feature

One of my best

straight friends gave a
glowing eulogy to my
contributions to the Navy.
She and her husband I
both knew I was gay.

Navy. But she and her husband both knew I was
gay. '

I have always wondered if I did the right
thing. Should I have come out? Did I compro-
mise my values? Could I have made a differ-
ence? It has been something that has weighed on"
my mind ever since. . C

I had had to take into account many situ-
ations in making my decisions — both to stay in
and then to retire when I did. I had an ex-wife
and two children, with alimony and child sup-
port payments each month. But also, I really
liked what I did. It was exciting, thrilling, and
fun to be a part of the government where I
thought I was making a difference.

Then, last year on June 1, 2001, a head-
line in The New York Times caught my eye:
“Military’s Ouster of Gays Rose 17 Percent Last
Year.”

Being a gay retired Navy officer isn’t the
only reason the headline drew my attention. I
worked my last four or so years in the Navy at
the Pentagon and was working for the
Department of Defense when the “donft ask —
don’t tell” policy was formulated.

Not only was I there, but I worked on
and wrote much of the “public affairs policy”
that went along with it — the strategy of how and
when to announce it and how it would be "
explained. It was a job I didn’t ask for, and one I
certainly didn’t relish.

I sat in on meetings with the Defense
Department’s Attorney General and her staff,
met with others drafting up the new policy and
wrote down all the questions we expected people
to ask, as well as the “party line” answers.

On the day President Clinton made the
announcement at Fort McNair, with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff sitting in the background, the
document I had drafted was sent through the

" Defense Department’s electronic messaging sys-

tem to all commands, high and low, around the
world. .

Not once did the words “don’t ask, don’t
tell’’ appearin that document. I remember sitting
in those meetings and hearing people object to
the terminology as misleading. Funny how it
caught on, though. J

But for all this ofliciality, serving at the
Pentagon was not what you would call “straight
and narrow.” I did discover the “hidden side” of
Pentagon life. The Pentagon Off1cer’s Athletic
Club? (known as the “POAC”), was a constant
source of sex for me. Yes, I was in a relation-
ship, but it wasn’t one that provided me with the
kind of sexual excitement I sought.

The POAC’s steam room was as bad (or
good?) as any of the steam rooms I had ever
encountered in the best of the gay bathhouses in
Europe. The running trails outside of the
Pentagon were rife with military men hiding in
the bushes looking for sex. Certain Pentagon
bathrooms’— you eventually figured out which
they were — were almost certain to provide you
with someone who wanted sex.

 

And that isn’t all. Sex was more or less a
constant topic throughout my years in the mili-
tary. It is amazing that the military spends so
much time on it when so much of it goes on —
unchallenged — at their own headquarters, as
well as in other commands.

Prior to going to the Pentagon, I was
assigned as the public affairs officer of the elite
Navy flying team called the Blue Angels. It was
during this two-year stint that I finally came out
to my wife, and we were divorced,

I_moved in with a young man I had been
seeing and started a scary new life. This was
before “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I was naive
enough to think I could keep things under wraps.

One day a few months after the divorce,
my commanding officer called me into his

T office. He said that one of the pilots noticed I

was hanging out with someone (my partner) who
“seemed gay.” Then he point-blank asked me if I
was gay. .

I sat stock still in his wood-paneled
office and looked steadily back at him. The
words “BOSS” carved in wood on his oversized
desk stared back at me. My heart pounded and
thoughts started racing through my mind. I knew
I only had a few seconds to answer him before
my silence would become arfadmission of guilt
to him. . A

What was I going to say? Was this the

end of my Navy career? How could I possibly

afford my alimony and child support payments if
I got booted out of the Navy for being gay?

So I looked him straight in the eye and
lied. “No, I am not gay,” I said. But I had a way
to nip this one in the bud, and I knew the time
had now come to use it.

I explained to him that if the subject ever
came up again, I would not hesitate to tell not
only his‘ wife, but the wives of all the other
pilots, about the sexual shenanigans the guys
played when the Blue Angels team traveled to
air shows around the country.

He didn’t say much to me after that.
Clearly pissed, he nonetheless dismissed me,’and
I simply got up and walked out.

The issue was never mentioned again.
My conscience is and was not exactly at ease
with itself, but I had had to make a snap deci-
sion, and I have had to live with it.

After the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy
came out during my early stint at the Pentagon,
several months passed. I was now working in
the Pentagon’s newsroom. One day, a couple of
plainclothes men from the Naval Investigative
Service came by my desk there and asked if we
could talk. ’ ' a

They had obtained a copy of my now at
least three-year-old divorce decree. They had not
only read, but scoured through it looking for
clues to my sexual orientation. Many parts of it
were underlined. Remember now, this is after
“don’t ask, don’t tell.”

They wanted to know why it said in the
decree that my ex-wife would have the right to