At the Buccaneer Motel
AUGUST 1986
MARINE CORPS RECRUIT TRAINING DEPOT
PARRIS ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA
When Lance Corporal Barbara Baum first appeared at the gay bars around Parris Island, other lesbian Marines were suspicious. Baum was new to the base, and might be a plant by the Naval Investigative Service, a concern heightened by the fact that she was in the Military Police, an agency that sometimes worked closely with the NIS. Moreover, Barb openly denied she was a lesbian, which made people wonder exactly why she spent so much time with them.
Even the friend who introduced Barb to local gay life, Renee Mueller, assigned to the Marine Corps Criminal Investigation Division, sometimes worried that Barb might be an NIS plant. But Barb liked to party and Renee liked to party, so the pair struck a keen friendship. Slowly, Barb began to realize that some of her other friends were also gay, Barb later recalled. In April, after she had been on base for five months, her closest friend from technical school, Diane Maldonado, confided that she was in love—with another woman.
Diane had a boyfriend, Marine Sergeant Steve Davis, but he had been deployed to Okinawa, and she had been lonely. Diane worried that Barb would hate her now, but Barb said of course not. Meanwhile, Barb had taken a house off base with Lance Corporal Becky Feldhaus, a gay woman who was also becoming a good friend.
Concerns about lesbian purges influenced every major and many minor decisions of the women’s lives on Parris Island. It was a significant reason why Barb and Becky had decided to rent together on Azalea Street in Beaufort. The nearest gay bar was The Who, forty-five miles away in Savannah, Georgia, where NIS agents were known to scout for lesbian Marines. With their nondescript government cars, dark suits, white shirts, and stern demeanor, the agents were easy to spot, however. When suspected agents entered The Who, the Marines raced to the bathroom and dispatched a civilian to ask the agents to identify themselves, which usually scared them away. But such encounters heightened anxiety. The women found it safer to socialize at private parties. Barb and Becky rented their three-bedroom house as much to have a place to be with friends as to live. And during the sultry summer weekends of 1986, as many as fifty women gathered there to drink beer, munch potato chips, and watch movies.
Barb still believed she was straight, but she was now very comfortable with lesbians, even as she began to appreciate how dangerous it was to be a gay woman in the Marines, particularly at Parris Island, where ferreting out lesbians was a major preoccupation. Renee Mueller was a victim in 1986 after she went on leave to San Antonio and loaned her car to a friend. Her car was impounded for expired tags. While the car was impounded, an MP searched it and found an intimate letter from Mueller’s lover in the locked glove compartment. The MP took the letter back to his station, read it aloud and passed it around. A lesbian dispatcher in the MP station called Renee in San Antonio to warn her.
When she returned, a CID agent she knew took her into his office. Friend to friend, he said, he thought she should confess to being homosexual. Although she was only twenty-one, Mueller had served in military law enforcement and was not susceptible to the usual pressure tactics. The CID agent asked a few more questions, such as the nature of the relationship Renee had with the woman who wrote the letter. “Do you love her?” he asked. “I love her like a sister,” Renee said. Before she left the interview, the agent asked her to sign the form on which he would type up their conversation. Renee signed.
The next time she saw that form, it was filled with inaccurate or incomplete assertions. The agent had noted that Renee said she loved her friend, but neglected to add “like a sister.” The statement looked like a straightforward confession of homosexuality. Renee’s career was over. The dispatcher who had phoned Mueller to warn her was herself court-martialed for “obstruction of justice,” but was acquitted.
For all the dangers, it seemed inevitable that Barb would eventually establish an intimate friendship with one of her lesbian friends. That friend was Diane Maldonado.
In September, Diane’s former boyfriend, Steve Davis, returned from Okinawa and was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort. Davis, who later declined to comment on the case, was, according to testimony, cordial to Barb at first, but later wanted to know why she and Diane spent so much time together. What did they do together? he asked. Then Barb heard a rumor that Diane’s roommate had turned her in to the NIS for being gay.
Davis, meanwhile, was becoming more unpredictable and confrontational. Diane confided to Barbara that she had heard stories about him, stories that he had held his last wife hostage for four hours in their home and had to be dragged out of the house in handcuffs. Davis had told her he had once shot at someone who was dating his girlfriend. (Davis later denied shooting at anyone, and said he had only told the story to impress Maldonado.) And there was the threat Davis made repeatedly to Diane: If he could not have her, no one would.
Diane was frightened for her life, and Barbara’s. She went to the Marine Corps’ Criminal Investigation Division to complain of Davis’s harassment. Though CID agents said they would investigate, Maldonado heard later that they had told Davis not to worry, they were not going to interfere in his private business. The next day, Davis was back at Diane’s barracks, wanting to see her.
Davis continued to spread rumors about Baum and Maldonado. By now, he had also contacted the local NIS office to share his suspicions. It was in such an atmosphere that Diane and Barb decided to get away from it all for a night, and took off for the Buccaneer Motel.
Barbara Baum’s captain had already suggested that she grow her hair a little longer, maybe wear a little more makeup. She might also date some men, the captain suggested. “People might think …” the captain said, his voice trailing off.
“I don’t care what people might think,” Barb snapped back.
Like so many other women in the military during the late 1980s, Barbara Baum would suffer ferociously for not caring what people thought because this was a time when military men were thinking a lot about lesbians in uniform. Their concern seemed to grow in direct proportion to the incursion they felt women were making into their territory. With attempts at “womanpause” blocked by Congress, women now comprised record numbers of the post-World War II military. By September 1986, 217,430 women served in the armed forces, or about 10.1 percent of the nation’s 2.16 million active-duty service members. Nearly 1,500 women were enrolled in the military academies.
The unprecedented numbers of women led to an unprecedented level of sexual harassment, a phenomenon intricately bound up with the harassment of lesbians. Mary Beth Harrison learned this lesson as the fifth senior woman aboard the USS Grapple, an auxiliary rescue and salvage ship commissioned in early 1986. Early on, Harrison noticed that many of the junior enlisted women spent too much time in their sleeping quarters during liberty. They were afraid to come out, she discovered. A male petty officer had been harassing them, one young woman in particular. Harrison confronted the man and informed him that he would be officially charged with sexual harassment if he continued to bother the women.
Harrison’s stout defense of the junior women from male advances provoked the men on board to allege that she was lesbian and protecting the women so she could have them for herself. When another young woman refused the advances of several men, they accused her of having a relationship with Harrison. The rumors dogged Harrison for the rest of her Navy career, and led to her eventual discharge.
Senior women who defended other women from harassment often found themselves under comparable suspicion. At Fort Polk, Louisiana, an Army lieutenant was investigated for being a lesbian when she stood up for women who were being propositioned by the lieutenant’s supervisor, who wanted the women to engage in ménages à trois with him and his wife. The lieutenant survived that investigation. Later, on a new duty assignment with a Military Police battalion in Germany, she saw a similar scenario play out when a male captain made a pass at an enlisted female, who complained to the battalion commander. When the captain was confronted, he insisted that the woman be investigated for being a lesbian. And so she was.
Female officers who angered enlisted men serving under them sometimes found themselves on the wrong end of a homosexual investigation. One soldier angry at his female Army captain informed the Criminal Investigation Division she was gay in early 1987. During the CID interrogation that followed, the captain was asked repeatedly to provide proof of her heterosexuality. “Do you have a boyfriend?” agents asked her. “Isn’t there a man in your life?”
The fear of being branded a lesbian often made women acquiesce to harassment—and at times even rape. Navy Lieutenant Bonnie Clark was at a farewell party for another officer when an officer in her command began plying her with drink. After the party, he insisted that Clark was too drunk to drive, and offered to take her to his nearby home, make her some coffee, and help sober her up. Once there he became amorous, and although Clark protested verbally she was afraid to resist. She tried to think what a straight woman would do in her place. She had seen what happened to other women when they fell under investigation; she did not want it to happen to her. The man raped her, but Clark did not file charges. She knew being drunk would damage her credibility in a rape trial and was afraid the Navy would end up investigating her for being homosexual.
Those women who did press rape charges sometimes found a remarkable lack of concern among their superiors. Army reservist Pam Mindt was sexually assaulted by a Reserves sergeant while performing her weekend duty at Fort Riley, Kansas. When she complained, an Army investigator recommended the sergeant be brought up on charges. His command, however, disagreed, and allowed the reservist to retire from the Army with his full military pension. Mindt sued him for civil damages in a civilian court, and she was awarded $60,000 for her “emotional distress.”
According to official Defense Department statements, the military had a “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual harassment, but this policy found expression in word more than deed. One study conducted at the time found that 70 percent of women in the armed forces said they had experienced sexual harassment. At an Army equal opportunity conference held in Europe, for example, Command Sergeant Major Karen Erickson, one of the four highest-ranking enlisted women in the Army, put the blame on officers “who fail or are incapable of stopping the kind of behavior that fosters sexual harassment … [those] who have the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude and use it as an excuse, a valid excuse, for things like harassment and discrimination.”
In such a hostile environment, witch-hunts of lesbians proliferated throughout the military. Investigations continued to focus on women in nontraditional jobs, such as the Military Police. A 1986 investigation of women Military Police assigned to the United States Military Academy at West Point resulted in the discharges of eight women, or about one quarter of the females in the academy’s MP detachment. Two of the women denied to reporters that they were lesbian, and said they had been named because agents for the Criminal Investigation Division threatened women with imprisonment and bad discharges if they did not name others. One thirty-one-year-old mother of two, who vehemently denied being homosexual, attempted suicide after her gay discharge.
The West Point investigation provoked local news coverage concerning the large presence of homosexuals at the academy. Newspapers ran stories quoting anonymous cadets and officers discussing the academy’s gay subculture. The coverage made Army public affairs specialists apoplectic. “There are no known homosexuals in the corps of cadets or regular Army. None!” Colonel John P. Yeagley, West Point public affairs officer, insisted to reporters. As for the investigation, he added, “We’re not on a witch-hunt. West Point is not a prison. It is not the KGB. People are treated with dignity and respect.”
A purge of suspected lesbian Air Force personnel swept through Yokota Air Base near Tokyo in early 1987. Air Force Lieutenant Pam Lane came under investigation after the Office of Special Investigations interrogated a nineteen-year-old enlisted woman who had tested positive for marijuana. Offered a better discharge if she turned in gays, the woman said she had had sex with Lane twice. Basing its conclusions on the lesbian vampire stereotype, the Office of Special Investigations advanced the accusation that the twenty-three-year-old Lane was the leader of a lesbian recruitment ring at Yokota and was enticing younger women into the gay lifestyle.
Officials prepared charges of sodomy and indecent acts against Lane. Facing a court-martial and prison time, she wrote the ACLU and Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, an outspoken supporter of both gays and women in the military. After Schroeder intervened, criminal charges were dropped and Lane was allowed to resign, though without an honorable discharge despite enthusiastic recommendations from her supervisor. According to Lane’s count, at least four women were discharged from Yokota for being homosexual during that investigation. At about the same time, an investigation of the Marine women’s volleyball team in Okinawa resulted in four more discharges of suspected lesbians.
The purges sometimes affected women in extraordinarily high ranks. It was during this period that the woman in line to be the first female commanding officer of a Navy ship was quietly derailed from the assignment after rumors spread that she was gay. In the mid-1980s, one of the first female admirals was quietly processed out of the Navy when it was suspected she was a lesbian. According to a personnel man who saw the paperwork, the Navy officially cited “mental reasons” as the rationale for the separation.
The purges reflected the military adamancy about denying honorable discharges to accused gays, particularly lesbians. None of the eight women in the West Point probe received an honorable paper; all received general discharges. None of the women discharged during the Yokota investigation received honorable discharges. Of the 1,648 enlisted personnel officially discharged for homosexuality in 1985, more than 600 were denied honorable discharges, despite the 1981 regulations that mandated that all homosexuals receive honorable discharges unless there were allegations of misconduct.
The irony of the greater focus on homosexuals among military women was that the proportion of lesbians was actually decreasing. As the military became an increasingly acceptable career path for women, the armed forces began drawing from a broader spectrum. While military lesbians estimated that homosexual women comprised perhaps as many as 3$ percent of females in uniform during the early 1980s, they calculated that by the late 1980s the percentage had dropped to 25. This trend paralleled increased tensions and disaffection between straight women and lesbians.
Heterosexual women accused lesbians of excluding straights. Lesbians responded that they were forced to be cliquish, because the pressures of ongoing investigations made them unsure of whom they could trust. Gay women resented that straight women with children could use that as an excuse to beg off hard duties or long hours. And they especially disliked women who succumbed to male sexual advances in order to curry favor with their superiors. Lesbians sometimes talked about heterosexual “zebras”—women who would lie down with men to get their stripes. To make matters worse, straight women sometimes turned in the names of women they suspected of being lesbians. These strains added a dangerous new element to the hazards lesbians faced in the military.
SEPTEMBER 30, 1986
BUCCANEER MOTEL
BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA
When Sergeant Steve Davis went to the Parris Island barracks looking for Diane Maldonado, one of Diane’s friends said she had gone to the Buccaneer, a one-story motel on a highway, next to a mobile home park. When Davis arrived at the motel, the desk clerk denied that Maldonado was there, but Davis saw her name on the register and her room number.
Baum and Maldonado were lying in bed watching Johnny Carson when Davis burst in, tearing the chain lock out of the door and splintering the wooden door frame. The NIS was waiting for them outside, he shouted. Diane threw a chair at him. Davis grabbed Baum’s car keys and her wallet from the dresser and ran out of the room.
Barbara went out after him. They talked in the parking lot; Davis was clearly distraught and wanted Diane back. He asked Barb to intercede for him. Barb said she would, if Davis would return her keys. He refused and Barb went back inside.
The two women decided to wait Davis out and watched movies all night on HBO. He was still there in the morning. Finally, Barbara called her roommate, Becky Feldhaus, who was famous for her temper and who promptly showed up and engaged Davis in a shouting match over Baum’s keys. Feldhaus had heard the stories of Davis’s violent past, and she concocted the most extreme threat she could. Davis should not mess with The Family, she warned him; they could have him hurt, they could even have him killed.
Davis responded that he would call the NIS about Barb and Diane. Feldhaus looked across the parking lot and saw a nondescript green car. Inside, a man wearing sunglasses was watching them. “I think they’re already here,” she said.
Indeed, they were.
UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
With just seven months until his graduation, Midshipman Joseph Steffan felt he was near the finish line. He had made it. As a battalion commander in charge of 600 midshipmen, and given the responsibilities that still rested on him as one of the three top-ranked midshipmen in his class, Steffan always looked forward to Glee Club trips away from the academy.
On one such trip, at a bar after a performance with a plebe member of the Glee Club, Joe, filled with camaraderie, confided for the first time that he was gay to another midshipman. He felt safe making the confidence to a plebe; he believed his rank protected him. The plebe did not seem shocked or disgusted and within a few weeks Joe had told a second classmate.
During Christmas vacation, the second midshipman to whom Joe Steffan had disclosed his homosexuality told his parents in rural Kentucky about it. And he mentioned it to his girlfriend, who told her parents, who, it turned out, knew a captain who was legal adviser to the Naval Academy’s superintendent. Quietly, in March 1987, the Academy began an investigation.
Barb and Diane ended their relationship several weeks after the blowup at the Buccaneer Motel. Barb was drinking a lot these days, and one night was arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. This was about the same time her commanding officer told her that she was the subject of an NIS investigation into a “hotel incident.” The captain appeared to be an ally. When the investigation dragged on with no resolution, he told Barb that he would personally ask the NIS to either press charges or halt the probe.
Two days before Thanksgiving, the NIS asked to see Diane Maldonado. The next day Barb was called in and told she was “suspected of homosexual activity.” Both women refused to answer questions; both asked to see a lawyer.
Barb’s drinking escalated. She quit once for three weeks, but then started again, waking up one Monday morning without the vaguest recollection of the past two days. It frightened her. Early in 1987, Baum enrolled in the Navy’s alcoholism rehabilitation program, and the program seemed to work for her. When she got out, she was feeling on top of the world, and everything seemed fresh. Back at Parris Island, she drifted away from her old friends who partied hard and drank. Nor did she hear any more from the NIS. She put the matter out of her mind.
FEBRUARY 20, 1987
ABOARD USS IOWA
INDIAN OCEAN
Within weeks of his assignment to the USS Iowa in November 1986, Gunner’s Mate Third Class Kendall Truitt had found a best friend, Gunner’s Mate Second Class Clayton Hartwig.
Both were single; both were better-read than most of the other sailors; both were interested in guns; both liked the same kind of music, like the dance group Depeche Mode.
When the Iowa pulled into ports, they preferred going to art museums and historical sites rather than socializing in bars. Both men spent their share of time with prostitutes, but their generally low-key demeanor set them apart from other sailors. This made their friendship stronger.
Like other best friends on ships, the two men sought shifts together when it was their turn to stand watch at night. Ken Truitt especially hated the tedium of the watch. On the night of February 20, he was bored and wanted to nap. Hartwig would hear nothing of such malingering, and told Ken so. Ken, who knew judo, started wrestling with Hartwig. Both men were big, Ken six-foot-three and Clay six-two; they were evenly matched for wrestling, but Ken had more experience and threw Hartwig to the deck, at which time another crewman who was taking soundings shone a flashlight on the pair.
The next day, the master-at-arms called Truitt and Hartwig into his office. “We have someone who saw you kissing,” he said. “I don’t think so,” Truitt replied. Nevertheless, they were now formally under investigation for “indecent acts.”
Both men signed statements saying they were not gay. Truitt explained what had happened and was written up for nonjudicial punishment for dereliction of duty, since he was supposed to be making rounds, not taking naps or wrestling on deck. Hartwig was ordered to take an HIV test. It came back negative. He was demoted one rank and warned not to wrestle again on duty.
That was where the matter officially ended, but gossip about the episode spread throughout the ship. During the Iowa’s long deployments, crewmen alternated as the butt of their mates’ jokes. One gunner’s mate was teased because he was fat, another because of his oversized glasses. Clay and Ken were ribbed for being fags. The jokes were good-natured but the suspicion was there nevertheless, both because of the wrestling incident and because of the pair’s indifference to the usual sailorly carousing. It did not help that both were handsome—nineteen-year-old Truitt was blond with angular features; twenty-two-year-old Hartwig had dark, moody eyes and a strong cleft chin. In recent years in the military, as in civilian society, being handsome had come to be associated with being gay.
The teasing always passed when it became someone else’s turn, and neither Truitt nor Hartwig took it seriously. It was just another shipboard rumor that would eventually fade into the ether, they believed, as shipboard rumors do, especially false ones. And that would have been the case, except for events that occurred two years later.