Dykebusters
SEPTEMBER 1985
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
Nobody at Annapolis understood Karen Colton’s decision to drop out of the Naval Academy at the end of her sophomore year. With Karen’s 3.7 grade point average out of a possible 4.0, she excelled academically, and she was popular among classmates. Two years of daily harassment from male midshipmen, however, had taken its toll. The limitations to women’s advancement meant there was no real purpose to their education. The hassle simply was not worth it to her.
A week before Karen left, a group of women officers from Washington came to Annapolis to talk about opportunities for women in the Navy. That might be the case in Washington, but not at Annapolis, where opportunities for women seemed remote. “Why aren’t you here?” Karen asked angrily. In the past two years, she had never seen a female naval officer performing any real task in the Navy. These field trips by equal-opportunity types utterly detached from the daily harassment women midshipmen endured were galling.
Karen’s close friends believed that she dropped out to live with Ruth Voor. Karen was stubborn enough to want to prove them wrong, so after leaving Annapolis she went to school for a year at the Florida Institute of Technology. After that, she realized what Ruth had known when they first met—that the two of them were meant to be together. In May 1985, she moved to San Diego, where Ruth was stationed, and began final work on a mathematics degree at the University of San Diego.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Ruth Voor had stuck with her plan to do sea duty. The combat exclusion policy that prevented her from serving aboard a ship that might see hostilities rankled Ruth to no end. Male classmates with far lower grades could have any assignment they wanted, while she struggled to find a ship assignment. After completing supply school, she finally did find a submarine tender, the USS McKee, and took over the food-service division.
Although Karen and Ruth led a settled lifestyle, the fear of exposure always hovered nearby. When Karen’s mother learned that her daughter was moving in with Ruth, for example, she became convinced that Ruth had corrupted Karen. She threatened to write to Ruth’s commander if Karen proceeded with her plan to move to San Diego. Karen was pretty sure her mother would not follow through on the threat, and she did not.
Another danger hung in the air in the autumn of 1985 when the McKee’s legal officer urged the captain to launch an investigation of homosexuals on the ship. Gays were a time bomb that could go off at any moment, he warned. The ship’s chaplain later confided to Ruth that he had also visited the captain and advised him, “Captain, if you have a witch-hunt, you’re going to lose some of your best people.” The captain was looking to earn an admiral’s star and was not interested in damaging his career, so he heeded the chaplain’s advice.
It was a close call. From her days at Annapolis, Ruth knew that these investigations could take on a life of their own, especially when women were involved.
The first four years of the Reagan administration marked more difficult times for women in the military. Though female recruits had saved the all-volunteer military in the early 1970s, the uniformed services seemed intent on taking advantage of the conservative administration’s antifeminist posture to roll back both the numbers of women recruited for the armed forces and to restrict the roles they could assume to a greater extent.
Even before Reagan’s hand hit the Bible at his inauguration in 1981, the Army and Air Force had privately proposed to his transition team that the Carter administration’s recruitment goals for women for the next several years be reduced. Two months later, Army deputy chief of staff Lt. General Robert G. Yerks suggested it was time to “idle our motors” and not enlist higher numbers of women until there were further studies on their usefulness. Though Congress balked, advocates for women in the military believed that the services were advancing a “hidden agenda” to turn the clock back on the gains women had made.
Though women by now represented 8.5 percent of the active-duty military, new recruitment dropped off. The Defense Department reduced by sixty thousand the number of women it intended to enlist by 1986. The Air Force reduced its female recruitment goal from 90,000 to 61,000; the Army from 87,500 to 65,000. The cutbacks came at a time when the Reagan administration had announced its intention to increase the standing military by 200,000 troops, or about 10 percent. Since this goal would be difficult to achieve without women, the Army General Staff submitted a proposal suggesting that the draft be reinstated so the services could meet their manpower needs—with men. Though Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger rejected the proposal and Congress generally objected to the armed forces reducing their female recruiting goals, the suggestion alone reflected the deep antipathy that military brass still felt regarding the increased presence of women in their ranks. The period that women’s rights advocates call “womanpause” had begun.
By the mid-1980s, the effects were evident in the numbers of women entering the armed forces. In 1979, during the Carter administration’s buildup, for example, the number of women in the military increased by 13,300. In 1984, the number increased by 5,200. Total projections for the numbers of women the military planned to enlist by 1986 were decreased in early 1985 from the Carter administration’s projected 265,500 to 215,000. Still, women made up 9.5 percent of the armed forces by 1985. In 1983 and 1984, they comprised 12 percent of recruits. The feminization of the armed forces was a trend that could not be halted; Congress would not permit it, and the Pentagon could not dramatically decrease the numbers of women without reinstating conscription, a politically unacceptable alternative.
What could be manipulated, however, were the jobs women would be allowed to have in the armed forces. Combat assignments would not be among them. That policy was rooted in a 1948 law specifically prohibiting women from flying combat planes in the Air Force and from serving as combat aviators or in any other position on warships in the Navy. The Army’s exclusion was not based on any statute but on regulations the Army itself had authored to ban women from combat jobs. The trend during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had been to open up the maximum number of jobs to women and to whittle down the numbers of jobs that fell into the combat exclusion category.
During “womanpause” in the early 1980s, the armed forces began to reverse that trend and began adding new military occupation specialties to those from which women would be excluded. Under the Reagan administration, the various branches of the military announced studies to determine whether this or that MOS should be reclassified as a combat job. Not surprisingly, many of the studies concluded that women’s roles should be further restricted. In 1982, for example, the Army added twenty-three MOS’s to the list of jobs that would be defined as combat slots. By early 1985, after extensive “research,” the Marine Corps announced that it was closing forty-one MOS’s to women. These included such positions as handlers for marijuana-sniffing dogs used in barracks drug searches.
It was no longer clear by the mid-1980s whether the combat exclusion policy could be justified in military terms. Other nations grappling with the same issue began to reconsider their combat exclusion policies. By 1984, for example, Norway, Greece, and the Netherlands had announced they would allow women in combat positions. When similar debates erupted in the United States, however, the discussion among the nation’s top military men revolved less around questions of military effectiveness than around a defense of manhood.
General Robert Barrow, a former Marine Corps commandant, explained in a congressional hearing, “War is man’s work. Biological convergence on the battlefield would not only be dissatisfying in terms of what women could do, but it would be an enormous psychological distraction for the male, who wants to think that he’s fighting for that woman somewhere behind, not up there in the same foxhole with him. It tramples the male ego. When you get right down to it, you have to protect the manliness of war.” General William Westmoreland put it more bluntly when he said, “No man with gumption wants a woman to fight his battles.”
The comments were intriguing not so much for what they said about the combat exclusion policy, which was never in serious jeopardy during the conservative 1980s, but for what they revealed about the military’s general attitude toward women in its ranks. The issue of women in the military was never about women; it was about men and their need to define their masculinity. That, more than the fighting and winning of wars, appeared to be the central mission of the armed forces, at least for many men. That was why they sought to limit the role not only of women in the military but of gays, as well. These exclusions were, in this sense, all part of the same package, a defense of traditional masculinity in a changing world. The fact that the world was shifting made the defense all the more impassioned. In the difficult years ahead, as the changes became more pronounced, it would also make the defense more ferocious.
Against the more pronounced resistance of the military hierarchy, it is striking that women continued to make impressive inroads in the armed forces. Minerva, the authoritative magazine on women in the military, kept track of women’s achievements in every branch of the service. Every MOS, it seemed, had its first female: the first security police chief master sergeant, the first female officer in the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team, the first colonel in military intelligence, and the first Air Force tactical fighter wing for which all maintenance squadrons were supervised by female officers. A female Naval Academy graduate became the first woman ship’s executive officer in 1984, though the ship was a tug and not in the active Navy but in the Naval Reserve Force’s fleet.
A decade of increased recruitment had at last allowed growing numbers of women to join the ranks of the senior enlisted. Though the dissolution of the all-women’s services had destroyed the old support networks, new networks were building. In July 1985, the Army appointed its first female Army general who came neither from the fields of nursing nor administration. At the same time, a female colonel was put on the list of promotable colonels to be the second female general in a combat support job.
The advancements came less from the deference of an obliging command as from the fact that so many of the military’s women were so well qualified. This fact was in no place more obvious than at the service academies, where, despite constant harassment, women increasingly graduated at the top of their classes. The Naval Academy class of 1984, for example, was the first in which a woman ranked as its number-one graduate. In 1985, a female earned that distinction for the first time at the Coast Guard Academy. In 1986, a female cadet was the top-ranked graduate of the United States Air Force Academy.
Even as women succeeded against incredible odds, females in the military were learning a lesson that many women in the civilian sector were learning, as well. Accomplishment did not always spell success, and sometimes it bred suspicion. Former Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay enunciated this fact when he told an interviewer in 1986 that women did not make ideal Air Force personnel because in the end they would want to get married and have children. He added, “If we have women who don’t want to do that, I don’t know if we’d want them in the Air Force or not. They’re probably kind of queer or something and psychologically not very suitable to carry on some of this important work, I think we’re running too many [women] through the Academy.”
The military world only mirrored the civilian world. But in the military, the penalties for violating gender roles were more severe, especially for those women who were nontraditional in both their occupations and sexual orientation. In this way, military lesbians found themselves on a dangerous front line of the gender wars in the 1980s.
MARINE CORPS RECRUIT TRAINING DEPOT
PARRIS ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA
“We have to get our drill instructor quota for the year,” said an agent from the Marine Corps Criminal Investigation Division in warning Renee Mueller to lay low. Mueller was a military policeman in the provost marshal’s office at Parris Island, the only Marine Corps boot camp where women were trained. Though homosexual investigations were handled by the Naval Investigative Service, the Marine Corps CID, which handled less serious criminal matters, had gotten wind of an investigation of suspected lesbian drill instructors.
These had become fairly routine affairs at Parris Island. No branch of the service was as hostile to the growing presence of women as the Marine Corps. And while the leathernecks could not legally move against them for being women, they could move against them for being lesbians. Suspicion fell most heavily on women in nontraditional jobs, which in the Marine Corps meant those in the most macho job of all, that of drill instructor, or DI. This MOS proved a fertile ground for investigations because there were, in fact, so many lesbian DIs.
Just why so many homosexual women gravitated to DI positions remained a matter of speculation. It is indelicate work, and some lesbians argue that homosexual women are less concerned with maintaining feminine affectations than are heterosexual females and are therefore better suited for the Sturm und Drang of the drill field. The work is also better suited to women without husbands or families: DIs routinely work their recruits through eighty-hour weeks. The field also attracts Marines with something to prove. The position is highly competitive; only the top 10 percent are even considered for the work. For whatever reason, the records of lesbian drill instructors purged from the Marine Corps during the numerous witch-hunts of the 1980s offer ample proof that lesbians have been among the most accomplished DIs. Their excellence and their high visibility, however, made them vulnerable to investigations.
Some of the younger Marines, such as Renee’s friend in the CID, understood that the investigations were mainly for show, to demonstrate to the brass at Marine headquarters in Quantico that nobody at Parris Island was going soft on queers. Mueller understood that, too, and she appreciated the warning.
A particularly nasty purge of lesbians, begun in 1984, was just ending. Although the NIS was happy to collar any lesbian it could identify, there was much more status to be gained by going after officers—the higher-ranking, the better. These were “the big fish.” The NIS had its sights set on a female lieutenant colonel who lived in a comfortable two-story home in a residential neighborhood off the Parris Island Marine base. The lieutenant colonel was believed to be having an affair with another captain, whom the NIS was also eager to nail.
To gather evidence, the NIS planted two women among the drill instructors at the headquarters company to gather information on the two officers, according to several women stationed at Parris Island then. Their break came when rumors spread that two enlisted female DIs had gotten “married.” An NIS search of their home turned up a certificate from a local gay church attesting to their union and receipts for two wedding bands purchased at a Navy exchange. At first, the two women denied the charges, but under NIS pressure they agreed to turn in all the lesbians they knew in exchange for honorable discharges.
The two NIS informers performed all sorts of unpleasant tasks for the NIS. One invited a gunnery sergeant to her home and seduced her. Once the couple was in flagrante delicto, an NIS agent leaped out of the closet and arrested the sergeant. Altogether, at least a dozen women drill instructors were rounded up in this purge.
The machinations typical of military justice in such cases were soon a problem. One staff sergeant was appointed a lawyer only one hour before her hearing; when the attorney requested an extension so they could discuss her case, they received only one day to devise a defense. When boards ruled contrary to the brass, they changed the boards: A female lieutenant colonel chaired one board that found an accused lesbian innocent. The lieutenant colonel was promptly removed from the panel for future hearings and replaced by a full colonel who worked directly for the base’s commanding general. No other women were acquitted.
The purge cost the Marine Corps some of its most outstanding female drill instructors. One ten-year veteran had the longest experience of any female drill instructor in the Marine Corps, and she had been the first woman from the Marine Corps to attend jump school, the first woman on the drill field for more than three years, and the first woman drum major of a Marine band. She had trained over one thousand recruits and received outstanding performance ratings. But at her hearing, she had a hard time finding character witnesses. The Marine Corps was the only service that segregated its training companies by sex, so only women could testify on her behalf; and few women would testify because if they spoke up for a suspected lesbian, they might be investigated, too. In the end, the staff sergeant was told she would receive an honorable discharge only if she named other lesbians. She refused and received a discharge under other than honorable conditions.
There were other discharges of sergeants and staff sergeants, and yet these hardly reduced the visibility of lesbians on the drill field. Most of the newly vacated positions were filled with new lesbian drill instructors, since they were the top performers and next in line for the promotion.
That lesbian investigations were aimed more at getting women out of the services than merely eliminating gays is clear in stories such as that of the USS Land, a Norfolk-based submarine tender. When Bob Ledet was assigned to the ship in 1983, he was struck by the fact that the crew was very gay. Of a ship population between twelve and thirteen hundred, Ledet estimated that between two and three hundred were gay, and most of these were men. Among the ship’s very highest officers was a patron of the gay after-hours clubs in Norfolk, whose boyfriend was an enlisted seaman on the USS America. When the Land was overseas, the officer rented hotel rooms and hosted huge parties for the ship’s gay male crew members.
For all the conspicuous male homosexuality on board, when an investigation of the Land occurred in late 1984 it was only of the women. As Ledet heard it, the NIS put an undercover agent in the female berthing area to collect names of suspected lesbians. Almost immediately thereafter, the women disappeared. Altogether eight women lost their Navy careers in that investigation.
Most commonly, lesbian investigations began after some man’s advances had been spurned. Lesbians were especially vulnerable to sexual harassment because commands rarely looked into females’ complaints against men but would almost always investigate a male’s accusation of lesbianism.
An officer assigned to a military police unit at Fort Polk, Louisiana, for example, came to the defense of some enlisted women who complained that a male supervisor was pressuring each of them to engage in a ménage à trois with him and his wife. The fact that the women refused inspired post authorities to investigate them for being homosexual, along with the officer who had spoken up for them.
Petty Officer Mary Beth Harrison faced a similar investigation at the Navy base in Keflavik, Iceland, when she rejected the sexual advances of a petty officer first class. The African-American petty officer, a yeoman, had announced his intention to sleep with every white woman on the base, according to Harrison’s recollection. “I’ll get you for this, bitch,” he had said when she refused him. The yeoman then convinced a woman who worked under him to accuse Harrison of being homosexual. The base’s administrative officer felt the accusation was justified because Harrison could offer no evidence of dating Navy men while assigned to Ice-land. This fact was considered enough to bring Harrison before an administrative separation hearing, which, citing the scant evidence against her, acquitted her.
The pressures on women were especially acute at overseas duty stations. In Germany, Army men often would not learn German and therefore were dependent on Army women for dates. Women who refused the advances of nineteen-year-old privates often became the subjects of lesbian rumors. At the Army post at Krabbenloch Kasern near Stuttgart, West Germany, frustrated young GIs fueled a frenzy of lesbian baiting in the mid-1980s.
Private First Class Jeanne Martin, who was assigned there then, believed that Krabbenloch had earned its reputation as a lesbian center because it was home to the Ninety-third Signal Brigade, which meant women filled such nontraditional jobs as cable installer and phone-line repairman. Although clerk/typists were as likely to be lesbian, they were rarely suspect; mechanics almost always were. Husky women were suspicious; petite women were not. Any woman who swore was also probably a dyke, since men did not like women who swore and any woman who did must not care what men thought of her.
The Family was well-established at Krabbenloch. With hostility mounting against lesbians, gays sat together in the mess hall and in the television lounges and took trips to town in groups. This caused the straight GIs to promote the notion that gays were a dangerous cabal, an Army within the Army that threatened them all; and the brunt of their hostility was aimed at women perceived to be lesbians.
Visual testimony to this occurred when a general visited the post in 1984 and the soldiers in A Company of the Thirty-fourth Signal Battalion strung a line of women’s panties, out of which stuffed condoms protruded, across the sidewalk from the post’s entrance. The message was presumably meant to indicate that the women there all acted like men.
In 1985, a number of the younger enlisted and noncommissioned officers organized a group they called Dykebusters. They wore T-shirts with two interlocking female symbols in a circle with a slash. At the enlisted club, they gathered around the jukebox, slugged back snorts of whiskey, and sang their own version of the theme song from the popular movie Ghostbusters. “There’s something strange in the neighborhood. Who you gonna call? Dykebusters!” When the men got to the final refrain—“I ain’t afraid of no ghost!”—they belted out, “I ain’t afraid of no dyke!”
Martin recalls that when she was assigned as a toolroom clerk, she was warned that she better give the men whatever tool they wanted, whenever they wanted. “If you get guys mad at you, they start rumors,” a senior NCO told her. “You have to be a people pleaser here.”
Women, both straight and lesbian, complained to one another about sexual harassment but were afraid to go to post authorities. If you complained, you might come under suspicion yourself and have to answer questions about who you were dating and if you were not dating, why not. One woman who reported sexual harassment suddenly began failing inspections. Although all branches of the services had regulations that forbade sexual harassment, few commands enforced them with much vigor. For all the talk of women’s combat exclusion in the 1980s, the more pressing issue of sexual harassment received little attention. And the relationship between sexual harassment and the antigay regulations was ignored altogether.
Female military personnel with children were the most vulnerable to investigatory pressures. By the mid-1980s, military investigators had adopted the tactic of harassing the children of suspected lesbians as a routine part of gathering evidence. In March 1985, when the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division suspected a female enlisted woman of having an affair with a West Point cadet, they showed up at the sports field where the enlisted woman’s children had soccer practice after school and asked the children about their mother’s sex life. Mothers who had once warned children not to talk to strangers now warned their kids against talking to agents of the United States government.
SEPTEMBER 1985
WURTSMITH AIR FORCE BASE
OSCODA, MICHIGAN
Captain David Marier was ordered to peel the base stickers off his car, turn in his uniforms and flight suits, and prepare for his discharge from the Air Force in July 1985. His final papers announced an other than honorable discharge. For the next two months, he stayed in Michigan to follow up on the various airlines to which he had applied as a pilot. The character of the discharge had its intended punitive impact, however. When one major carrier asked Marier why he had not received an honorable discharge, he told them. Suddenly, Dave was no longer qualified to fly for them. Other airline job offers also dried up. Marier still hoped something would work out, but until it did he would return to his home in Minnesota. He could not afford to keep up the mortgage payments on the house he had bought, so he gave it up.
In the autumn, Dave granted a round of interviews to the gay press and newspapers around Oscoda. Eventually, his story even ran with the Associated Press, but it failed to ignite the indignation for which Marier had hoped. When he talked about the military’s coercive tactics and threats of prison time and bad discharges, he could tell that many heterosexuals did not believe him. Not in this day and age, they were thinking; things like that don’t happen in America.
Dave wrote to the “Phil Donahue Show” and “Sixty Minutes,” but nobody wrote back. An organizer from the National Gay Task Force told him that all their energies had been diverted to AIDS. Gay groups had meager funding in the best of times, and these were not the best of times. Dave still hoped to pursue a legal challenge; but before he could do anything, he had to file his appeal with the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records.
On his way back to St. Paul, Dave stopped in Lansing to meet another former Air Force pilot who might understand what he was going through. Dave and Jim Dressel, the Vietnam war hero and former state representative, engaged in usual shoptalk. In the Reserves, Jim had flown A-37S, as Dave had. Dave joked that he might have refueled Jim when he was flying with the Air National Guard. Jim seemed upbeat about his future, which encouraged Dave.
Back in St. Paul, Dave got a job as a waiter at a Red Lobster restaurant. He received the minimum wage, and he could eat there for half price. A year earlier, he had flown some of the most sophisticated aircraft in the history of aviation. Now he was twenty-nine years old; he had lost his job, his home, and his future; and the best he could do was to wait tables at a Red Lobster.