Funerals
JUNE 22, 1988
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
By April, when Leonard Matlovich could no longer walk the three flights of stairs to his apartment on San Francisco’s Castro Street, he packed up his few belongings and moved to West Hollywood to stay with a friend who would take care of him. Every week he came down with something new. Soon the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions that stained his skin spread to inside his digestive track, which made it impossible for him to absorb nutrients. He began to lose weight rapidly.
In those final weeks, Matlovich, long the calm and reasonable leader among gay activists, found his rage. His whole life had been hemmed in by prejudice. His childhood and early adult years had been haunted by nameless self-loathing; prejudice had ended his Air Force career; and now he was dying of a disease for which he believed there would certainly be medical solutions, except for the sluggish government response. Even in dying, it seemed, he could not escape the hatred.
Despair overwhelmed him; to friends, he was curt and sometimes angry. And he still yearned for that which he had never found, a lover. As he said in one of the last interviews of his life, with journalist Mike Hippler who was then working on Matlovich’s biography, “I’d like to have a lover. I’d like to have that feeling once in my life—to love and be loved wholeheartedly.”
Leonard’s friend Ken McPherson, a veteran gay activist, had arranged for Matlovich to speak at a huge gay march in Sacramento; it would be his last public appearance. Lenny was very weak; when he spoke, even he noticed that his oratorical fire was gone. He told them at the end, “We’ve got to love each other.”
Matlovich could no longer absorb water. He became severely dehydrated. He was hospitalized, but then released; the doctors gave him three weeks to live. Within a week, he was coherent only part of the time.
His family came for a last visit, completely devoted to Leonard, but still unaware of what he symbolized for many people. When McPherson told them that there would have to be a press announcement when he died, and a public funeral, his parents looked mystified. It had not crossed their minds that this was anything but a private drama.
In his last days, Lenny refused all medication, perhaps because it only prolonged his suffering and delayed the inevitable. Finally, he slipped out of consciousness, and his family watched as his breaths turned into long, deep sighs, and then into a regular pattern of shallow breaths. At 9:43 P.M. on June 22, 1988, two weeks before his forty-fifth birthday, Leonard Philip Matlovich, Jr., stopped breathing altogether.
Later histories will record these years as an era of death for the gay community. The largest regular features in local gay newspapers became the obituary pages, which were crowded with death notices of thousands of young men. Reading such pages was how one kept up with who was dead and who was still living. When someone ran into an old acquaintance he had not seen in some time, he might say it was good to see him, but what he meant was that it was good to see that he was still alive.
Gay organizing floundered as virtually an entire generation of gay male leaders, who had spent years achieving positions of influence within mainstream institutions, suddenly wasted away and died. The impact would be felt on the gay movement for decades; there were few to replace them. A new generation of lesbians began moving into many of the more prominent leadership positions. Their presence in the movement’s top echelons was long overdue and many gained these positions through talent and competence, but at least some women rose to become prominent in local gay groups in large part because the male leaders had all died off.
The funeral became a central ritual in the lives of homosexual people, and this was no less true for gay men serving in the United States military. By the time Major George Gordy died, he had achieved unusual distinction among Air Force fighter pilots. Though he had been investigated in the same 1979 Air Force Academy purge that had claimed two other careers, he had gone on to become a much-decorated F-16 pilot, the winner of such prestigious Air Force honors as the Orville Wright Achievement Award. But he died of AIDS, and that implied that he was homosexual, which seemed incongruous with an illustrious career. So the Air Force Academy alumni newsletter reported that Major Gordy had died of cancer, and a two-star general flew in from Korea to deliver his eulogy.
Colonel Kenneth Wittenberg also found ignominy after his HIV-related death. Wittenberg was a signal corps officer who worked in a highly sensitive job at the military’s White House communications center for several years. When his lover Kary Walker sought the military funeral for Wittenberg to which he was entitled, the local Army detail in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, asked for a copy of Wittenberg’s death certificate. When they saw that he had died of AIDS, the local detachment waffled about conducting services for him, and ultimately refused.
This was not always the case, however, and many victims of AIDS did receive the same dignities as those given any other soldier. This was so for retired Air Force Colonel David van Poznak, who was something of a legend among gay military personnel in the Washington area. In 1963, he had been a junior captain assigned to work on protocol in the White House. Succeeding First Ladies valued him and influenced their husbands to intercede so that the Pentagon allowed him to remain at this assignment rather than rotate out. Van Poznak stayed at the White House for fourteen years. His walls were adorned with photos of himself with Presidents and with other heads of state—French President Charles DeGaulle and Queen Elizabeth II, among others.
In one garrulous, animated moment, he had sat right down on a hysterical Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev’s lap, and had his picture taken there. When he died, he was afforded full Air Force honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
Major Jeff Bircher, commander of the Air Force honor guard at Arlington National Cemetery, also received full military honors after he died of AIDS, and his coworkers thought well enough of him that they named one of their rooms in his honor.
As of mid-1988, more than 2,200 of the nearly 6,000 soldiers and recruits who had tested HIV positive remained in the military, but there were still some quarters that would have preferred simply to discharge all of them. In December 1988, Colonel John Cruden, chief of the Pentagon’s legislative division, wrote the Defense Department’s general counsel that “Maintaining in the active duty force over 2,200 permanently nondeployable combat assets who are certain to progress to medical unfitness in a relatively short period of time is a very unwise personnel policy.” The Pentagon now estimated that the cost of maintaining these “nondeployable assets” was $57 million a year.
Cruden had an ally in Deputy Defense Secretary William Howard Taft IV, who directed Army officials to devise a program to allow any HIV-positive soldier early medical separation or disability retirement. However, this change would require congressional approval. Although the Pentagon forwarded legislation to enable the services to discharge all their HIV-infected sailors, the bill went nowhere on Capitol Hill, effectively resolving the issue. The new HIV regulations issued in August 1988 offered no substantive changes in how the services should deal with HIV-infected personnel.
By late summer 1988, all the services had started their first round of retesting soldiers and sailors. The new testing showed that, as elsewhere in society, military members continued to become HIV infected. In the Army, one out of 1,300 soldiers converted from HIV negative to HIV positive every year, according to the testing, making for about 600 new HIV-infected soldiers annually.
Some military doctors argued that the real numbers of HIV-positive service members was really much higher, and suggested that military officials obscured this fact, presumably for fear of alerting the public to the large presence of gays in the armed forces. In San Diego, for example, Dr. William Harrison, who had recently retired as a Navy captain, challenged the Navy’s claim that 622 HIV-positive soldiers had been processed through the AIDS unit at Balboa Naval Hospital. This was about 37 percent of the 1,681 sailors and Marine Corps members who the Navy said had tested positive between 1986 and 1987. Of these, only 350 remained on active duty in the San Diego area, according to the Navy.
Harrison was in charge of Balboa’s AIDS program and knew he had treated between 800 and 1,000 patients. Moreover, he said, between 650 and 900 were on active duty in the area. “The Navy is lying, manipulating the statistics,” Harrison told the San Diego Tribune’s AIDS reporter Cheryl Clark. He pointed to another official military publication that reported that 2,187 sailors and Marines had tested positive.
The Navy did not allay suspicions when it ordered its San Diego epidemiologist not to discuss HIV statistics with the media, or when the Navy’s AIDS coordinator at the Naval Medical Command declined comment altogether, and a spokesman explained it as such: “If people are reading about the numbers of HIV-positives in the military, it may raise some concern.”
There were also inconsistencies in the numbers Defense Department officials reported to the press. While medical officials said the number of active-duty HIV-positive servicemen was 2,200, other Pentagon officials privately told the Navy Times in May 1988 that the true number was closer to 2,900.
Most HIV-infected personnel from this period reported fair treatment by their commanders, and an adherence to the official regulations guaranteeing confidentiality and nondiscrimination. When a pharmacist at the Reynolds Army Community Hospital, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, tried to embarrass an HIV-positive serviceman by calling out to him loudly in the crowded pharmacy that his AZT, an AIDS drug, was ready, the pharmacist was severely disciplined for violating the soldier’s confidentiality. In San Diego, a Navy commander became leader of his aviation squadron after he tested HIV positive, an appointment that was personally approved by the Deputy Secretary of the Navy. HIV-positive soldiers and sailors routinely continued achieving positions that required the most sensitive security clearances.
The attitude toward HIV-positive soldiers, however, was sometimes hostile. At Fort Hood, Texas, the world’s largest tank and artillery post, the commanding general, Lieutenant General Crosbie Saint, consolidated all HIV-positive soldiers in one barracks, which commonly became known as the “HIV Hotel.” Saint maintained that the segregation was necessary to preserve the combat readiness of his other units. Saint executed his order by transferring all fifty HIV-positive soldiers on the base to the headquarters unit, where they would perform administrative tasks and not be deployable. On the same day, in April 1988, they were also moved to Building 21006, which even Saint referred to as “the leper colony.”
The abrupt job transfers and barracks relocations immediately alerted the other 38,000 soldiers on the base as to who was HIV positive, which resulted in the harassment of anyone housed in the barracks. To make matters worse, the fifty soldiers were not allowed to leave the barracks at night; the HIV Hotel was more a prison than a hotel. Any infraction of the rules earned a disciplinary hearing.
Under mounting harassment on the job and off, HIV-positive Private John Brisbois went AWOL and sought psychiatric treatment at Lackland Air Force Base. Fort Hood authorities were contacted and Brisbois was put in shackles and leg irons and taken to the Fort Hood confinement facility. At the stockade, he was handed a bottle of insecticide shampoo that featured the word POISON on its label, and told to shower. He drank it, hoping it would kill him. After his stomach was pumped, he was thrown back in jail. Shortly after that, he received a less than honorable discharge.
The HIV Hotel shut down after Newsday’s AIDS reporter, Laurie Garrett, sneaked onto the post with a photographer and published a front-page exposé of the facility. Brisbois ultimately filed a complaint asking for an investigation by the Inspector General, which found that Army regulations had been violated. No disciplinary action, however, was recommended against the officers who had violated the regulations. By then, the unfavorable publicity had prompted officials to transfer the HIV-positive soldiers out of the headquarters unit and reintegrate them into post housing. Lieutenant General Saint was not chastened by the Inspector General’s finding. When Saint received his fourth star and was assigned to be commanding general of the Army in Europe, he was overheard to boast, “I will have no trouble controlling the troops in Europe, after all, I ran the largest leper colony in the United States here at Fort Hood.”
The most pivotal battle line regarding the treatment of HIV-infected personnel involved the enforcement of “safe-sex orders.” Under them, any GI testing positive had to sign papers acknowledging that he had been ordered to inform all his sexual partners that he was HIV positive and to engage only in “safe-sex” practices.
The orders were a very military way to deal with a problem that the gay community had largely fumbled over the years: what to do about those who put others at risk for HIV infection. The military’s solution was simple—order people not to do it and punish them when they did. The gay community had mainly ignored the issue, as it would for many more years. For their part, civil libertarians objected to the orders, suggesting they were meant to stigmatize further HIV-infected people in a way that carriers of other communicable diseases were not.
Gay worries that the safe-sex orders were designed to penalize homosexuality were appeased by the fact that they were enforced most aggressively against heterosexuals. In early 1988, Petty Officer John Crawford became the first sailor to be charged with criminal charges relating to unsafe sex. Navy officials accused the twenty-seven-year-old of assault, adultery, and violation of an order for having unprotected sex with his ex-girlfriend without informing her he was HIV positive. Crawford’s attorneys contended that the Navy was using Crawford as “a guinea pig, just to see how far they can go with this AIDS issue.” They also argued that the girlfriend was an unreliable witness, angry at Crawford because he broke off their short engagement. A Navy jury acquitted Crawford of the assault and adultery charges, but confined him to his barracks for fifteen days because he had broken a Navy order by having his tryst in his barracks room.
The potential antigay uses of the regulations became evident in the case of Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Eckert of McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento. Eckert flew a weather plane and was in his nineteenth year in the Air Force, just one short of retirement. Though he had known he was gay since he first signed up for officers’ training in 1969, he had kept his sexual orientation to himself, except for a few rare furtive trips to a gay bathhouse before returning to his wife and two children. He was introduced to the gay military subculture during a three-year assignment to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. His wife had remained in the States, and he developed a relationship with a twenty-three-year-old airman from Georgia. Toward the end of his assignment, he was almost caught up in an OSI investigation, but he refused to be interrogated and his lawyer aggressively defended him. Ultimately, nothing happened.
By 1986, after his transfer to Sacramento, Dave Eckert wanted to explore his gay identity outside his marriage. He and his wife separated amicably and established residences two miles apart to afford their children as close to normal parenting as possible. After his daily weather flights, Eckert, a former seminarian, became involved in the local Metropolitan Community Church and he planned to work in the gay church when he retired in 1989.
In early 1986, the man Dave was then seeing took him aside to tell him that his most recent boyfriend had just tested HIV positive. Eckert went to a private hospital and found that he too was now infected. Eckert’s lover said he would stay with Dave, and the pair lived together for some time in their Sacramento apartment until Dave discovered that the man had been using his credit cards to the tune of many thousands of dollars. Dave kicked him out of their home. Not long after, a woman friend of the credit card thief called the OSI to report that Eckert made pornographic movies with teenagers. Two weeks later, Dave’s commander told him he was being investigated for homosexual activity and, for reasons that were never made clear, disclosure of classified information. He was ordered to take an HIV test. When he tested positive, he was charged with reckless endangerment for allegedly having unsafe sex, as well as with public sex with a minor, sodomy, and conduct unbecoming an officer.
Since a court-martial conviction could cost him both his freedom and the pension for which he had worked nineteen years, the forty-three-year-old pilot decided to go public and fight the charges. Bald, with a fringe of gray hair, Eckert looked like Dwight Eisenhower, but he had a booming, deep voice and impressive television presence. The case against him fundamentally rested on two facts, he asserted: that he was gay and that he was HIV positive. All the other charges grew out of assumptions about what gay AIDS-infected people did, and he was going to prove that those assumptions were false.
The media, even the military press, remained overwhelmingly supportive, particularly when it became clear that there was no evidence to buttress the Air Force charges. As columnist Michele McCormick wrote in Navy Times, “Officially, the charges against Eckert are not directly based on the fact that he is HIV positive.… But the fact remains that a person whose positive test becomes publicly known is a person who must endure an added handicap.”
Eckert’s lawyer, meanwhile, promised pickets and even more media coverage if a court-martial proceeded. Finally, Air Force Major General Trevor Hammond ruled that there was insufficient evidence to try Eckert on any of the court-martial offenses, although he did hand over evidence that Eckert was gay to the lieutenant colonel’s commanding officer for administrative action. When asked to comment on the case, Hammond told reporters, “It’s kind of nasty stuff that I don’t like to talk about.” In fact, the Air Force never did find any minor with whom Eckert allegedly had had sex, or any witness to any of the charges against him, except the admission of his ex-boyfriend that they had engaged in sodomy. Though Eckert no longer faced jail time, he once again risked losing his pension benefits, still being eight months from retirement. He and his lawyer managed to prolong the procedures, however, so that the administrative separation board could not be scheduled until August 2, 1989, one week after Eckert’s twentieth year in the service, which enabled him to resign with full benefits.
Because of his rank and willingness to go public, Eckert had sidestepped a possible prison sentence or, at best, the loss of nearly twenty years of benefits. Others were not as lucky. By late 1988, the armed forces were prosecuting at least eight soldiers and sailors for violating their safe-sex orders, and as time went on those numbers grew.
While the military waged its war on sexually active HIV-positive soldiers, the quality of medical care for HIV-infected soldiers declined at some of the medical facilities mandated to handle the new cases of HIV-positive personnel. Walter Reed and the Air Force’s Wilford Hall continued to receive excellent marks for their work with HIV-positive patients, but at outlying facilities, such as the Oakland Naval Hospital, complaints mounted. Without a strong advocate for AIDS patient care, such as Petty Officer T. J. Sterbens, or high-profile patients such as Admiral-select Art Pearson, who died in 1987, programs for the HIV infected deteriorated profoundly. At one point during a period of remodeling, hospital administrators were so detached as to tell the HIV patients to move their wards themselves. Meanwhile, the NIS office at the nearby Treasure Island Naval Station began nosing around the ward to find evidence that patients were homosexuals.
The champion of patients remained the feisty gay Navy judge Commander Mike LaBella, who had resided in the ward after his HIV diagnosis. LaBella served as unofficial legal adviser to the ward’s patients. He also began traveling to Washington to lobby on HIV-related issues with his friends in the highest ranks.
It was during one of these trips that he first heard about a report concerning gays in the military that was being kept a closely guarded secret at the top echelons of the Pentagon. The reason for the secrecy, he heard, was that the report found gays were entirely capable of serving in the armed forces and that the policies against them should be abolished. That was all he could learn, however—that and the fact that it was the most fervent wish of the Department of Defense that no one outside the Pentagon learn that the report existed.
CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
MARINE CORPS COMBAT DEVELOPMENT COMMAND
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
The same day Leonard Matlovich died, Corporal Barbara Baum met with Major David Beck, the aggressive prosecutor of lesbians at Parris Island, and finally gave the statement that the Marine Corps had been seeking for six months. Barb was convinced that the two-week delay between her agreement to a meeting with Beck and his actual appearance was calculated to let her experience how awful imprisonment was, so she would be more cooperative. It worked. Barb hated prison. She had lost a great deal of weight. She could not eat or sleep. Her emaciation startled her attorneys, who said that she looked as if she had cancer. Prison psychologists worried that she might commit suicide.
Her Marine Corps attorney assured Barbara that the nightmare would end if she talked; he had promises from the base commanding general himself that if she named names, she would be freed.
On June 22 and 23, she spent fourteen hours with Major Beck and an NIS agent, telling them everything she knew. Her statement filled 178 pages. Beck had arrived with his own long list of suspected lesbians and quizzed Baum at length about each one. The NIS agent had a computer printout of names of alleged lesbians from throughout the Marine Corps, and he had questions about them. Most of the “evidence” Baum gave was hearsay; she said only that she had heard this or that woman was homosexual. Several of the responses that would later be used in administrative hearings against some of these women included such answers as “yes” or “I think so” to the question of whether this or that woman was lesbian. She did not claim to have any firsthand knowledge, either through her own sexual experiences or those of others, about any activities that could be the basis of charges for sodomy or indecent acts.
In the course of her statement, however, she provided the NIS with seventy-seven names of suspected lesbians and gave the “evidence” that would become the basis of discharge proceedings against several Marines, including Gunnery Sergeant Diane Edwards, the highly decorated veteran who was an early object of the probe, and Captain Judy Meade, a fourteen-year veteran who, Baum said, was “involved with” a civilian lesbian. For the Marine Corps, the statement was disappointing because it did not name as a homosexual Captain Laura Hinckley, the Naval Academy graduate. Baum’s statements about their friendship gave the NIS enough evidence for a fraternization charge, but this, they knew, was unlikely to net the prison sentence that a prosecution for sodomy or indecent acts might produce.
The fact that she had talked so exhaustively to Beck and the NIS, however, made Baum confident that she would be released from jail any day. She began eating again, and began to gain weight. During her exercise period, she took up running, talking to God as she did her laps around the prison yard, praying that they would let her go tomorrow.
She waited for news of her expected release. And waited, and waited.
JULY 4, 1988
CONGRESSIONAL CEMETERY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Leonard Matlovich had known on precisely what day he wanted his funeral to be held: July 4, Independence Day. Ken McPherson remembered some of Leonard’s old enthusiasm when the pair had met to discuss Matlovich’s funeral. Matlovich had wanted the occasion to feature gay pride, the Air Force, and patriotism. He wanted flags and military honors and full deference to the notion that homosexuality should be talked about openly.
Lenny’s grave site was in Washington, which made that city the logical place for a memorial service. Memorials for figures of less historical importance had drawn more than a thousand in San Francisco, so McPherson figured that with its huge gay community, Washington would offer up as large a crowd. From the start, however, every mainstream institution McPherson contacted threw up obstacles. Since Matlovich had died a confirmed atheist, he did not want a religious sendoff, but to comfort his parents he had decided that his memorial should be held in Washington’s Christ Church, which was affiliated with Congressional Cemetery.
The minister at Christ Church concluded that that decision meant that in his last days, Lenny had returned to the fold. He ordered a service with full Episcopal communion. A Congressional Cemetery official, dressed in long, flowing robes, was to carry a gold crucifix at the head of the procession. Nothing Ken said could stop it. It seemed to Ken that the church had also decided to honor Matlovich as someone who was a noble soul in spite of being a homosexual, so there would be nothing political about the service. Ken fought to allow an outside public address system for the overflow crowd he anticipated; the church refused, saying it would not accommodate a “political circus.”
For its part, the Air Force at first refused to participate at all; it would not provide an honor guard, bugler, or riflemen for the ceremony, all of which Matlovich was entitled to under Air Force regulations. Only the threat that the matter would become a newspaper story caused the Air Force to relent and allow the funeral detachment.
Ken had brought several leading spokespeople against the military’s gay exclusion policy to attend the service—in uniform—and serve as pallbearers, including former Staff Sergeant Perry Watkins, whose case was still in the federal courts, and Ellen Nesbitt, a New York state National Guard officer who had recently launched her own federal case. When McPherson told the Air Force that these famous gay soldiers would hand the casket to the military honor guard for its transfer from the church to the graveyard, the Air Force again objected. They would not participate in any service with gays in military uniforms. In the end, McPherson had to give in, and Watkins and the others acted as escorts to the official honor guard, walking alongside them.
Ken plastered Washington’s gay neighborhoods with posters featuring a photograph of Lenny’s tombstone with its nameless epitaph for “A Gay Vietnam Veteran.” On the morning of July 4, he believed that thousands would descend on the church, but they never came. The hundred-member Gay Men’s Chorus comprised a majority of those in attendance; the leadership of the Washington-based national gay groups, sensing the passing of someone historic, made up the rest. Inside the church, the entire service was conducted without anyone mentioning that Matlovich, arguably the most influential gay activist of his generation, was gay, or that Lenny, who had spent his last years as an AIDS activist, had died of AIDS. Don’t talk about it. The silent imperative that had so haunted his childhood and filled his early adult years with anxiety, the silence he had spent the last third of his life fighting, had descended once again.
Outside, there was more that would have been to Lenny’s liking. His body was carried to the Civil War-style caisson, drawn by two black horses with plumes and braided manes. Marchers, carrying both the American flag and the rainbow flag that had become the symbol of the gay movement, surrounded the coffin and began the slow, mile-long march toward Congressional Cemetery with Washington police diverting traffic off Pennsylvania Avenue.
At the grave site, Perry Watkins spoke eloquently about the dream of equality Matlovich had advanced, and told how it had inspired him and a generation of others who had lived through those days before homosexuality was something one could talk about out loud, a time Leonard Matlovich had helped end irrevocably.
The Air Force delivered a final indignity to the gentle man who had confronted it so publicly and boldly. When the manager from the caisson service began affixing the American flag to the top of Lenny’s casket, the head of the Air Force honor guard stepped in and ordered him to remove it. The caisson manager objected, but if the Air Force was going to participate, there would be no flag on Leonard’s coffin. And thus—minutes before the twenty-one-gun salute was fired for a fallen soldier and the last strains of taps drifted toward the Potomac—was Leonard Matlovich denied his flag, the symbol he had held most dear in life.
On his way out of the graveyard, Ken McPherson walked up the gravel walkways past two other famous homosexuals who resided in the very same row as Leonard Matlovich: former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was just eight grave sites down from Lenny, and his longtime companion, Clyde Tolson, who lay just several more graves from Hoover. It was Lenny’s last little joke to be buried so close to them. Although the day had given Lenny some of what he wished for with its display of patriotism and gay pride, there was also disappointment for anyone who understood what Lenny had truly wanted. With its gap between expectation and outcome, Matlovich’s death was like his life. As Ken walked out of the cemetery he heard the rumbling of the yellow bulldozers shoving the last sod over Lenny, now beneath the tombstone whose legend he had written, about a nameless veteran who had won medals for killing and a discharge for loving.