Somewhere along the hot, damp, meridional coast of Vietnam, I met one of these fascinating characters secretly carrying a life story which help us understand issues of our time.
For obvious reasons, you will come to understand in this article, the brave former American soldier who helped me put together this project, asked me to preserve his anonymity. So I will refer to him as “Terry”.
Of course, this could have been an article about modern relationships between Vietnamese and Americans meeting again in a peaceful atmosphere of tourism, but none of that will be spoken off today. We are going to aboard a different, more personal, even intimate, type of relation. The Vietnamese beach was just a nice place for conversation. Where, in front of an icy drink, fighting the tropical heat and the mosquitoes, Terry is going to help us understand how being gay affected his life decisions, and relations to other, through a career he spent serving his country.
Even if Homosexuality has been legalized (by same-sex marriage and decriminalization), and is generally socially accepted in most occidental countries, such as the -late to pass- the United States of America in 2015, it is still a taboo subject in certain part of society, and especially in a few traditional work groups. Therefore, forcing people into silence, by hiding an everyday violent form of discrimination. Making these innocent victims build a life of lies, wear a mask, and give up the opportunity to experience what they would have considered being a normal life. Let us not forget how it used to be, and how it still is, to be in those men and women boots, or in this case should I say Rangers.
A Life of Lies
Terry was born in the early sixties in the strongly conservative State of New Hampshire before moving later on to Texas. He was apart of what we can call a big family : 13 brothers and sisters, “7 biological, 4 adopted, the rest were foster”, and only two parents to take care of them, most of all “One brave mother, who died at the age of 52, and that’s maybe why.”. The couple is strongly Catholic, “not fanatics, but there would often be the church”. They all lived in a big house of twenty room but only two toilets, “It was never spotless but it was clean”, and when the father came back from his supporting job as a tax collector there was always food on the table.
At the age of 13, Terry discovers in one of the two toilets that “puberty had kicked in” and with it a revelation about his sexual orientation: ”I told my best friend straight away. He didn’t care. He wasn’t part of the idiots. I grew up at a time and age where people would keep this for themselves until they were 40 or 50 years old.”. But Terry added that he never told his family and other surroundings by fear of their judgment. A recent poll from Stonewall shows that people from Terry’s generation (around 60 years old) came out in average at the age of 37, but this doesn’t tell us to who they did so. Most people didn’t go public during those times but just chose a small group, keeping in mind that the law as much as the public opinion were against them.
From the age of sixteen, Terry was working as a janitor in a restaurant where one of his sisters was a waitress. Height mouth prior to his eighteenth birthday he joins the military in order to make the most of the career chance and social benefits it offered. ”I was young, my parents had to sign the papers”.
Being this young, not knowing much about the military world except its benefits wasn’t he scared? I had to ask. “Not so much as I should’ve been,” he answered.
”I hid it to everybody; my family, the military. So it didn’t change anything. But it came up in my mind sometimes. Like if they ever found out I was having a ‘thing’ for somebody, or doing shower time…And that would have been a prison sentence when I first went in.”
———–
So, was it legal to apply the military having what the World Health Organization called a ”state of illness” until 1990?
“No it was very illegal” But nobody was really hunting gay people for the legal issues it caused, the real punishment was more about ”the mistreatment”. The illegality was condemned through other ways such as unfaithfulness in ”fake” marriages :
“I think that the most extremely homophobic persons had struggled with it themselves. I actually knew this guy…This was years ago. I actually slept with him! He had beaten up another soldier because he was gay. He ended up hitting on me but in another way. He knew I was gay, and him, turned out to be bisexual, and so we had sex. I was really young too…like 19, and he was 24. It happened on American soil, in Hawaii. I was obviously single at the time which doesn’t make you earn a lot of money in the military. But I was actually married!”
– ”So you were married ?” I asked very surprisedly.
“Just for the benefits”
– ”Did your family attended the ceremony?” Them not knowing he was gay.
”They never knew about the two, cause actually, there was two.”
“The First time I think what happened is she started falling for me, and that’s bad. So we got divorced. We must be the only two persons that divorced because of Love. It’s bizarre. We are still good friends, she calls me every day.”
The second wife was actually because she was going to die. She was my best friend’s mother. He was ten years younger than me and she was ten years older. She was going to die because she didn’t have the medicals. Her husband, at the time, decided to get paid more money than have the medical. So he divorced her, I married her, and she got the medical. And her mental handicap daughter was also taken in charge.”
– ”Were you seeing other men at the time?”
“That would be illegal in the military…But yeah!”
”Believe it or not, after a moment everybody knew I was gay.” You can have a contracted marriage under military law until officially proven you are gay, ”but you just can’t see anyone ells on the side.”
Don’t Ask / Don’t Tell
– ”When did things started evolving? When did people start finding out you were gay?”
“When I was 26, that’s when the DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, policy passed in, and it was not long after that people didn’t ask, they just knew!”
In 1993, former US president Bill Clinton addresses a message to the nation from the National Defence University in Washington, in which he officially puts an end to the 50 years old military ban on lesbian and gay joining the army ; but at the same time, demanding troops not to question anyone’s sexual orientation, and especially, ordering them to not reveal it to others -if the answer wasn’t : I am straight-. The difference being, homosexuality was no longer banned in the US military, but being openly homosexual was. This was done to reassure the senators and high ranked officers at the time -such as Sam Nunn-, afraid that being open about this subject would ”undermine “unit cohesion” and threaten combat effectiveness”.
LGBT group leaders still argue that this decision only underlined the fact that homosexuality made you a second class citizen in the eyes of the government.
The contestation had a positive effect on the cause. Medias sharing the issues of the debate on weekly basis gave a voice to the community and participated in the evolution of public opinion :
“In 1994, the Pew Research Centre reported 45% of Americans opposed allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. By 2010, that number was 27%.” the Time.
[ Link to Bill Clinton Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFYwgEJbJqk ]
[Back to Terry:] “It is legal now, it started to be legal a few months after my leave (in 2011). Actually, 10 days before I retired! Can you believe it? I was 25 years in the military and that’s when they choose to make it legal !”
On the 20th of September 2011, the Obama administration officially put an end to the DADT law after seventeen years of banning.
Invisible Ceilings and Threats
– So your officers in charge started to know. Did it ever stop you having any promotions?
“I believe so, but I can’t prove it. The thing is, I have a lot of issues. People usually overlook differences, and even being gay, but when you have more than one it’s hard. I struggle with weight, ADHD… But people with the same experience and results went up, and I didn’t.
“I had one sergeant, everybody knew he was gay. I think superiors didn’t respect him as much.”
One of the main claims that raised among the high ranked officers during the DADT period was that superior officers would not be taken seriously if openly gay, and that was an important issue because respect is everything, if not vital, for a unit to achieve its missions. Thus, the military corps try to make differences disappear among its members in order to achieve perfect unity. Its leaders didn’t understand how letting the “biggest difference among men”, sexual orientation, being shared (and potentially “spread”) would have a positive effect. So everything would be done to ensure there would be no “bad example” to be followed. The highest rank ever reported, or publicly admitted between the ’70s and the ’80s was Leonard P. Matlovitch, a Technical Sergeant and a Vietnam war veteran whose story made the cover of Time magazine.
“But I did had bosses who openly not-against gay people”
– And what about your comrades?
“One time when I was in Afghanistan somebody kept stealing all my stuff. We all lived in open-bay and was really hard to protect everything you had. I did have one footlocker, but if you left your shoes out they would just disappear. They stole probably about five hundred bucks worth of my things. And it really saddens me I didn’t have the balls to face them.
“One of the idiot guys had this comment: But why do you like guys, that’s why God made ugly women for.”
A lot of these aggressions were kept hidden for many years, some of them reaching a high level of direct violence or causing depression, and sometimes dissertation leading victims to be punished even more. And for what? some may ask. Nowadays LGBT movement representing the interests of their members among the army, claim that 70% of those who are concerned stay in the closet by fair of these consequences.
– Any emotional support?
“After 1992 yes, but before that, it was mostly other gay people. There were a few romantic stories with roommates…
“People would say: ‘Be careful!’ But not because they cared, just because they figured somebody else would care.”
What about now?
In 2014 the Guardian revealed that the U.S ”placed 40 out of 103 countries’ armed forces based on the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender service members”.
In 2016, Eric Fanning becomes the first openly gay person to be nominated at a high rank as United States Secretary of the Army. A great victory for the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee which sole purpose is to increase the number of openly LGBT persons among the Public Officials in the United States.
So, it is safe to say that things are changing for the best but very slowly.
Now people are waiting to know: Will it ever be fully accepted and normalize?
