By Perry Brass

Reading the headlines in The New York Times, last Saturday (January, 12, 1998) about Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy R. McVeigh (not to be confused with Timothy L. McVeigh, the McVeigh associated with the Oklahoma City bombing) who had been allegedly "outed" by his user profile on America Online-and quickly thereafter found himself facing dismissal by the Navy--brought me back to that time, from 1978 until 1980, when I was an Air Force wife. How I went from being an openly gay, New York-based writer to the not-always-so-secret partner of a American airman in the hilly sticks of Germany, still seems like a dream and mystery to me, one of those things brought about by falling too much in love, maybe. But it opened up for me a keyhole into the military, a subculture that I knew nothing about, and how it interacts with gay men, using them, playing up to them, and, often, destroying them when it can. The real mystery (at least for non-military people) is why are so many queer men attracted to the military, and how can they live their lives in constant denial, while-again, often-at the same time flirting with being caught? My own story was fairly simple. I met Rex (not his real name, but now I am paranoid-there is no telling who is reading this and what they'll try to do with it) while he was on a one-weekend trip to New York. He had been stationed for two years in the Southwest, in a grimy hellhole of an Air base laden with mosquitoes and rednecks. He knew all along that he wanted to be in Europe. Germany specifically. He put in for a transfer and finally got it and with it, on-route, a few days in New York. We met at Riis Park, a gay beach, spent a gorgeous summer weekend together, and realized that something more was there than we had anticipated. He took off and we started writing one another twice a week. I wrote to him through his base APO box number; he wrote back to me in Manhattan. I thought nothing of it, did not even think that our letters might be intercepted. Luckily, they were not. The writing became more personal, more confidential, and I realized that, in a truly old-fashioned way, I had fallen in love with him by letter. I called him a few times overseas at his job. He was living in an Air Force dorm, but we managed to hear each other's voice, and that was all that mattered. I decided that a year after meeting him, I would move to Germany. In preparation, I took a German class, made all the contacts I could with German magazines and media, gave up my New York rent-controlled apartment, and put my things in storage. Rex got a small, secluded house in the local village off-base, told his friends that a writer friend of his from New York was coming to visit, and then I flew over. I had been to Europe before, but never to Germany. I had never lived in such a rural setting. The area he lived in, a kind of hard-scrabble-farming German version of Appalachia, was dotted with NATO Air Force and Army bases. It was crawling with soldiers, and for the most part, stony, resentful German farmers. The two groups rarely spoke to each other. I landed in the middle-living what I came to realize was a much more closeted and secretive life than I had bargained for. After the initial few weeks of rosiness wore off, it began to dawn on me where I was-in a place cut off from other "out" gay men, and where an almost daily disappearing act had to be perfected. I felt often like Conrad's story The Secret Sharer: a stow-away swimmer who comes on board to share a young sea captain's bed and innermost private life, but whose presence cannot be revealed to anyone. My presence could be revealed, but few people involved with Rex's military life could know that I was anything other than a freelance writer from New York casually visiting him. Luckily most American military personnel were so cut off from anything that resembled "real" life that my staying there for a year and a half in this small German town, two miles from an Air base, did not wrinkle any foreheads. Rex on the other hand could not have been happier. He was deeply romantic, hated the Service, and now had someone to share his "gay" life with. He had got into the Air Force as a last resort, after a bad marriage and being stone-broke in the Midwest. Everything that he had been promised by the Air Force-that he would be trained for a "real" job, get choice locations, get usable college credits while in the Air Force-were all lies. I learned later that he was very much an exception to the "average" gay airman or G.I. In other words, he knew what was going on, and loathed it. Most of the other gay servicemen I met either refused to know what was going on, knew but were in complete denial; or-even worse-bought one hundred percent into the whole military snow-job (something even most straights with an I.Q. over 80 could not do) and were sure that this little tick about themselves, this little "personality problem" (being "you-know-what"), would never bother or harm them if they kept their noses clean and their mouths shut. All I can say to this is: wrong, Mary! Rex and I went to the base often. We had to shop there (it was almost impossible to live on the German "economy" with prices double what they were for "Uncle Sugar'"s boys). On base I could somewhat pass as an out-of-uniform airman, or as a visiting relative. We made up a little game called "stupids." The idea was to act as dumb as possible. Pure "dumb-shit" was even better than half-stupid. The less personality (or "affect) you had, the better. Rex and I would lower our voices on base, and grunt. Sometimes, if we had things to say that needed to be said in private, we'd switch to German, or a language we made up between us, kind of a Germ-glish, mixing up phrases and words as we went along. An example: in German the word for bassoon is "faggoti." So we'd say, "Do you think he's a bassoon?" Since German gay men often tried to look like butch American soldiers, the question was: "Is he a bassoon, or a soldier?" Sometimes, this was a hard call. Rex's buddies often overlooked me or anything I said because I was, after all, visiting from New York. They had all heard how crazy New York people were. One of my great aids to going stir-crazy was the tiny base library. It was basically a basement full of books. In my time there I read about half the fiction in it. I also discovered (like we did not know?) that a lot of the base "bassoons" might be found at the library. Paradoxically, from a purely looks point of view, being on base in the late 70s was kind of like being in a huge "gay" environment. The boys on Christopher Street were all wearing butch army fatigues, bomber jackets ("clone coats"), and very short military hair cuts. So, hey, this was the real thing. Except that unlike Christopher Street, at the base nobody smiled, seemed the least happy, looked at anyone else, or showed any connection with what was around them. The military was either very serious, or brainless; with scant humor in between. Also, very "ungay" for me, blacks and whites did not mingle. I was used to having friends of all colors, sizes, and sexes back in New York. But in a military environment social segregation seemed to be standard. As a civilian I got to meet a lot of black G.I.'s, often in the village we lived in. Mostly they were passing through or asking directions. I did not dress "German," so they'd see that I was American. Sometimes they would pick me up hitchhiking. Since I did not have a car, I did a lot of hitchhiking and often met people that way. For professional as well as social reasons, I got out of the military environment as much as I could. For the most part, being on an Air Force base was like being on a depressant drug. It was a constant downer. The only way to survive it was to keep lowering your emotional needs. This attitude would backfire, and violent flare-ups occurred: husbands beating up their wives (even killing them); fights in the dorms. There was a constant atmosphere of suppressed violence on base. It kept most people locked tensely within themselves. Rex, being alert to what was going on, quickly met up with a gay clique. Every base had one, and there was often a kind of underground network from one base to another. The network was based mostly on individual friendships, and occasional tricking. Rumors went around that there might be yet another gay clique on base, but paranoia kept these cliques, if they existed, from ever meeting. A little courtship dance on base had to go on with each new man, to see if he could be trusted and how far to trust him. So finding another clique of men on our base was very difficult and did not happen. They were about a dozen men in Rex's clique. They met together in a couple of private homes to party, camp, dish, drink, and let their hair down-sometimes in each other's faces. Self-hatred could be waist-deep. The clique called itself, very Manson-esque, "the Family," and the Family, for the most part, did not think highly of itself and its status in the Air Force. In New York I had not been part of this sort of closeted, self-hating scene, so it was difficult for me to get into it or understand it. I quickly became known as "Miss Writer from New York," an outsider who would never be part of the military or a real Family member. Rex, who had thought the Family would "take me under their wing," was bitterly disappointed, and my being there-as an object both of jealousy and ridicule-actually moved him away from other gay men on the base, who could not establish an ongoing relationship with another man. "Family" parties often ended up drunken, sad free-for-alls. The huge base liquor store, with its cheap, duty-free booze, supplied endless octane for these trips. Most Family "sisters" had bought into the Air Force's homophobia, even as the Service meat-grinded them through a career. Since gays were considered, for the most part, "single," they were judged by their superiors either not to have a private life, or to be neutered. The attitude (which despite Clintonism, I'm fairly sure has not changed) was: "we ask-you hide-we ask more-until we get you into a position where you can't say no." This went for disclosing being gay, as well as for doing exactly what the Military demanded. Queers could not say no to weekend duty, to the most stressful schedules ("We can't do this to married men," Rex's boss told him, "they have to be home with their kids."), or dangerous jobs. If you protested and said, "I'm sorry, I need to be someplace else," out would come the questions. We spent months when Rex was on weekend call twenty-four hours a day. The stress this caused him and our relationship could not be questioned. When I asked him why his associates couldn't do this type of call, he said simply, "They're married." Having a close sexual relationship in the Air Force with another airman was almost impossible. The Service had a way of figuring out when two men were becoming closer, and transferring one of them. More casual friendships though were easier. There was usually a form of "gaydar" at work, although this could be misleading (and sometimes dangerous) in a situation where so many men were young, attractive, eager for attention, and "looked" gay. On the plus side, it meant that some straights also floated into Family life. In a way, they became like male faghags. They wanted to be somewhat included, but sexually you did not touch them. They came to gay parties, sometimes brought in German or American girlfriends-who usually pretended not to know what was going on-and sometimes ended up drunk and in bed with Family sisters. Among our various friends and acquaintances though, I remember meeting only one other man who was not in complete denial that the Air Force, if you were gay, was there to destroy you--and would do so at the drop of a rivet. For the most part gay men bought into the Military picture completely and saw any breach of it as an insult to the Air Force-and their careers-instead of to them. A good example was a horrible murder that took place in the middle of my first winter in Germany. Joe, a young airman-who lived in the same dorm Rex had lived in-had been picked up hitchhiking in the village by a courteous, thirty-something German. He offered to give Joe a ride back to the base, and then shortly after, according to Joe's account, had propositioned him. The airman said that he'd be willing to go with the German, if he drove him to his dorm where he had to tell his roommate that he would be returning late. According to a story that circulated around the base (and later got back to the Family), Joe entered his dorm room, told his roommate that he was going back out to "kill myself a queer," and returned to the German's car. A few minutes later, in a deserted field about a mile from the base, the airman took out a hunting knife that he had gone specifically to the dorm to retrieve, and stabbed the driver about a dozen times in the chest, heart, neck, and face. Joe then walked back to the base covered in blood. He did not deny the killing, but said that it was done in self-defense. The German's family was shocked; he had been married, had two kids, and had been a respected citizen of a neighboring village for years. The Air Force, doing its part for their boys, refused to have the case tried in a German court, which it would have done had the victim been a German girl and homosexuality not been brought into it. As a journalist, I decided to investigate the case as much as I could. I went to the base's legal officer to discuss it. He told me that Joe had been taken off base, to Frankfurt, and after a "fair" hearing would probably be sent back home. (The huge German magazine that I worked for, Der Stern, told me that since homosexuality and the American military had been involved, they were "not interested" in the story. "The motives of the driver seem apparent," my editor said. It was one of my first encounters with the German idea that you try the victims before the perpetrators; a concept that the Air Force seemed to have copied verbatim. After I had brought up the murder at the next Family gathering, several members, the ones who would actually talk about it, told me that Joe had done the right thing. "He was only protecting hisself," Hank, a security guard told me. "I'm military and I understand these things. You'll never understand it." When I asked why Joe did not just walk away, I was laughed at. The moral of this story was that it was better to kill than be taken for a queer, and even if you are a queer yourself, you would never make this kind of mistake with a guy like Joe. "You don't just rush into a situation," I was told. "You have to psych it out, and if you don't, you aren't respecting people." That Joe had "rushed into" murdering a German family man was not part of the "military head," or "regs" as it was called. It is a mentality that you either buy into or you wash out of. Washing out, one way or another, seemed to be out of the question. While I was an AF wife, I heard repeatedly what a fool Leonard Matlovitch, the first American airman to go public for being gay, had been. He had "fucked up his career, his pension, and his life." He had shaken the cookie jar that Uncle Sugar had given him. The idea that he had shown courage doing what he did was not taken seriously. Courage was doing your job and holding up under fire. Courage was buying into the military picture, even if you knew how much horseshit was involved. Not to buy in was "sissy," and even sissies would not do this. The worst fire came from a series of investigations done by the Air Force's Office of Military Investigations, which during my time overseas went from base to base, investigating basically one crime: homosexuality. The degree of this investigation impressed me considering how much embezzlement and waste, by any account, went on in many military situations. Several members of the Family were investigated while I was there. One was older, and married with a front marriage cardboard enough to look like the set from a Hollywood "B" western. Jeff and his lesbian wife had never spent a night together. The Air Force would from time to time figure this out, and call him back in. Since Jeff had never been "caught," as Timothy McVeigh allegedly had, he simply stood his ground each time, went home, drank himself to sleep, and waited for the next round. He figured by the time anything really happened, he'd be pensioned. The other investigation was with a nervous young Hispanic whose life was made hell for him. Carlos did not have a front or a cover-not a "wife," or a fiancee back home-anything that might save him. Rex, who had been divorced and told everyone that he never intended to marry again, had the cover; but Carlos also had German male friends, another no-no. It was okay to date German girls, but not German boys. Or at least not be seen close enough to them. Again, in complete denial, Carlos said that he would, as I remember, "outlast the investigation. Tell them nothing. I got the toughest hide in the Service." I remember looking at him in the streets of the village and seeing that his skin had broken out, he was shaking, and looked sleepless. A few months later, he was able to get "compassionate" leave. A sister of his was desperately ill, and he had to go home to the Bronx to help her and her family. This stopped the investigation before it was able to nab him. As in any homophobic situation, where you are working so hard to hide both your own homosexuality and your own "gay" feelings (which, as the comedy "In & Out" showed, can seem even more threatening than sex), there is a feeling that people will play along with you as long as you keep the game going at a certain constant level. Instead of "don't ask, don't tell," it's: "I'll play hard at being straight and you'll play just as hard at pretending that I am straight." During my AF wife years, I found this going on constantly. My favorite example was Junior, a tall, thin, effeminate medical officer from the South. As willowy and obvious as he was, Junior was-in short-a screaming queen. As part of his "straight work," he was married and he and his wife had (I kid you not) six kids. He kept her constantly pregnant in order to get her out of the way to fool around on the side. He would take her to a German disco several miles from the base, where he could pick up the locals and take them out to the parking lot to have sex. His wife, he claimed, did not know a thing about him. Junior was always the big laugh of the Family, but he was in fact a nice, sweet-natured guy, who never engaged in the brutal dishing and fighting of the Family, who as individuals felt disowned on every level. His wife, between pregnancies, dolled herself up like Barbie. She came from a poor-white Southern background. With the dependency allowance that the Air Force gave her for having six kids, she had never lived so well. There was no way she was going to upset the applecart she was riding on. They both pretended that nothing out of the ordinary was going on in their marriage. Eventually Junior became involved "full-time" with another man, a German, and stopped doing men out in the parking lot. He brought his boyfriend home, got his wife out with the kids, and everyone still pretended that nothing was going on. Of all the queer airmen I met while I was German, Junior was among the nicest to me, and when I would meet him, his wife, and several of his kids on the streets of the base, we would all just wave. While I was in Germany, to keep my sanity between writing journalism, I decided to start a novel. It was of course about gay military men in Germany, their secrecy, self-loathing, need for friendship, and the relationships they formed both with the Germans and each other. When I got back to New York in late 1979, I got an agent and we started to shop it around. It was turned down all over. Bob Wyatt, a gay editor at Warner Books, wrote back to me, "I'm still not sure what 'gay literature' is, but this is not it. Gay men are not the least interested in the military. It means nothing to them." It has taken me a while to understand Wyatt's statement and how that attitude colors much of the lives of gay men in the Service. They feel that civilian gays have no understanding of what is going on with them-so how can "coming out" in any way be of the least benefit to them? AIDS has changed some of this feeling, since AIDS in the military has been such unmitigated hell that gay military people have had to break out of some of their silence. But the feeling is still if we're working so hard to keep this a secret, why can't Uncle Sugar work just a little to keep the secret going? Most military gays still see the options as that of being either a screaming queen (a Junior who will have to get married to shut people up) or being "regular military" and staying within regs. In Timothy McVeigh's situation, the latest pitch in this war, he said, "I was shocked" that he was relieved of his duty, after a 17-year, unblemished military record, the very day that AOL had verified that his user profile had included the word "gay" in it. To most civilians, this sounds like utter naiveté. McVeigh could not believe that the Navy-in other words, the U.S. Government itself-would invade his privacy especially in the light of Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which was meant to keep the Military out of the bedrooms of its employees. Of course, it's easy to see that this invasion of privacy has been going on through most of the Navy's history. It has actually been stepped up lately, as the sexual stakes involved have come out more into the open. In many ways, the game has become more subtle and more revolting. And anyone's feeling that "Since I am working so hard to hide myself ('Don't tell'), why shouldn't the Navy just play along with the charade (and 'Don't ask')" will be met with even more effort on the military's part to uncover alleged gays. In the meanwhile, deprived of his job, McVeigh will have to develop like Carlos, the "toughest hide in the Service." I wish him well with his fight, but I wonder in the long run if this will turn out to be a learning situation for the military, any gay men in it, or their "wives." Perry Brass's newest books are The Harvest, a gay science-politico novel, and The Lover of My Soul, A Search for Wisdom and Ecstasy," a collection of poetry and other writings. His new website is www.perrybrass.com, where you can reach him and learn more about his work. Note: With the exception of Timothy McVeigh's, he has changed all the military personnel names used in this story.