Blanket Parties
OCTOBER 1984
THE PENTAGON
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
As executive director of the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records, Pete Randell led what seemed a perfect life. He had a staff of twenty at the Pentagon. Another dozen people worked for him at the Air Force personnel center in San Antonio. The band struck up whenever he stepped off the planes that ferried him around various bases where he lectured on his corner of Air Force bureaucracy. Over the past year, he had been awarded citations from the American Legion, the Veterans for Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, and the American Red Cross. The Civil Service had just given him the Civilian Meritorious Service Award. His children were twelve and nine years old and the family lived in a comfortable brick ranch home on five acres of what was once a Civil War battlefield near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Randell had been the youngest executive director of any corrections board. Now he was certain that he was being groomed to be Assistant Secretary of the Air Force.
Still, under it all, were the yearnings Pete had suppressed for most of his adult life. He was thirty-eight years old now and edging closer to allowing himself one moment of freedom. The catalyst for his seeking out the gay subculture was a case that came before the board in 1984, during which a gay airman said that he could spot gay men just by looking at them. Pete wondered how this could be; he certainly could not. The thought stuck with him. There were other gay people out there. How many more? How could you tell? Over the years, he had stolen a chance encounter here and there, but these did not represent any systematic interaction with the gay community.
Then Pete recalled the copious documentation of gay life used in Technical Sergeant Matlovich’s appeal almost a decade earlier. Pete ordered up box after box of the Matlovich files from the archives and began poring over the testimony and newspaper clippings. In a Parade magazine story, Pete read Leonard’s comments about going to a gay bar in Washington, a place called the Lost & Found.
Late one night in October 1984, with wisps of Indian summer still in the air, Pete drove to the bar. He parked on a side street. Here he was, at an establishment catering to sexual deviates, and he really thought he might be raped when he walked in the door. He anticipated furtive homosexuals, mincing men, transvestites and lesbians in male drag. So when Pete took his first steps inside, he was stunned to see a normal-looking crowd, cheerful, chatting, seemingly happy.
A week later, he picked up a copy of the Washington Blade, the local gay paper, and noted the locations of other gay bars. He met civil servants and soldiers and professionals like himself. Soon, he made the acquaintance of the manager of an exclusive eatery where the President and Vice President sometimes dined. The manager was well connected to the powerful gay underground. He began introducing him to the large homosexual Republican establishment in Washington.
Over the next months, Pete met an associate justice of the Supreme Court, several congressmen, a handful of general officers, and a senator, one of at least two gay Republican senators. By now, Pete was also learning about the gay generals who had managed to navigate their way around suspicion into top Pentagon jobs. An Air Force active-duty major general put the make on him in a Pentagon rest room. And, of course, he heard about the four-star Army general widely rumored to be gay. Another story making the rounds was that one branch of the service had claimed two bachelor generals, one retired and one on active duty, who were brothers and both reputed to be gay.
All this came as a revelation to Pete. Everything his parents had taught him about homosexuals was a lie. There were decent homosexuals, and some were making decisions about how to run the country. He felt a tremendous relief as the two warring sides of his nature, the secret and the respectable, came together. It gave him no impulse to become a crusader for gay rights. He had not been in a closet, after all; he had been in a vault. He decided to separate from his wife.
Pete Randell had never used his position to pursue an antigay agenda within the Air Force. On the contrary, he had put an end to the practice of “redlining,” in which gay-related appeals went to only the most conservative panels. This was no small matter during the early 1980s, given the unprecedented numbers of gay-related discharges meted out under the new Defense Department regulations. At his presentations on Air Force bases, Pete always asked for a show of hands as to whether officers thought gays would eventually be allowed to serve in the Air Force. Usually, by more than two-to-one margins, audiences responded affirmatively, and 90 percent commonly agreed that homosexuals should be allowed to serve. At the senior NCO academies where Pete delivered his standard two-hour lecture, the response was the same.
The military’s antigay regulations galled Randell, as much because they violated his conservative “get the government off our backs” ethos as because of their implications for his personal life. This was not an issue about which he was outspoken, however, even as he began the process of self-discovery.
Others in Washington’s Republican gay underground were outspoken opponents of gay rights, including a gay rock-ribbed conservative United States senator from the most conservative New England state. John “Terry” Dolan, whose fund-raising with the National Conservative Political Action Committee had played a key role in President Reagan’s 1980 campaign, was a regular at the more exclusive gay bars, as were a number of prominent Defense Department officials.
In a society that supported so many institutions enforcing social proscriptions against homosexuality, it was inevitable that many homosexuals themselves would be involved in perpetuating that discrimination, because homosexuals exist in every social institution. In late 1984, for example, Fairfax County police conducted a routine sting operation on a gay cruising area in the Belle Haven Marine in Old Town Alexandria, outside Washington. According to news accounts, one of those arrested was Albert B. Fletcher, a judge on the U.S. Court of Military Appeals. Fletcher claimed that he had been jogging near the public rest room and had stopped to talk to an ostensibly gay man in order to gather information that would assist him in deciding a gay-related case. The man with whom he decided to chat, however, was an undercover officer. According to Fletcher, the officer asked him to have sex. Though police said that it was Fletcher who propositioned the police officer, other attorneys representing other victims of the sting said police officers were indeed engaging in entrapment.
Accusations of entrapment frequently followed operations in which police staked out gay cruising areas. In the eight months before Fletcher’s arrest, Fairfax County police had nabbed sixty-nine men in similar sting operations. In July 1984, an undercover operation in a Fairfax County shopping mall led to the arrests of nineteen men, including an Army major, an Air Force major, and a Seventh Day Adventist minister. In a throwback to the journalistic conventions of the 1950s, The Washington Post published the names and occupations of all the suspects.
Fletcher’s arrest was particularly ironic, given his 1978 ruling upholding the Army’s court-martial of Private Reginald Scoby on sodomy charges. Fletcher resigned his post shortly after his arrest.
NORFOLK NAVAL STATION
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
Naval Investigative Service agents were blunt at Linda Gautney’s first interview. The NIS investigated homosexuals, one explained. Did Linda have any problem with that? Linda did not. As far as she knew, she had never met a homosexual. When she had attended the NIS academy in Suitland, Maryland, she sat through lectures that taught her that homosexuals were security risks and a threat to the good order, discipline, and morale of the Navy. These notions were presented as well-established facts that barely needed explanation.
By now, Linda was aware that the NIS itself was concerned about the possibility of having gays in its midst. Though governed by civil service regulations that forbade discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, Linda learned from friends in her hometown that, in the course of a background check on her, NIS personnel had asked questions about whom she had dated and whether she had any “deviate sexual practices.”
None of these questions troubled Linda, who had lived a thoroughly ordinary life for all her twenty-two years. She had not wanted to work in cotton mills her whole life like most of the other people in eastern Alabama, so she put herself through two years at the local community college and then through Troy State University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in criminal justice in 1984. During her last year at school, Linda interned at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glenco, Georgia, where a number of federal agencies train their agents. That was where she became interested in the NIS. The Naval Investigative Service is the FBI for the Navy, NIS agents said. Linda applied and in August was assigned to the Norfolk Resident Agency.
Immediately, she began hearing about “queer cases,” or “8-G’s,” after the case codes assigned to sodomy cases—code 8-G. In training, Linda never received specific instruction on how to handle 8-G’s, although she learned other interesting specifics. One teacher in an interrogations class explained that once a gay male suspect admitted his homosexuality, his voice sometimes turned higher and he might become more effeminate, break down and cry. “It’s like they become a woman right in front of your eyes,” the teacher said. Regarding lesbians, they could be the meanest people in the world, but a jilted lesbian could be a treasure trove of names, since she was likely to “dime out” other gay women.
In Norfolk, Linda saw that many agents did not like working the queer cases—not that they thought it was wrong; nobody ever said that, but they seemed to think that such work was beneath them. The FBI didn’t go peeking under beds; why should they? Senior agents preferred to avoid the work altogether, leaving the 8-G’s to junior agents. And then it was important that 8-G cases did not undermine an agent’s professional standing.
Gays were considered the easiest marks for NIS interrogations, and an agent who could not wrest a confession from an 8-G became the butt of some ribbing. Agents took professional pride in eliciting more information than the suspect needed to give. It was a badge of honor to leave an interview with both a confession and a list of fifteen other gays to investigate. When an 8-G interrogation was over, nobody ever asked, “Did you get a confession?” It was assumed the agent had. Instead, Linda noted, the question was always, “How many did you get?”
This was the first time Linda had ever been away from rural Alabama, and that, along with all the talk about 8-G’s and queer cases, caused her to reflect on her own sexuality. She had lived a perfectly conventional life but was aware of less than conventional personal feelings. Now she understood she was a lesbian. And her feeling of being different did not dissipate in this environment where homosexuality was frowned upon. She made it a point to date male agents and not to strike up friendships with women in the office. Still, she began to worry: Would they notice?
The possibility that other agents might be gay was a matter of constant speculation in the NIS office. One female agent, for example, kept a file of three-by-five-inch index cards on which she had written the name of every suspected homosexual ever named in her interrogations. She claimed to know the name of almost every lesbian in Norfolk. This led some agents to wonder openly whether she had something to hide. There was also talk about an extraordinarily high official at the NIS headquarters in Washington who had never been married and who seemed to have an inordinately close relationship with another agent.
It was in this ambience of suspicion and countersuspicion that Linda began to realize she could not repress her feelings forever. She also wondered whether 8-G’s were worth all the time and money the government spent to root them out. But she dared not speak such thoughts aloud—then she would be suspect. She could imagine it now. Agents would fan out in her hometown. They already knew Linda Gautney was gay, they would say. That’s what they always told friends and relatives of 8-G’s under investigation: They knew the suspect was homosexual—they just needed more information to nail it down. Even if information was not forthcoming, word spread in hometowns just the same. Linda imagined the agents in Valley, Alabama, and people nodding knowingly and remarking that Linda had always been a tomboy.
At the same time Special Agent Linda Gautney was worrying about NIS agents in her hometown, Air Force Sergeant Jack Green was preparing for a serious discussion with the sergeant with whom he shared his room and his bed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Jack was about to explain that he was an informant for the Office of Special Investigations. Though Green’s duties had to do with Department of Defense efforts to rid the services of drugs, the OSI was also the agency that investigated homosexuality. Since Jack’s boyfriend was an occasional pot smoker as well as gay, Jack figured he would be frightened when he learned that Jack was more than just a munitions specialist.
It had started innocuously enough in 1982 when Jack joined the Thirty-fourth Tiger Fighter Group in Guam. The Reagan administration had enunciated a “zero tolerance” policy for drugs in the military, and all the services were using young servicemen as informants to break the drug suppliers that had long fed off military installations. Although Jack had served in the Air Force less than a year, he was twenty-two years old and more mature than most airmen. With a diploma from Tecumseh High School in Tecumseh, Oklahoma, and two years at Southern Bible College, he also had the small-town credentials that made him a reliable foot soldier in the war on drugs. Since he contemplated a career in law enforcement, working with the OSI seemed a good career move.
What could not be read on his résumé were the profound conflicts he had long experienced over his sexuality. In high school, Jack had assured himself that his attractions to men were just a phase. At college, he had spent endless nights on his knees pleading for God to change him. He had joined the Air Force to get away from homosexuality. Now he was amazed at the numbers of gays there were in the military.
It was during his assignment on Guam that he began meeting other gay airmen. Drug cliques sometimes overlapped with gay social circles, and in his round of partying he met a lesbian officer with whom he became friends. Later, his OSI handlers became keenly interested in their friendship. Was she a lesbian? they asked. No, Jack said. Toward the end of the assignment, Jack had a brief affair with an OSI agent who, like himself, was secretly gay.
In Turkey, Jack still struggled with himself. He could no longer deny that he was gay and could no longer believe that he was ever going to change, but he still did not want this destiny. Only in the summer months of 1984, when he began a relationship with his roommate, did he move toward accepting himself. At first, the roommate talked a lot about his girlfriend back in the States. After several weekends on the Turkish coast, the two men got drunk together and made love. On almost every weekend after that, they went away, had too much to drink, and then had sex. Neither spoke aloud about their nighttime activity. Neither ever admitted to the other that he was gay. Their relationship simply drifted wordlessly somewhere beyond the taboos they had broken.
By the autumn of 1984, Jack knew they had to speak. Word was out among the drug dealers he was investigating that there was an OSI informant among them. Jack figured it was just a matter of time before they found out who. He had to tell his roommate before someone else did.
As Jack had expected, his roommate was petrified. Jack assured him he would not turn him in for being gay, but he was opposed to drug use and warned him to stop smoking marijuana as long as he was in the service. It was not safe.
Being a drug informant, however, was not safe work, either. As the dealers tried to figure out who was informing on them, suspicions fell on a young airman. Before long, he was tossed from the third-story balcony of his apartment. When the OSI finally closed the case against the dealer, Jack’s testimony being the crucial evidence in the court-martial, he figured he would be transferred away from Turkey, as he had been in the past after similar busts. Instead, he was retained at his job in the munitions shop—even though the shop was crowded with people whom the dealer had named as drug users. Green pleaded with the local OSI commander for a transfer. None came, though he was warned not to stand around any heavy machinery on the base, just in case there might be an accident. Even after Jack was cornered in a barracks bathroom and beaten up, the OSI did not issue the transfer.
Jack’s relationship with his roommate did not last long after his revelation, but that was the least of the airman’s problems. Jack’s immediate task was survival.
When other ROTC cadets started talking about having a blanket party, seventeen-year-old Kevin Drewery knew right away who would be the guest of honor. It had been obvious since that afternoon when Drewery and his entire platoon were forced to do extra calisthenics because of some screwup by Bob, a mildly effeminate cadet.
Kevin’s two weeks at Fort Knox were supposed to be the prelude to a military career. At the end of the summer, he was slated to attend Kemper Military College in Boonville, Missouri, on a full scholarship. He had launched himself in a military direction after becoming increasingly aroused during his junior high school gym classes back in Rockford, Illinois. Taking ROTC courses was a way to get out of physical education, and he hoped the military would rechannel his desires in more conventional directions: The Army would make a man out of him.
After two years at Kemper, he would be commissioned as an officer. By then perhaps he would not be queer anymore. It was a frightening thought, to end up being outcast and hated like Bob, the cadet for whom the blanket party was now being planned.
Bob was asleep inside the barracks while Kevin and six other platoon members had a pizza outside and complained about the extra exercises they had had to do. They were all in their twenties, had completed several years of college, and were about to be commissioned. And Lord, how they hated queers. Kevin was not sure who brought up the blanket party, but you could not be in ROTC and not know what a blanket party meant. Kevin was frightened that they would be caught but equally frightened that if he did not help the other cadets, he would end up under a blanket himself.
Late that night, the platoon sneaked inside the barracks, threw a blanket over Bob in his bunk so that he could not identify his attackers, and began working him over. Bob did not fight back for the fifteen minutes that the half-dozen men pummeled him. Kevin flailed away with the other cadets, knowing with every punch that he was every bit as queer as Bob and that they would all be beating him if they knew.
When it was over, the cadets retreated outside, laughing about what they had done, congratulating themselves. Bob never reported the attack.
Not long after his first visit to the Lost & Found, Pete Randell asked his wife to meet him in a restaurant. He had never told her why they had separated. She had believed he was having an affair with another woman. When they met, Randell told her it was not another woman, he was gay.
Pete’s wife did not take the news well. She wanted a divorce, which Pete was willing to give her. She also told Pete’s parents. “You ain’t nothing but a goddamn queer faggot,” was Pete’s father’s response when he heard.
Pete was prepared for this. What he was not prepared for was his wife’s telling agents of the Office of Special Investigations, which she did when they conducted their background check in December 1984 to renew Pete’s security clearance.
Pete lost his clearance immediately, which required his removal as executive director of the Air Force records board. Under national security rules, Pete could not hold the job without a top-secret clearance and, as a practical matter, the Defense Department was loath to give such clearance to a gay man. Civil Service said Pete could not be dismissed from his job for being gay, but he could be demoted to a position for which a security clearance was no longer required. He was offered a job as a clerk/typist—in the office where, until a few weeks before, he had been executive director.
Of course, the Air Force wanted him to resign. Pete was uncertain. His pride would not allow him to become a typist, with everyone else in the office sniggering about him behind his back. He had worked in government for his entire adult life, however, and was not sure what else he would do. Facing an uncertain future, the talk about discrimination and oppression did not seem so unrelated to his life anymore.
After months of extraordinary tension, Sergeant Jack Green received his transfer to the Thirty-second Tactical Fighter Squadron at a U.S. air base in Holland. Early in his assignment, the Office of Special Investigations asked Jack to work again as a drug informant. He refused. He had been left hanging in Turkey and had grown frustrated with the uneven hand of military justice in drug offenses: Enlisted men caught with small amounts of marijuana seemed to draw heavy penalties, while genuine drug kingpins seemed always to walk away.
Jack’s new assignment put him near Amsterdam, Europe’s gay capital. On New Year’s Eve, Jack took his first trip into Amsterdam, and, as firecrackers burst and revelers cheered, he welcomed in 1985 at a popular gay coffeehouse on Leiderstraadt.
In the months that followed, Green grew more comfortable with his sexuality. In March, he met Albert Taminiau. By June, they were living together in an apartment on the outskirts of Amsterdam, about an hour from Jack’s job at Soesterberg Air Base, an installation that would soon become very famous in the Netherlands because of Jack Green’s assignment there.