And a Discharge for Loving One—34
Years and Counting:
Leonard Matlovich
By Michael Bedwell
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On the 40th Anniversary of Stonewall, San Francisco’s
Gay Pride parade was, again, a rainbow of colors and
causes. It began, as it always does, with the
indescribable thrill of seeing and hearing hundreds of
“Dykes on Bike” roar up Market Street on motorcycles of
every kind. The 208 official contingents that followed
over several hours included beefcake and wedding cake,
the most gay friendly straight mayor in the world, and
one of the few city police chiefs, possibly the only, to
march in a Pride parade with multiple out police
officers and sheriffs in uniform with their life
partners and children. Every year there are more
children in the parade, and their hand-lettered “I Love
My Two Gay Dads” or “Let My Moms Get Married” signs
never fail to make spectators tear up, just as the PFLAG
“We Love Our Gay Son/Daughter” signs do.
There were gay theists proclaiming, “My God thinks I’m
FABULOUS,” and gay atheists declaring, “I believe I’ll
have another drink.” There were gay Jews and gay
Muslims; seniors and stilt walkers; labor unions and
midwives; American Indian Two-Spirits and gay
Vietnamese; gay vegetarians and Pink Pistols. Drag ran
the gamut from lace to leather. One group protested
circumcision; another cutting AIDS funding. Gay-friendly
corporations from Levis to Wells Fargo Bank to Virgin
America to Zipcar had floats or employee contingents.
Marriage equality was an expected ubiquitous theme and
gays in the military were represented this year not just
by the Alexander Hamilton American Legion post but also
by a new vets group. As many know, this spring a group
of gay West Point vets formed Knights Out to fight Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell. Its spokesperson, Army Reserve Lt. Dan
Choi was a Parade Grand Marshal and rode in a car with
discharged Knights Outer and candidate for the
Congressional seat just vacated by repeal bill sponsor
Ellen Tauscher, Anthony Woods.
Loonard Matlovich at the
Berlin Wall |
As the cheers went up as they passed, from experience
one is confidant that many of those thousands are
unaware that the fight against the ban goes back three
decades. And that the first to fight it purposely outed
himself as Choi did. But when US Air Force Tech. Sgt.
Leonard Matlovich told his commanding officer that he
was gay in March of 1975, neither Choi nor Woods were
even born yet. |
Gerald Ford was
president.
The last American deaths in Vietnam, and the first from
AIDS, were yet to be reported. Patty Hearst was still a
fugitive and women were yet to enter the military
academies. There were no cell phones or CNN. The first
successful PCs, with only 1 KB of memory, no keyboard,
mouse, or screen, were shipping but there was no
Microsoft, Apple, nor public Internet. A new Cadillac El
Dorado was $9935, 8-track tape player extra, and gas 44¢
a gallon. No Pac-Man or Prozac, no MacDonald’s drive-thrus,
no test-tube babies. Median US income was $11,800,
stamps 10¢, and VCRs $1000. There were no civil unions
or domestic partnerships. It was before Rocky and
Star Wars and Top Gun, before A Chorus
Line and Cats, before Cheers and
Saturday Night Live. Harvey Milk was in his second
of four tries for office and politically unknown outside
of San Francisco. Martina Navratilova, 18, had yet to
ask for US asylum, footballer Dave Kopay had not come
out, and Elton John was yet to marry Ms. Renate Blauel.
The Suez Canal was still closed, the Berlin Wall was
still up, Ali was yet to fight Frazier, and the YMCA was
still to sue the Village People. Mao, Sadat, Hoffa,
Chaplin, Elvis, and John Lennon were still alive.
Michael Jordan was in middle school; there was no Tiger
Woods. Not only was there no Knights Out, there was no
AVER, SLDN, Servicemembers United, HRC, or NCLR. Barack
Obama was 13.
And, after the New York Time’s published a front
page story on Leonard’s unprecedented test case, after
he appeared in people’s living rooms on national talk
shows and Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News,
after he showed up in their mailboxes on the cover of
Time magazine, he became the first national
celebrity in the fight for gay rights. I have heard gay
men say they remember where they were when Kennedy was
shot and where they were when they first saw the photo
of him in uniform over the caption, “I Am A Homosexual.”
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His road to becoming what writer Malcolm Boyd
called, “the Charles Lindbergh of the gay
movement,” was a tortured one. After being
raised in a devout Catholic home, the son of a
politically conservative career airman, he
served three tours of duty in Vietnam where he
won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Like Harvey
Milk, he had been a Goldwater supporter. Unlike
Milk, he was thirty before he made love
to another man for the first time.
He’d begun
to question his own internalized homophobia
after he had realized the racial bigotry he’d
grown up with in the South was wrong and he had
become one of the Air Force’s most successful
Race Relations Instructors for classes created
after race riots had broken out on bases a few
years before. |
Seeing an interview with gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny
in the Air Force Times, Leonard, like countless
others over the years, called Kameny for
information—just as countless others would eventually
call him.
Not yet ready to say he was gay himself, he was
intrigued when Kameny told him that he’d long been
looking for a servicemember to launch a “perfect test
case.” A year later, Leonard was ready to admit he was
gay, and when Kameny heard his credentials and
willingness to volunteer for that role, the case that
introduced America to the injustice of the ban on gays
in the military was set in motion, others came out, and
gays at New York’s 1975 Pride celebration embraced what
was for most of them a new cause.
“Leonard
Matlovich surveyed the throng with wonder. Two years
earlier, he had believed he was the only homosexual in
the world. Now he was one among tens of thousands. How
had he allowed so much of his life to be wasted in
loneliness? A cheer rose from the crowd when Matlovich
delivered the line he had used in every newspaper and
television interview since his case went public. … With
[him] were the other heroes of the moment: Staff Sgt.
Skip Keith in his blue Air Force uniform and Barbara
Randolph and Debbie Watson from Fort Devens. When the
four of them stood side by side at the microphone,
waving to the crowd that billowed through Central Park,
a huge ovation rose up and it felt as if their spirits
had also lifted into the air and soared over the city’s
skylines. It was a moment Leonard would cherish for the
rest of his life.”
–
Conduct
Unbecoming, 1995.
by Randy Shilts.
For the first time, it wasn’t just big city newspapers
that followed a gay rights story, but small town readers
of everything from the Beckely, West Virginia, Post
Herald to the Elyria, Ohio, Chronicle Telegram
to the Harlingen, Texas, Valley Morning Star to
the Pocatello, Idaho, State Journal woke up to
“Homosexual GI Fights Discharge From Military” and
“Decorated Vet May Be Ousted If Found To Be Homosexual.”
And
it wasn’t just Leonard’s unimpeachable military record
that intrigued both press and public. He didn’t look or
sound like any gay person they’d known before. He cared
no more for Grand Opera than the Grand Ole Opry; had
never heard of The Advocate until they called to
interview him; and pried open previously closed minds by
his very ordinariness. CNN’s Larry King would write, “I
owe my liberation from whatever stereotypes I’ve managed
to escape to a remarkable man named Sergeant Leonard
Matlovich.”
At
least one reporter asked, “Are you really gay?”
“He
could be your next-door neighbor, a mechanic, accountant
or the family doctor. He wants what you want: a decent
job, a comfortable home, love. His name is Leonard
Matlovich and he's one of the country's most
controversial homosexuals. Today scores of Americans—gay
and straight—are following [his] case.”
– The Associated Press.
“A DECENT JOB, A COMFORTABLE HOME, LOVE.” So Leonard
refused when one of the prosecutors at his
administrative discharge hearing asked him if he would
promise to become celibate in exchange for possibly
being allowed to stay in the Air Force under a vague,
then-possible “exception clause.” The hearing briefly
exploded when two witnesses called by the prosecution
testified they’d happily serve with him again. But his
lawyers’ constitutional challenges had already been
thrown out, and there, and in subsequent civilian court
hearings over several years, he would learn that while
his personality, perfect military record, patriotism,
medals and accolades could disarm peers, the press, and
the public, even heroes are defenseless against Justice
seen through the eyes of military homophobia. Many since
then, of course, have learned the same.
The
first made-for-TV movie about a living gay person would
follow, as would endless interviews and a financial
settlement from the Air Force. But the ban only
tightened while Leonard’s participation in the broader
civil rights movement expanded. He helped lead the fight
against Anita Bryant’s antigay uprising in Miami and
against other local demagogues emulating her across the
country. He traveled from city to city raising money to
fight John Briggs’ anti gay teachers Proposition 6. He
led protests against homophobic Pope John Paul’s visit
to the United States, against Lyndon LaRouche’s attempt
to quarantine people with HIV, and helped force
Northwest Airlines to end their ban on flying people
with AIDS. He was arrested protesting President Reagan’s
feeble response to AIDS at San Francisco’s Federal
Building and in front of the White House.
“D.C. police wearing long yellow rubber gloves arrested
64 demonstrators after the group blocked traffic on
Pennsylvania Avenue …. Matlovich, who recently learned
he has AIDS, wore his old Air Force jacket decorated
with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star and clutched a small
American flag as police handcuffed him."
- The Washington Post, June 2, 1987.
And he continued to do what few can—he continued to
inspire. Just last year, after viewing video tapes of
some of his many speeches and interviews, another writer
for the Washington Post remarked,
"He had the knack for taking your heart and making it
catch for a moment.... He seemed to make people want to
be braver than perhaps they were."
– Neely Tucker, November 12, 2008.
Six weeks after telling a Sacramento gay rights rally
that, “Our mission is to reach out and teach people to
love and not to hate,” and more than a decade after
telling his African-American Air Force supervisor that
his letter outing himself meant, “Brown v. the Board
of Education,” Leonard Matlovich took his last
breath beneath a large framed photo of Martin Luther
King, Jr. On one side of his bed, holding one hand, was
his roommate, Joe, a nurse cousin, and this writer; on
the other side, holding his other hand, his heartbroken
mother still trying, like so many mothers during those
dark days, to fathom how she had outlived her son. And
his father, the stoic conservative who, before retiring
after 30 years in the military himself, had stood by his
then 19-yr. boy as he was sworn in. Thirteen
years before this day he’d opened the morning newspaper
and found out for the first time that his son was gay .
. . and that he was threatening to sue the United States
Air Force for discharging him. He then locked himself in
his bedroom and cried for two hours. As he looked down
now at the shriveled body finally at peace, his
inconsolable grief gently rested against the shoulder
of his immeasurable pride.
That Sunday in the Christopher Street West parade in Los
Angeles, thousands of the usual, noisy revelers grew
briefly silent as a riderless horse passed, being led
behind Joe carrying an American flag banner that read,
“Sgt. Leonard Matlovich. Hero.” A few days later, after
his funeral with songs by the DC Gay Men's Chorus and a
eulogy by ABC's Charlie Gibson, his coffin was born
through the streets of the nation’s capital on a
horse-drawn caisson. Accompanied by an Air Force Honor
Guard, followed by mourners carrying both American and
rainbow flags, it came to historic Congressional
Cemetery where the year before he’d dedicated a memorial
to Navy veteran Harvey Milk, and stopped at the
gravesite whose stone read,
“When I
was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two
men and a discharge for loving one.”
And
mainstream media that had documented his crusades for so
long paid their final respects, too. Over breakfast,
Americans read, “Gay War Hero Buried With Full Military
Honors” or “Service Reconciles Life As Military Man, Gay
Rights Activist,” and saw photos of the Air Force honor
guard next to his stone with its pink triangles or his
mother’s tears fall upon a folded flag. And in the
evening, they heard news anchors like Peter Jennings
personally recite his indelible epitaph. Since then,
other gays, individuals and couples, have chosen to be
buried near him. Though never imagining that, he’d
always meant that stone to be a memorial to all gay
veterans, and, for several years, it has been the site
of Veteran’s Day observances as autumn leaves rustle
across his grave and, a ways off, that of Walt Whitman’s
great love, Peter Doyle.
THIRTY-FOUR YEARS. It has been thirty-four years since
Leonard walked out of the Langley Air Force Base hearing
where his discharge had just been announced and held a
Kennedy Bicentennial half dollar up to waiting
mesmerized reporters. Ironically, it was engraved with
an image of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall where his
mentor Frank Kameny had first led a gay rights
demonstration a decade before. Leonard told them,
"It says '200 Years of Freedom’. Maybe not in my
lifetime but we are going to win in the end."
As I write this, the momentum for that victory so long
overdue seems stronger than ever, but we are tossed from
one day to the next between waves of fresh hope and
waves of renewed despair. I can’t predict whether the
hundred thousand plus discharges that began way back in
World War II will finally stop with a freeze or go on,
day after day, until Congress collects its conscience
and common sense.
I am certain of two things.
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In the fall of 1977, Leonard was invited by Jimmy
Carter’s Special Assistant, Midge Costanza, for a
private tour of the White House where he was
photographed sitting at the President’s desk in the Oval
Office. The 1880 “Resolute” desk is still there today,
but the sign that was on it is now in Carter’s recreated
office in Georgia. Nonetheless, with respect, our
current President could do well to be reminded of the
sign’s original owner, Harry Truman, and what it said:
“The buck stops here.” |
The
second thing I know is that, if there is any justice,
when President Obama does finally sign a bill repealing
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell it should be one named along the
lines of The Leonard Matlovich Freedom to Serve Act.
And that our Commander-in-Chief should follow the
signing with placing a wreath on Leonard’s grave in
honor of him and every other gay servicemember who has
fought for right abroad and at home.
_____________________________________
Michael Bedwell is the former president of the gay
rights group at Indiana University and of DC’s Gertrude
Stein Democratic Club. He met Leonard Matlovich in 1975
a few days before the Secretary of the Air Force
affirmed his discharge. They were roommates in
Washington and San Francisco where, last year, he and
other friends installed a memorial plaque for Leonard on
the building they lived in at 18th and Castro. He is
also the creator of
www.leonardmatlovich.com. |
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© 2009
Michael Bedwell |