Voice Intercept Operator. Honorable discharge
I was born 1954 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Roman Catholic identity was a large part of growing up. Neighborhoods were defined by which parish you belonged to, which was a surrogate for, “What is your ethnic heritage?” The highest political office (although it wasn’t elected) was the bishop, because that was the ultimate authority. The rules of the road were not voted on, they were handed down. And the value was on submission rather than on what we would call one’s individual process. That environment does a very good job of creating the appearance of living by those rules and believing those rules!
That was the ’70s, the era of great promise, the Age of Aquarius. The staff of life was beer! Smoking dope and popping speed was just how the world was. I went to university in Philadelphia. Being in the bigger city presented opportunities that did not happen at home and I remember having sex with somebody, though I don’t even remember exactly how it happened. Still no sense of declaring myself to myself as a gay man, and a common rationalization [I used] was, “OK, if I do this, I’m not going to get sent to Vietnam,” because my concept of the military–“the Army” we used generically to mean military service—was just part of the fabric of our life.
Perceptions of the Army had changed and the draft and war in Vietnam was about over. So that wasn’t going to happen to me if I went and talked to these guys. The attraction for me was quite practical, actually. I heard that the Army had these tests they can give you to tell you what to do. And my recruiter, Sergeant Doll, made it sound like finishing school. He painted it up wonderfully. And that was where it started. After boot camp, I was stationed for a year close to San Francisco. Language school seemed to have a good number of gay men. Many were training to work in intelligence or security fields and there was a generalized paranoia, much like in the civilian world. Lots of speculation and nothing said out loud, but recognition of a shared attribute and an emergence of social networks, but little if any sexual activity in the barracks.
One weekend our classmates went to Disneyland. Ben, like me, remained behind. He let me know he had a friend who lived in San Francisco, the epicenter of the emerging gay movement in the 1970s. Ben was urban Detroit to my suburban Scranton, black to my white, Protestant to my Catholic, musical to my tone deaf, savvy to my naive. We were young, buffed up from boot camp, and new on the gay block in the Castro. I had my first date with a guy, Rick, who lived there and we saw each other whenever I could get to San Francisco. It was the classic summer romance, Memorial Day to Labor Day.
After language school, I spent a couple months in West Texas at a small air force base where the commander was a not very secretly gay woman who earned respect from all. Despite being a security base, there was a fair bit of interaction with local civilians. My roommate in the barracks was also gay and we wound up dating two local civilians who were friends. Then duty assignment to D.C. meant immersion in another kind of fantasyland where things were not as apparent as in San Francisco.
Several years later, I wind up working with HIV-infected active-duty service members. People have no clue how important the Department of Defense was in HIV research. They link HIV with gay men but do not link gay men with military service, choosing not to inform officially unacknowledged active-duty gay men of the need to understand and address the threat of this disease within the uniformed services. The contributions of those brave men and women will likely go unsung in the history of the pandemic, just as the sacrifice of today’s service members gets yellow-ribbon bumper stickers or priority boarding at the airport, but not a lot of substantive understanding or ongoing support.
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MIKE ALMY, WASHINGTON, D.C., 2010
MAJOR, U.S. AIR FORCE, 1993–2006
Air Control Systems Manager. Deployed to the Middle East four times; discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; pursuing reinstatement
In my early thirties, I was trying to fully understand who I was as well as the implications of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I had been in the military ten-plus years. I had every intention of staying twenty years to retirement and make a full career out of it. I realized it was a sacrifice I would have to make, keeping my private life separate from my professional life and in all likelihood never having a significant relationship.
When I was in Iraq, the Air Force restricted all private email accounts; we had to use government email on the government network. We used that primarily for work purposes but also for personal use. I used my email writing to family and friends. My unit rotated out of Iraq and the new unit came in and someone, somehow, stumbled upon my private emails. Instead of just deleting them, [he] proceeded to read them, found a couple emails that peeked his interest and raised them up to his squadron commander. They ordered a search of my emails—over 500—and pulled out maybe a dozen or so that were damaging to myself as far as DADT. So in the middle of the Iraq War, during the height of the insurgency, they were searching private emails to see if someone’s violated DADT. They conducted the search without ever getting a lawyer involved. They forwarded those to my commander back in Germany.
About six weeks after we had been back in Germany, my commander called me into his office and the first thing he does is read me the duty policy on homosexuality. I’m sure I must have turned ghost-white because I had no idea that any of this was occurring or had taken place. Then he hands me the stack of emails. I look at them and I recognize them as ones that I had written. But in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “How the heck did you get ahold of these?”
He asked me to explain the emails. I said, “I’m not going to make a statement until I talk to a lawyer first.” We went around and around for about twenty minutes and he realized that he wasn’t going to get anything out of me. He relieved me of my duties right there on the spot. It had a horrible disruption to the unit. A few months later they suspended my security clearance, took away part of my pay, and the whole thing dragged on for about sixteen months before I was finally thrown out of the military. On my last day I was actually given a police escort off the base like I was a common criminal or a threat to security.
Initially I was suicidal because I was devastated. I couldn’t compose myself; I didn’t want to get out of the house, I just wanted the entire thing to go away. That lasted for probably a month or so, and it was really only through a few very close friends that really gave me strength because I had none of my own at that point. They’re the ones that pulled me out of that initial phase. I’m sure I was depressed for two or three years afterwards.
I knew the rules as far as DADT. I never told. The Air Force in essence asked by searching private emails. I refused to answer the question. And yet I was still thrown out. I maintain to this day that the Air Force violated DADT by searching the emails. And yet no one else was held accountable for that. No one else was punished.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it, I realize you can never be fully honest or open with people that were close to you, with people that loved you or people that you worked with every day. There is this constant barrier around your private life. It takes its toll after a while. You become so compartmentalized and so internalized that you don’t even realize it.
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ZACHARY WERTH, BOISE, ID, 2011
SPECIALIST, IDAHO ARMY NATIONAL GUARD, 2007–2010
Medic. General discharge under honorable conditions, erroneous enlistment; used as a smokescreen for homosexuality
DUSTIN HIERSEKORN, BOISE, ID, 2011
PRIVATE,
