had engaged in homosexual acts or who had demonstrated an intent or desire to be homosexual. This was no small task. As documented in Richard Plant’s history of the German antihomosexual campaigns, The Pink Triangle, many younger gay men had decided to escape the mass arrests of homosexuals in the mid-1930s by volunteering for military service. Between 1940 and 1943, some five thousand German soldiers were indicted for homosexual acts.
When Allied soldiers liberated death-camp inmates, the handful of homosexual prisoners who had survived discovered that their liberators shared attitudes similar to those of the Nazis. Some British and American military jurists, for example, ruled that imprisoned homosexuals were criminals and were not to be automatically freed as the Jews were. As Plant writes, a homosexual who had served three years of an eight-year sentence in prison, and five years in a concentration camp such as Auschwitz or Dachau, would be returned to prison for five more years. Time spent in a concentration camp did not represent time spent fulfilling a prison sentence. When asked about the pervasive persecution of homosexuals during the 1930s and 1940s, the typical response from the ordinary German was the same as his or her response to the questions of persecution of Jews: “We knew nothing about it.”
More than a decade after W. Graham Claytor, Jr., issued his order banning homosexual thoughts among military personnel, he characterized the policy as a compassionate act meant only to ensure that homosexuals were no longer stigmatized by a less than honorable discharge. “I felt it should be treated like a disability,” said Claytor, who in 1982 moved into a new government post as president of the Amtrak railway system. When an interviewer noted that gay soldiers were “kicked out” of the armed forces during his tenure at the Pentagon, Claytor grew indignant. “We didn’t kick them out,” he insisted, “we gave them an honorable discharge.”
He was not aware, he said, that the new regulations would enable the separation of thousands more homosexuals in the years that followed. He did not know that his order to grant honorable discharges would be widely ignored. As for the dramatic increases in the separation of homosexuals from the military during his own years as the Pentagon’s number-two official, Claytor also pleaded ignorance. “I knew nothing about it,” he said.
Beyond the prosecutions and impressive purges of gays that followed the new regulation, there was also the fact that the Department of Defense now had a concise statement with which it could answer any question concerning homosexuality. By late January 1981, every public-affairs office on every military base and installation in the world had received the Department of Defense fact sheet, entitled “Homosexuals in the Armed Forces,” and for the next decade the 123 words of Department of Defense Directive 1332.14 would be the only words spoken publicly by any Department of Defense press spokesman to defend the Pentagon’s policies on homosexuals.