Heroes
OCTOBER 23, 1983
TWENTYNINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA
Joe Milano had been in Beirut, and he and his friend Fidel Comacho had not been able to talk for months. They took the walk they had taken so many times before from Fidel’s apartment near Camp LeJeune toward Friends Lounge, the local gay bar. Fidel had. crossed the bridge near the bar when he realized that Joe was no longer walking with him. He turned and saw Joe was still on the bridge. Then the bridge was collapsing and Joe was waving good-bye.
Fidel woke up with a start. Joe was dead, he knew, and had appeared in his dream to say good-bye. Still groggy, Fidel heard somebody in the barracks say, “There’s been an explosion. They bombed the barracks in Beirut.”
Though in California for desert training with his Marine unit, Comacho, a Navy corpsman, had served in Beirut a year earlier and had stayed in the reinforced concrete building on the edge of Beirut International Airport that served as the barracks for the Marine Corps peacekeeping force. The Marines called it the Beirut Hilton, but it had made Fidel nervous from the start, sitting there so exposed. Now his worst fears had come true, and his friend, Navy corpsman Joseph P. Milano, was dead.
With 241 Marines and Navy corpsmen dead, more American servicemen were killed on October 23, 1983, than on any other single day since the beginning of the Tet offensive more than fifteen years earlier. Among them were at least two gay Marines and a gay Navy corpsman, Joseph P. Milano. That afternoon, as the nation’s flag dropped to half-mast, a Marine corporal half a world away walked into his barracks, where his buddies sat huddled around a television set.
“The shit’s going to hit the fan,” one said.
“Better clean our weapons,” said another. “We’re going to war.”
The corporal stood dazed, staring at the set. Like Comacho, the corporal’s thoughts went immediately to Joe Milano. He had met Milano three years earlier when they were both assigned to the same barracks in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Joe was nineteen years old then, a meticulous corpsman dedicated to his “jarheads,” as sailors call the Marines; in return, his Marine unit revered him. Over time, Joe and the Marine corporal began a relationship.
Their different assignments often separated them, but they exchanged almost daily letters, artfully phrased so as not to betray them if their correspondence fell into the wrong hands. Joe had confided his misgivings about the Beirut assignment from the start. But at the end of the tour, he expected to return to Camp LeJeune, and his corporal was due to be stationed back in Jacksonville, too. Just weeks before the explosion, they had made plans to get an apartment together.
That night, Marines around the world paced through their barracks, eager for any word of this or that buddy, so Joe’s lover was not conspicuous in his obsession. The next day, he read that Joe’s unit had been in the heart of the blast. But when the Navy Times listed casualties a few days later, Joe’s name was not on the list of dead but on the roster of the missing. The corporal still hoped—and still wrote, dispatching two letters a day to Joe’s fleet post office address.
Finally at mail call, a letter from Joe arrived. The corporal was ecstatic until he saw the postmark: October 20, three days before the bombing.
Late one night, he called Bethesda Naval Hospital, where a gay corpsman who knew both him and Joe confirmed what the corporal had feared all week. Joe’s name had finally appeared on the list of the dead.
MICHIGAN STATE CAPITAL
LANSING, MICHIGAN
Jim Dressel was a war hero, and that distinction had provided his entree to politics. Even before he had gone to Vietnam as a fighter pilot, he had known he would pursue a political career. Flying 210 combat missions in Vietnam was his way of punching his ticket to the legislature. By the 1980s, of course, this was a fairly old-fashioned way of designing a political career, but Jim Dressel’s constituents hailed from one of the most old-fashioned locales in the country, Holland, Michigan, so it was successful.
Holland sits about halfway up the western edge of the state’s mitten shape, on the shore of Lake Michigan. The area was settled by a staunchly conservative Dutch population a century before, and their traditional Christian Reformed churches shot their spires up throughout Ottawa County, a bastion of fundamentalist orthodoxy. Appropriately, the region’s major crop was tulips, and tourism was a major industry—visitors came from all over the upper Midwest to enjoy the annual Tulip Festival and the town’s Dutch ambience. Jim fit in. Though his paternal grandparents were German immigrants, his mother’s family was Dutch, and Jim looked Dutch, with his square jaw, pale blue eyes, lanky build, and light hair.
He attended Hope College and became fascinated with politics, motivated in part by the book Profiles in Courage, the primer by John F. Kennedy about officials who destroyed their political careers by pursuing noble causes. Jim wanted to do noble things. His ideological inspiration was Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater, and he worked on the Arizona senator’s 1964 presidential campaign. The most conservative county in Michigan, Ottawa was only one of two counties in the state to support Goldwater.
Jim became aware of his homosexuality in the 1960s, as well—an awareness that he remembered coincided with seeing Advise and Consent, the movie in which a gay senator shoots himself in the head with a pistol. This and the overall opprobium of gays told Jim that if he wanted to go into politics, he must suppress this part of himself, especially if he planned to use a war record as a first stepping-stone; you could not get a war record if you were queer. Jim resolved never to act on his sexuality. He had other plans for his life, and they could not include homosexuality.
A week after he graduated from Hope College in 1967, Jim Dressel was commissioned into the Air Force. In 1970, Captain Dressel was assigned to an Air Force base in Thailand where he flew F-4 fighter planes and bombed supply trucks heading from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. His 497th squadron flew only night runs, so they called themselves the “Night Owls.” Dressel earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and a dozen other medals. He was discharged in November 1971. Climbing up the ladder to his jet cockpit in his flight suit, he posed for a dashing photo, which he used as a publicity shot six months later when he ran for Ottawa County Commissioner.
Jim knocked on every door in his district. It helped that his two opponents were both Christian Reformed, which split up that church’s vote and allowed Jim, a Methodist, to win the Republican primary in 1972. Since the county never elected Democrats, winning the primary was tantamount to winning the election. Three years later, Dressel was appointed to fill the seat of the county treasurer and he handily won reelection to that post. He also worked the small-town political circuit, serving as county Republican chairman and as a stalwart in the Rotary and Jaycees. In a close race, he gained a seat in the Michigan House of Representatives in 1978, winning the race as a moderate Republican and a fiscal conservative, but one in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, a fairly radical position to take in Ottawa County.
A few weeks after that election, Jim took a vacation in Los Angeles. He had read in After Dark magazine about a gay disco called Studio One. He had never been to a gay bar. In fact, to his knowledge, he had never talked to another homosexual in his entire life. Jim drove around the block many times before he finally walked in. He stood at the bar all night and just watched, speaking to no one. He went back again the next night and again the night after that. He felt like an adopted child who many years later finds his real parents at last. By the end of his vacation, at the age of thirty-five, Jim Dressel had made love for the first time.
Dressel earned a reputation as a good-government Republican in the legislature. As a conservative, he was opposed to frivolous spending, so he returned all the pay increases the legislature voted itself during his tenure. Neither was he parochial. When Detroit clearly needed this or that job-training program, he supported it; he was among the few rural Michigan legislators who did not automatically oppose spending for Detroit. During his first four years in the legislature, Dressel was exceedingly discreet in his personal life. He never went to gay bars in Michigan; he socialized only on Christmas vacations at gay resorts in Key West. His reputation remained spotless until October 1983, when Dressel agreed to serve as one of two principal sponsors for a gay civil rights bill.
The other sponsor was a liberal Democrat from Ann Arbor. Gay lobbyists could always get the liberal Democrats from college towns; what they needed was evidence that support existed elsewhere. Jim Dressel was handsome, forty years old, and a bachelor; gay activists assumed, therefore, he must be gay. It was worth approaching him at any rate. When asked, he agreed to sponsor the bill. The good-government Republican in him supported the legislation because it seemed the right thing to do.
There was another reason, of course. The bill was a way of starting to right an injustice that Dressel had painfully experienced himself. He began to believe he could make a difference for others like himself. If other Republicans saw that he supported this bill, maybe they would, too. Maybe the bill would pass and the repercussions be felt across the country. A ground swell could occur. It took only one courageous person, he believed, to make a difference.
In Holland, the shock waves spread quickly. In the Detroit News published on the day of the Beirut explosion, Dressel’s unusual move in sponsoring the bill was a page-one story whose headline declared that in Ottawa County supporting such legislation was “a sin.” Jim’s advisers could understand him voting for such a bill as a matter of conscience; but no one could fathom why he would be a principal sponsor. Only one state in the country had ever enacted such a law—Wisconsin, a year earlier. The Christian Reform realtor whom Jim had first defeated in the 1978 Republican primary quickly announced he would run against Jim in the next primary.
Mail opposing the measure flooded Jim’s office. “Homosexuals do not reproduce. They recruit, and, as they recruit, they corrupt,” wrote one correspondent. “Homos are so low that God destroyed the WHOLE WORLD because of them and their behavior,” wrote another. One expressed the hope that Jim would die of AIDS. A columnist for an Ann Arbor newspaper wrote that sponsoring the bill was tantamount to Dressel looking “down into his open grave.” When Dressel was asked about his own sexuality, as he frequently was both in his district and by the press, he refused to answer, saying it was not anyone’s business.
Under the rotunda of the state capitol in Lansing, Jim gathered support for his bill, calling in every chit he had out among Republican legislators, as well as from the Detroit politicians for whom he had gone to bat in the past. As they had been able to do elsewhere, gay lobbyists mustered an impressive array of mainstream religious leaders to support the bill. Once the bill had twenty-two cosponsors, including three Republicans, it went before the House Judiciary Committee and won in a vote of eight to five. Jim grew optimistic that they could get the bill passed. After the years of anxious sublimation, he could help make history.
NOVEMBER 1983
FRIENDS LOUNGE
JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA
Danny Leonard was an unlikely hero for Marines at Camp LeJeune. Danny owned the Friends Lounge, the only gay bar within sixty miles of the base, where he was better known as Brandy Alexander, an entertainer who donned elaborate wigs, high heels, and sequined evening gowns to perform every weekend under the Christmas tree lights that twinkled over the small Friends stage.
Danny had never thought much about political matters, much less about Defense Department personnel policies. The seventh of eight children from Lexington, North Carolina, Danny had grown up as the town queer. He started doing drag in 1964, when he was eighteen, and over the next fifteen years became a well-known female impersonator in the South, supporting his avocation through a hairdressing business. He heard about a gay bar for sale in Jacksonville during the 1981 Miss Gay America pageant. The bar was not much to look at, a run-down one-story white cinder-block building across Lejeune Boulevard from the Marine base, but Danny bought it.
One night after closing the bar, Danny discovered a young man with a Marine haircut passed out at the wheel of his idling car in his parking lot. At first, Danny thought the man was drunk; then he noticed the torn-out backseat and a hose running from the exhaust pipe, through the trunk, and into the car. He had just figured out he was gay, the young man explained haltingly as he recovered. He was a Marine, he said. What could he do? He had come to the bar, but it was after closing time. He had decided he was better off dead.
With that conversation, Danny Leonard believed he had found his destiny. He was in Jacksonville, across the street from the nation’s second-largest Marine base, in order to give confused young Marines like this one a healthy environment in which to come out. He remembered his traumas as the town queer of Lexington and could only imagine what it must be like in a hostile environment like the Marine Corps. So he decorated his bar with the Marine Corps flag and insignia and put out the word that service personnel would be welcome—and safe—in his bar.
By November 1983, the Marine Corps had taken notice. One Friday night, local sheriff’s deputies and military investigators riding with them as a “courtesy patrol” began stopping anyone driving out of the Friends Lounge parking lot who appeared to have the “high and tight” haircut of the Marines. If the driver produced military identification, he was handed over to NIS agents for questioning. Deputies had pulled over three cars by the time word got back inside. The Marines and sailors at the bar were as terrified of leaving as they were of staying.
With the sheriff’s cars still idling outside, Danny closed the bar and told the servicemen they could spend the night. Eventually, the deputies would give up and drive away. By his count, 123 servicemen bunked down at Friends that night. The next morning, patrol cars were still outside the parking lot when Danny went out to a nearby Hardee’s for 123 orders of biscuits and gravy. He then called local television reporters and invited them to the Friends to discuss the questionable legality of county taxpayers’ money going to support harassment of our fighting men. The deputies and NIS agents sped away at the sight of the TV cameras; official spokesmen denied they were engaged in a “witch-hunting” operation against gays. Meanwhile, the gay servicemen made their escape.
The next weekend, Danny initiated an informal shuttle service for his military patrons. Since driving in or out of his parking lot was hazardous, he arranged for them to park at a shopping center a mile from the bar and call for a ride. Some military customers arrived via the woods behind the bar, carrying a change of clothes. Danny provided a storage room for changing and freshening up for the evening. Every six months or so, as his Marine clientele transferred out and new recruits came in, Danny delivered a lecture warning customers against giving strangers their real names or letting unfamiliar people know they were in the service.
When a judge tried to make Friends off-limits, Danny fought back. In court, when the judge suggested that he might subpoena Danny’s membership and mailing lists, Danny informed him he would burn any lists before he let a government agency get its hands on them.
This impudent drag queen infuriated Marine officials. One night, someone lobbed a tear-gas grenade at the bar. Another time, fifteen Marines showed up with tire irons, shouting that they were going to beat up the queers. Danny dispatched a cadre of his beefiest nonmilitary patrons to challenge the group with pool cues. The Marines backed off. Shortly after that, however, Danny received an anonymous phone call. “I think you’re overstepping your bounds,” the caller said, and advised Danny to “back off or we’ll burn your bar down.”
It was in this anxious climate that Friends patrons waited for word of their buddies and boyfriends from the LeJeune-based Twenty-fourth Marine Amphibious Unit, which had been assigned to Beirut. When word filtered back that three Friends regulars were among the dead, Danny did what local community groups were doing throughout that part of North Carolina and joined the effort to memorialize the fallen Marines and Navy corpsmen. When the Marines announced plans for a Beirut Memorial on LeJeune Boulevard, including a Vietnam Memorial-style wall inscribed with names of the dead, Danny Leonard’s Friends Lounge raised two thousand dollars for its construction, more than any other business in Jacksonville. And one night in early 1984, Danny dedicated a plaque at Friends to memorialize Hospitalman Joseph P. Milano and the other servicemen who had died in Beirut.
After a few weeks, the news of the Beirut explosion dropped out of the headlines and into the back pages, displaced first by the invasion of Grenada and then by the forthcoming presidential campaign. For one young Marine, however, the memory would not fade.
The Marine corporal lapsed into severe depression in the days after he heard of Joe Milano’s death. His grief was especially painful because he could not betray its source. Grieving widows and buddies got sympathy; grieving homosexual lovers got interrogated by the Naval Investigative Service and discharged. The corporal constructed the lies that would protect him, telling friends that his girlfriend had just been killed in a car accident. Whenever he talked about the death and his grief, he had to monitor his every word, making sure he got the pronouns right. Within a few months, he transferred back to North Carolina, although he could not bring himself to live in Jacksonville. It was where he had planned to live with Joe Milano; he could not live there now without Joe.
The debate over the Michigan gay-rights bill reflected attitudes dominant in the early 1980s. On one side were people like Jim Dressel and his supporters, mainly Democrats, who maintained that the issue was only a matter of fairness and that people should not stand to lose their jobs because of other people’s prejudice. Gays seemed born that way, supporters noted, and discrimination based on sexual orientation was as invidious as bias against people with any other predetermined condition. Even most mainstream religious denominations assured legislators that God did not abide prejudice and discrimination, even if the Bible condemned homosexual acts. Most legislators accepted these arguments, and Jim frequently said that if the vote was held in private, 70 percent of the legislature would endorse the bill.
On the other side were fundamentalist religious groups, including an array of increasingly outspoken coalitions, such as the fifteen-thousand-member Moral Majority of Michigan. This group’s chairman, the Reverend David Wood, argued that homosexuals chose to be gay and were no more deserving of civil rights than “rapists and thieves,” who also chose to violate the laws of God and man. “I have a tough time wondering why elected officials are asked to pass a law giving sanction to a criminal,” said Wood, noting that Michigan continued to proscribe criminal penalties for sodomy.
Two newer issues raised by opponents surfaced in Michigan. The first was the argument that the bill would undermine the institution of the family. This reasoning, the argument that anything that did not condemn gay people tore away at the fabric of the American family, had been gaining ground since the formation of profamily lobbies in the late 1970s. To Jim Dressel, whether heterosexuals could make their families work seemed an entirely separate issue from whether gay people should have civil rights. Yet this logic was almost universally accepted. Even in liberal San Francisco, religious leaders successfully persuaded Mayor Dianne Feinstein to veto a bill in 1982 allowing unmarried couples restricted recognition as “domestic partners,” because the bill allegedly “repudiated” the “sanctity of marriage and family.”
The second new tactic that worked against the bill involved invoking AIDS. Ever since the issue had exploded on the front pages of newspapers in early 1983 with the first cases among blood-transfusion recipients, organizers of the religious right had used the perceived potential for widespread AIDS transmission in its argument against gay rights. “Although AIDS is carried primarily by immoral homosexuals, AIDS can be transmitted to healthy moral Americans like you and me,” wrote David Williams of the American Family Association. “Homosexuals don’t care if innocent people die as a result of their grotesque disease. Yes, homosexuals are only concerned with themselves and maintaining their sick, disgusting lifestyles.” A Holland constituent forwarded Dressel the fund-raising solicitation that included these statements, with the note that this was definitive rationale for rejecting the gay-rights bill.
Although most Americans rejected such rhetorical extremes, the appearance of the baffling new disease, whose cause had yet to be discovered, added to all the nagging uncertainties about homosexuality. Heterosexuals seemed able to accept individual gays; Congressman Gerry Studds, the first member of Congress publicly to acknowledge being homosexual, was in those very months on the way to a comfortable reelection. But on a more abstract level, the new disease bolstered old fears. For the first time in more than a decade, support for gay civil rights in public-opinion polls began to decline.
It was the wrong time to be sponsoring a gay civil rights bill, and Jim Dressel represented the wrong district to be taking up the cause. The Ottawa County Republican Party, which he had once chaired, publicly disassociated itself from both Dressel and his legislation. After favorable votes in the House Judiciary Committee, the bill floundered. When the matter came up on the House floor, the bill was sent back to committee, where everyone knew it would die.
The defeat hurt, but what hurt more was that in Holland, where Jim had spent his life, old friends and high school classmates suddenly stopped talking to him. Conversation ceased when he walked into a restaurant. For forty years he had been one of them; now he seemed to embarrass them. Everyone was whispering that he was gay, and Jim reinforced these suspicions by refusing to deny it. He would like to have said forthrightly that he was, but four decades of programming had instructed him to remain silent. Polls showed he was headed for certain defeat in his primary election.
Columnists throughout the state rallied to his defense, writing that he represented everything that was sorely lacking in politics—someone who stuck to his principles even in the face of political disaster. Even the Republican newspapers in Jim’s district, in Holland and Zeeland, supported him, aggressively calling for his reelection and defending his integrity. More influential, however, was the word that went out informally from the Christian Reformed churches: Dressel had betrayed them; he must go.
Jim’s service in the Michigan Air National Guard had become a respite from the pressures of the legislature. But now, as the controversy reached its peak, Dressel discovered that the other pilots, his friends at the National Guard base in Battle Creek, would barely speak to him. An article about Jim’s sponsorship of the gay-rights bill was posted on the base’s bulletin board. Jim could read the concern in the other pilots’ eyes: He was forty years old and unmarried and probably gay. If one National Guard pilot was gay, others might be, too. His pilot buddies worried that their neighbors and families might suspect them and that they, too, might become strangers when they went back to their homes in Kalamazoo or Augusta or Galesburg. Jim had used the military as his door into politics; now that he was on his way out, it seemed time to leave the military. After sixteen years of service, he resigned his commission.
MARCH 30, 1984
PORTSMOUTH NAVAL HOSPITAL
PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA
Officially, retired Commander Vernon Berg was dying of a lymphoma in the early months of 1984, and there were indications his cancer was caused by exposure to Agent Orange. But his son and namesake, Vernon Berg III, believed that part of his father’s malaise was disillusion.
Copy helped care for his father at the end. He had plenty of practice; AIDS had hit New York City’s gay community early and hard. Copy had watched seventeen friends die over the past three years. He sometimes worried for himself, as most gay men did in those anxious early years of the epidemic, before blood tests could determine who had made it safely through the community’s virological gauntlet.
The older Berg struggled against his disease, less because he loved life, Copy thought, than because he hated death. Throughout his illness, he had insisted on treatment at home. If he went into a hospital, he feared, he would not come out alive. But by the last days of March, he had grown so ill that he was moved to the Navy hospital at Portsmouth, across the Chesapeake Bay from Norfolk. He died there on the night of March 30, the day before his fifty-third birthday.