Lesbian Vampires of Bavaria
OCTOBER 1982
UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
“A midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal.”
That was the fundamental precept of the Honor Code of the United States Naval Academy. Though high-sounding, there is a practical rationale behind its rigorous enforcement. The Navy cannot afford the luxury of even the slightest mistrust among officers. Twenty-one-year-old Ruth Voor, now in her final year at the Naval Academy, believed in the honor code and was proud to serve on the Brigade Honor Committee, which supervised its enforcement among the entire Academy. The appointment earned her a third stripe on her sleeve, made her a midshipman lieutenant, and gave her a number of special privileges. By the autumn of 1982, it also created some personal conflicts.
Another lesbian investigation was under way at the school, and it promised to imperil the women’s basketball team that Ruth had helped manage. The female students were frantic. Lists of suspected lesbians were being drawn up. Careers were on the line, just seven months before graduation. Word spread that a first-year midshipman had already been interrogated by agents from the Naval Investigative Service’s Annapolis office, which had a reputation as one of the most aggressively antigay NIS offices in the country. It became Ruth’s job to tell the midshipman to stand strong against the coercive tactics of the NIS.
Ruth had already taken notice of Karen Colton, the plebe at the center of so much concern. Karen was cute by anyone’s standards, with blond hair and a trim build, but Ruth was most taken by Karen’s blue eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” Ruth had asked Karen’s squad leader early in the school year.
“Don’t even think about it,” her friend had advised. “You want to graduate. Don’t get in trouble.
Ruth told her not to worry. She was not stupid.
But in the weeks that followed, it was hard for Ruth to stay away. When Karen had watch, Ruth made sure to come by her post to pick up her mail and messages. She wangled regular invitations to sit at Karen’s squad’s table, and it was clear that she was interested. But Ruth assured her friends it was just harmless flirting. She never revealed herself to Karen; quite the opposite, she frequently mentioned a supposed boyfriend. When Ruth asked Karen to help her manage the basketball team, Karen felt flattered and agreed.
At eighteen, Karen was a product of her age group, which was beginning to enjoy the benefits of more than a decade of gay organizing. Karen was five years old when the Stonewall riots occurred, and thirteen when Anita Bryant thrust gay rights onto the front page of every newspaper, especially in Florida, where Karen was raised. The whole issue just did not seem scary to Karen. Her best friend in high school had a lesbian sister, and, by the time Karen was sixteen, she had gone to Saturdays, the gay bar in Melbourne, Florida. That was pretty much all she knew about gay life firsthand. She expected that one day she would get married like everyone else.
Karen began thinking of going to a military academy in 1976, when she read an article in Sixteen about the first women to enter the academies. What with her high grades and her many extracurricular activities, she was easily accepted to Annapolis. By the summer of 1982, she had become a part of the seventh Academy class to include women. From the first days, Karen excelled. She ranked second in her company at the end of Plebe Summer, and as the school year got under way she went to the top of her class in academics and physical fitness.
And she soon discovered what Ruth had learned three years earlier—that a lot of men at the Academy resented the presence of women there. They laughed at her desire to be a pilot, explaining that the combat exclusion policy would prevent it. That she wanted to work in nuclear power was even a bigger joke, since virtually all the Navy’s nuclear-powered ships, mainly aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines, were also off-limits to female sailors. She would end up in some supply depot somewhere, her male classmates assured her.
Sexual harassment was pandemic. On the night of the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Karen got drunk and passed out on her hotel room’s bed. Several male midshipmen came into her room, took pictures of themselves in sexually suggestive poses with her, and then passed the photos around the dormitory. Only when Karen threatened to turn the men in to Academy brass did they finally relinquish the photos.
By now, men had developed a pejorative vocabulary to describe female midshipmen. The standard uniform, for example, was called the WUBA, an acronym for working uniform blue alpha, but the guys snickered that females should be called WUBAs—women in uniform with big asses. Throughout the huge dormitory at Bancroft Hall, men wrote WUBA on doors where women were likely, to pass.
Much of the hazing revolved around the presumed lesbianism of any woman who would invade the Academy’s once exclusively male domain. Five years after the lesbian investigation of the women’s volleyball team, male midshipmen still hooted at female volleyball players. Since all female athletes were presumed to be homosexual, lesbian jokes abounded following any women’s sports events. When the Navy women’s basketball team prepared to play the Army’s team, one young midshipman from Company Twenty-one made a huge banner and hung it from the Bancroft Hall rotunda: LEZ BEAT ARMY. Karen tore it down herself.
Karen had been surprised that there were any gay people at all at Annapolis, let alone so many. Her first lesbian Academy friend, who played softball, too, filled her in and gave her a rundown on the most crucial agency with which gays needed to be concerned: the Naval Investigative Service. They’ll call you into a room, the friend warned, and lie to you and tell you they already know you’re guilty. “If it ever happens,” she said, “deny everything.”
It was an October morning when Karen’s company officer asked to see her. When Karen tried to postpone the meeting because she had class and the officer said no, she knew something bad was about to happen. A half-dozen NIS agents interviewed her. The subject was Karen’s friend on the softball team. She had told her roommate she was a lesbian, they said. Had she told this fact to Karen? Karen said she did not know anything about it. The agents said they had pictures of her friend with her girlfriends. Had Karen ever seen any of them together? Karen said no. “But you’re her best friend,” they countered. “Why would she tell other people and not you? She must have told you.”
“I don’t know anything,” Karen said.
Karen Colton was terrified. Lying was an offense for which an Academy student could be expelled, and she was lying. Scarier than that were the questions and what they signified. Her friends were being watched; they could be watching her.
The news that the assistant manager of the women’s basketball team was being interviewed by the NIS was no less chilling to the gay women at Annapolis. Everybody worried that the eighteen-year-old would crack under pressure. Nobody wanted a repeat of the 1978 investigation of the women’s volleyball team and a reputation that would persist for years.
When Ruth went to talk to Karen on behalf of the rest of the basketball team, she was painfully aware of how it would it look if it came out that an Honor Committee member had advised a plebe not to cooperate in an investigation. But Ruth did not believe she was violating the Honor Code by warning Karen against the NIS. She did sometimes worry that failing to tell the Academy she was gay might be a violation, an error of omission. One time, the commandant had told them to confess anything they might be guilty of and not to wait for someone to ask them about it. But Ruth genuinely did not believe there was anything wrong with being a lesbian.She would not counsel Karen to do wrong; she would tell her only to be wary.
Ruth could not bring herself to say the words, however. What if Karen was an NIS plant looking to ferret out lesbians? It had happened before. So she broached the subject tentatively. Did Karen know about the NIS? she asked. Yes, Karen said. Ruth talked about their tactics, that they lied about what they knew, claiming to know facts that they did not. And she told Karen she should be aware that she did not have to talk to them at all if she did not want to.
Karen seemed to understand, and Ruth left her room relieved, convinced that Karen was savvy and the team was safe. But their conversation made Karen look ahead to her years at the Academy with trepidation. From now on, she thought, it would not be safe to talk to anyone, not even a friend. Though this investigation blew over without any expulsions, Karen started avoiding the friend who had been suspected. It just seemed too risky.
The school year ending in 1983 was a busy time for lesbian investigations at the Naval Academy. In January 1983, another student, a junior, came under investigation when it was suspected she had taken a plebe girlfriend. Two months after that, some of the women on the basketball team made a list of suspected lesbians, which had been turned in to one of the brigade officers. Among those listed was Midshipman Lieutenant Ruth Voor.
The hunt for lesbians in the U.S. military in the 1980s was not merely a preoccupation, it was an obsession. As the presence of women became more pronounced in every service, an entire mythology evolved, imbuing lesbians with menacing qualities—far darker, in fact, than anything that had been attributed to gay men in recent years.
At about the same time Ruth Voor met with Karen Colton to talk about the NIS, for example, a young Army specialist four named Steve Robin was serving as a launcher specialist on a Lance missile crew in the rolling hills of Bavaria, two hours from the West German-Czechoslovak border. Early in Robin’s tenure, a rumor swept his unit that the older enlisted women in the battalion were intimidating young female recruits to have sex with them. Afterward, the younger women became part of their lesbian clique and, once they were trusted, they were sent out to seduce the new batch of incoming women. That was how the lesbians’ numbers kept expanding. To Robin, it sounded like a grade-B vampire movie. Still, sinister fables like this were widely accepted throughout every branch of the military.
As with any stereotypes, there was a germ of legitimacy at the bottom of the lesbian-vampire myth. First, there was inarguably a higher proportion of lesbians among women in the military than in the civilian world. Many lesbians who have served in the armed forces over the past decade estimate that at least 20 percent and perhaps as many as 35 percent of military women were homosexual. But these numbers are meager compared with the old days when as many as 80 percent of WACs were thought to be “members of the church.”
The military offered opportunities that assertive and confident women could scarcely find elsewhere. In theory, strength and independence were assets for women in the military, while they could be decided liabilities for civilian females. Military life relieved some of the pressure to find a husband, too, since women could plead their dedication to the service first, an evasion gay military men had been using for generations. Furthermore, as researcher Patricia Davis concluded, the services’ reputation as a refuge for lesbians had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The number-one reason for homosexual women joining the military, she found, was the belief that they would meet other lesbians there.
This phenomenon had long been obvious to military men, who also noticed that younger women sometimes ended up in relationships with older women. But young Karen Colton, as an example, would have been lesbian with or without her subsequent relationship with Ruth Voor. The theory of the enticing older seducer was no more or less valid among lesbians than it was among heterosexuals. But this fact carried little currency in male circles, where darker interpretations and stories like that of the lesbian vampires of Bavaria were heard with increasing frequency.
This was intriguing because at the same time women were making dramatic inroads in the military. Between 1972 and 1982, the number of enlisted women in the Army had increased by nearly 550 percent, from 12,349 to more than 67,000. The number of female officers had nearly doubled from 4,400 to 8,650. Women now comprised 10 percent of the Army’s officer and enlisted strength, and comparable increases were evident throughout the services. A female of flag rank, Rear Admiral Pauline Harrington, commanded the key Naval Training Center in Orlando.
The growing female presence in the military mirrored a similar development in society at large. In 1981, President Reagan appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, to the United States Supreme Court. In 1982, the first female astronaut, Sally Ride, was scheduled to fly in the space shuttle Challenger. There were now female bishops and university presidents. In November 1982, 992 women were elected to state legislatures, triple the number of a decade earlier, and 21 women entered the U.S. House of Representatives, a record number.
In ordinary life, a decade of feminism had produced astonishing changes in the lives of millions of women. Nearly 53 percent of women were in the work force in 1982, compared with 38 percent two decades earlier. Though women still dominated in such traditional jobs as secretary, phone operator, and receptionist, better jobs were opening up. Between 1971 and 1980, the proportion of management positions held by women increased from 10.9 percent to 19.2 percent. To accomplish this, women were marrying later and postponing having children. Such trends indicated permanent changes in American life.
One of the most intriguing symbols of the vast cultural impact of women’s new freedom appeared on a billboard in Times Square in 1982—a beautifully muscled young man, naked except for his Calvin Klein underwear. The advertisement marked a turning point in the relationship between men and women in the United States. For the benefit of commerce, men would be sex objects from now on. The trend showed the vast chasm between the goal and the outcome of the women’s movement. The aim had been to create a society in which no one was a sex object. The outcome was that feminism had democratized sexual objectification.. Now, everyone could be a sex object.
For many men, these changes were frightening. Reaction fomented against women’s new place in society. The resistance became most clear on the political level when President Reagan advanced his antifeminist agenda. Within months of taking office, the administration shut down the Office of Domestic Violence, the agency aimed at protecting women from abusive husbands. The pro-family movement appeared to consider programs that interfered with wife-beating to be antifamily. The most significant setback came on the last day of June 1982, when the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass, having fallen three states short of approval by thirty-eight legislatures, as required for ratification. In the desperate final years of fighting its approval in state legislatures, spokesmen like Phyllis Schlafly, who had a gay son, had employed such scare tactics as saying the amendment would advance homosexual rights, including gay matrimony, if it were passed. The pressure worked, even while every public-opinion survey showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans approved passage of the law. Opposition to abortion rights, meanwhile, became a virtual litmus test for appointment to the federal judiciary.
The most profound resistance to the encroachment of women on traditionally male terrain happened under ordinary circumstances and away from much public notice. In thousands of small ways, men tried to reassert the old roles while women were trying to adapt the new. Insidious sexual harassment resulted, especially in the workplace as women’s numbers grew. Women also found that job success created a disconcerting double bind. An aggressive male employee was complimented as assertive; an aggressive woman was a bitch. One source of the resistance to strong women was a barely articulated fear of lesbians. It had become a cliché among women trying to succeed in traditionally male domains to assure colleagues, “I’m not a feminist, but.…” But of course the great majority of women did indeed subscribe to the feminist ideology; what they really meant was, “I’m not a lesbian.…”
The disclaimer was intended to salve men’s anxieties. Lesbianism was a comparatively new topic of discussion for heterosexuals. Talk about homosexuality had almost universally been about gay men. That changed in the 1980s. Whether in a corporate boardroom or on an Army post, a man in conflict with a strong woman colleague was likely to mutter that she was a “dyke.”
These were difficult times to be a heterosexual male. For centuries, heterosexual men had defined themselves by their relationships with women. Surrendering relationships with women and being identified as homosexual could destroy a man. This was the cultural imperative that heterosexual men had constructed when they decreed that homosexuals were damned in the eyes of God and potential traitors to their nation, no matter what the facts of their lives might be. By the 1980s, this cultural edict was becoming as constrictive to heterosexuals as to homosexuals.
The old moorings were slipping. Once women had simply been wives and mothers. Now they did not need men to define themselves; they had their own jobs. Women once dropped their own surnames for their husbands’. But now, growing numbers of women refused to define themselves as Miss or Mrs., words that announced what relationship with a man a woman did or did not have, and the designation became Ms. Some steps further along this feminist path, many men feared, lurked the women who represented the ultimate rejection of men: lesbians, who refused to define even their sexuality by their relationship to men, who did not need men for anything.
As such, lesbians were the sum of all fears for the confused heterosexual male of the 1980s. Lesbianism was the phenomenon that could deprive heterosexual men of women who would participate in the construction of their heterosexual identity. It was a frightening thought for those men who had created a society in which heterosexual identity—or, more accurately, the proof that one did not have a homosexual identity—was of paramount importance. At the same time, the new popularity of men as sex objects exacerbated anxiety, because heterosexual men for the first time faced the same dilemma that they had thrust upon women for so long—that they might not measure up physically.
Some men—many men—tried to force things back to the old ways. At work, they harassed women, not necessarily because they wanted sexual favors but because they needed women to reaffirm their heterosexuality and the old patterns. When glass ceilings were quietly slid into place in the corporate world, it was not because men perceived women to be any less qualified than themselves but because of a collective fear for manhood as they understood it. If a woman could perform even the most responsible jobs, what good was such work at defining manhood?
Such anxieties were most acute within the institution most devoted to the ideology of masculinity, the military. Sexual harassment ran rampant through the military in the 1980s, to an extent barely imaginable in the civilian world. Here, the presence and growing influence of women would create a paroxysm of paranoia about lesbians.
None of these problems were unknown in the civilian sector, of course. In the civilian world, for example, a female worker who brushed aside a colleague’s sexual advance might not be promoted. She might even lose a job or be whispered about as a lesbian. But in the military, such whispers could lead to purges and even prison time, and in the 1980s, again and again, they did. All women suffered from the discrimination and harassment meted out by confused and insecure men, but no group suffered as much as lesbians, because no group so embodied male fears.
Not surprisingly, the first ship in the Women at Sea program to allow woman on board as crew, the USS Vulcan, also became an early target for a lesbian investigation. Ten women were put under investigation. The witch-hunt aboard the USS Dixon, a submarine tender ported in San Diego, received more public attention, however. The investigation began in 1982 after some heterosexual women on the crew turned over to the NIS the names of women they thought were lesbians. Using the customary threats of court-martial and a bad discharge, NIS agents were able to get one of the younger suspects to confess and provide a list of lesbians aboard the ship.
What most struck Bridget Wilson when she started advising the ten women under investigation was that virtually all of them held nontraditional jobs. There was a boatswain’s mate, a machine-repair technician, an electrician, a fireman, and a hull technician under investigation—not a secretary or a nurse among them. Of these, six were charged with lesbian activity.
The Dixon women responded by going to the press and insisting, as the Norton Sound women had two years earlier, that their sex lives were nobody’s business. Faced with the potential of unfavorable publicity, the Navy backed off. In the end, only three women were discharged.
The more successful witch-hunts were the ones nobody heard about, such as that of lesbians aboard the USS Puget Sound, a destroyer tender. Impressive purges of lesbians also occurred at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington. According to an account in the newsletter of the National Organization for Women, one Millington investigation netted seventeen discharges, while a later probe of twenty-two women at the same base resulted in nine ousters. At the Concord Naval Weapons Station near San Francisco, seven women were accused of homosexuality in a 1983 investigation. Five were quietly discharged in this purge; three were denied honorable discharges.
In Okinawa, the NIS conducted an investigation of the women’s Marine Corps softball team. In Puerto Rico in 1983, twelve members of a Navy women’s softball team were investigated and two discharged. The fear of lesbian investigations of sports teams inspired the women’s softball team on the Pensacola-based USS Lexington actively to recruit heterosexual females for their team. “I don’t know how to play,” one of the token heterosexuals complained. “That’s all right,” she was told. “We’ll teach you—here’s your mitt.” Organizers of team parties were always scrupulous about making sure that men attended.
The discharges sometimes struck down women who were pioneers in their military fields. Captain Katherine Martin was one of the first four female flight surgeons in the Army and the only one assigned to Europe when her name was turned over to the Criminal Investigation Division by two lesbians who had decided to turn themselves in as gay so they could get out of the Army. When CID agents decided to interrogate Martin and found her in a dentist’s chair undergoing a root canal, they searched her, had her handcuffed, and drove her to the CID office for interrogation. Under threats of a prosecution that could cost her her doctor’s license, Martin agreed to resign. The government then made her repay the Army scholarships that had financed her medical education.
The massive lesbian investigations resulted in an intriguing statistical turnaround for military investigators. While the numbers of gay discharges continued to go up in the early 1980s, the numbers of investigations went down sharply. Between 1974 and 1978, investigations outnumbered discharges; between 1979 and 1983, discharges outnumbered investigations, because each individual investigation yielded so many more discharges. In fiscal year 1982, that number was 2,069 enlisted personnel forced out of the armed forces for homosexuality. The Navy had contributed the most to that total, with 1,134 gay discharges; the Army had only 473 discharges, the lowest per capita separation rate for homosexuality. Though antilesbian fever contributed to the unprecedented level of gay discharges, economic realities also made the dismissals easier for military brass. The nation was caught in the grips of the worst recession in a generation. Unemployment hovered at 10 and 11 percent. With few new jobs in the civilian sector, there were plenty of eager recruits. Keeping homosexuals in the services at this time was not for the convenience of the government.
DECEMBER 14, 1982
COURT OF MILITARY APPEALS
Lieutenant Joann Newak’s Attorney, Faith Seidenberg, had argued that Joann’s right to counsel had been violated by the twisted conflicts of interest of her Air Force lawyer; that Newak could not be legally imprisoned for merely believing that she possessed amphetamines; and, from a commonsense point of view, that Newak’s seven-year sentence was “cruel and unusual punishment,” since no civilian would have been tried for her “crimes,” much less sent to prison.
But the Court of Military Appeals unanimously rejected her argument. In a thirty-seven-page concurring opinion, Justice Edward B. Miller offered an exhaustive rationale for why Newak should be imprisoned. That document included a sweeping history of the nation’s military law, supporting references from the Continental Congress and the first three Presidents, as well as citations of Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1858. In conclusion, Miller wrote, “Certainly, had the accused been tried tried on these identical charges in a civilian court, which would probably have been unfamiliar with the laws and traditions developed by the military during its long history, it is likely the court would not have had full capacity to recognize the complete impact of damage to the national security.… The accused was tried by a military court-martial that fully appreciated the seriousness of her offenses in a military context. Her sentence was entirely appropriate, in view of her offenses, and properly vindicated by the military’s disciplinary authority.”
In the weeks during which appeals court reviewed the arguments over Newak’s imprisonment, the public was beginning to hear about the case and the young lieutenant’s draconian punishment. Writers Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice and Coleman McCarthy of The Washington Post both wrote eloquent condemnations of the Air Force handling of the Newak case, and their columns prompted other reporters’ interest. Finally, Army authorities at the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth ordered that Newak could participate in no “face-to-face interviews.” When Newak tried to reply to reporters’ questions in writing, officials ordered that interviews of any kind “are not authorized under any circumstances.” When Newak decided to write to reporters anyway, prison authorities searched her cell and confiscated letters in progress, to be held for “investigatory purposes,” according to documents filed in federal court.
When pressed in court to explain why the military would not let Newak talk to reporters, Army spokesmen argued that conversations with the press could involve breaches of national security. Meanwhile, Newak appealed for clemency from the Air Force so that she could be released from prison. It was then that word reportedly came down that if Newak wanted clemency, she should stop talking to reporters. And she did.
JANUARY 1983
UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
By the end of her first semester at the Academy, Karen Colton had heard enough from Ruth Voor about her supposed boyfriends. Over a long dinner one night, Karen finally got Ruth to admit what was obvious to both of them, and in the months that followed a relationship developed. Ruth settled into the relationship with confidence: She knew this was the one she had been waiting for and it would last the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, Ruth had the new lesbian investigation in which she was a suspect to worry about. This probe had started when one heterosexual basketball team member made a list of her teammates who she assumed were lesbians for her brigade commander, who passed the list on to other brigade officers.
The gossip had a bizarre effect at first. Suddenly, several male midshipmen wanted to date Ruth. Ruth did go out with a gymnast, but when she refused to make out at the end of the evening, he snarled that the rumors about Ruth were true. Another incident occurred late on a Saturday night when Ruth was studying with another midshipman, a former enlisted Marine deemed promising enough to be channeled into the Academy as a prelude to his future as a Marine officer. Once Ruth was inside the Marine’s room, he stripped down to his underwear and announced, “I’m going to show you what it’s like. It’s really great.”
Ruth was strong and able to fight him off, but he blocked the door and would not let her out. The watch station was right outside the door. Ruth said she would scream. The Marine ignored the threat. Instead, he started talking about the accusations going around about Ruth. They said she was a lesbian. He wanted to show her what it was like; he was doing her a favor. He pinned her arms to the wall and tried to kiss her.
Ruth did not scream. He knew she would not. If he accused Ruth of being a lesbian, she would be kicked out, just a few months short of graduation. She managed to break away and get out of the room. She was enraged but had no one to tell. If she said he had tried to rape her, he would say she was homosexual.