Gay in
the Military:
Documentary Poetry
by
Gabriella Lyth Donofrio
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I was
on study abroad in France on September 20, 2011, the day
the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was put into effect. I read an article about the repeal online without
thinking too much about its significance. I had never
heard of the policy before, never thought twice about
the military except to listen to stories of my grandpa
who served in WWII. But a few months later, as I was
watching the fifth season of The L Word, Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell suddenly came back into my awareness. I realized that it had barely been three
months since gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and queers could
serve openly in the military.
As an English major at Kalamazoo College I knew I wanted to produce
a collection of poetry. I was referred to Mark
Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary. Coal
Mountain has been described as “genre defying” and
experimental “documentary poetry.” It is this
concept that I have subsequently borrowed to develop my
project.
To
create the pieces in this collection, I first
interviewed several military members on their
experiences of being gay in the military. I then transcribed the interviews and framed poems
around the stories that seemed most poignant to me. The result is a collection of pieces in
the voices of seven members of the LGBTQ+
military movement.
Below
is a small sample of the near seventy-five pieces in my
project.
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Top Secret
I'll give
you this story—it's really hilarious. So my partner and
I—the first one, Courtland—we're living off base in
California. I was flying at El Toro, the marine base in
Southern California, and I had a super top-secret
clearance. In my squadron there were only three of us
that were designated to drop nuclear weapons. So they
had to do an investigation about us, above the normal
top-secret investigations. So here we are, we're living
together, and people see us coming and going, and the
FBI went in and investigated me. They spoke to all the
neighbors and everything, and they never figured out
that the two of us were gay and living together! Is that
funny or what? So here I am with this super top-secret
clearance to drop nuclear weapons, and I'm gay.
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A Joke
When I signed up at
the height of the Vietnam War they were
raking in 4,000 people a day at every
recruiting station. So for the induction
process—which was a medical exam and this
and that—there were 4,000 guys in their
underwear because that's the way they do it,
going from one doctor to the next and
looking at your eyes, asking you to cough
and all that nonsense. And so one half
second is in front of a psychologist who did
not look up from his rubber stamp and his
paperwork and said, "Any problem with
homosexuality?" And I honestly said, "No,"
because I didn't have any problem being gay.
And he said, "Next," and that was the end of
that. |
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Terror
After that time
where I was investigated, I had this terror, this
dread—constantly looking over my shoulder—that I'm going
to use the wrong pronoun, I'm going to say the wrong
thing to the wrong person and my career is going to be
over. That time when I was under investigation, I had to
go into work every day. I was stared at, whispered
about. I had nothing to do. I was basically just sitting
at a desk doing nothing all day, every day for about
three months while I was being investigated. And it was
the worst feeling in the world. I'm lucky I didn't get
kicked out. I'm lucky I wasn't—you know, there are a lot
of people who get assaulted, who had really bad
experiences back then. Mine wasn't anywhere near as bad
as others, but it was pretty awful. So when my
obligation was up I regretfully left the army. I just
couldn't go through it again, I couldn't risk it. I was
in the first class of women to graduate West Point, and
my dream was to go back and teach there but I just
couldn't. I couldn't live that way, live with that fear
of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It was
really scary. |
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Communication
Fast forward to March of
2003, when we started the war in Iraq. He had to go
on deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom
and as a pilot in his position, working with special
warfare, we both knew that there was a strong
possibility that he could be shot down or killed in
combat. We would try to talk when we could by phone
or by e-mail, but we had known of one of our friends
who had been discharged from the military while he
was stationed in Germany for talking about his
relationship with his partner via e-mail. So we kept
our e-mails, you know, without any kind of affection
or anything, just sort of like how's your day going
kind of things—best friends kinda conversations. And
then it became a problem when we were talking on the
phone, too, because their phone calls were possibly
monitored. We could tell in the other person's
voice—the frustration that you can sense in human
inflection. We couldn't say things like “I love
you,” or we just didn't because we were scared of
it. |
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Five
I
deployed in 2004 to Iraq, and my partner dropped me
off on base, and so she came on base with me and we
were standing there with all the other military
families and, you know, everybody was hugging and
kissing goodbye and crying and having this very, you
know, emotional goodbye and we kind of gave each
other a high five and, you know, said good luck and
that was pretty much it, you know, and, I look back
at that now and say, wow, if something were to have
happened, that would have been my last interaction
with the person that I love, was a high five.
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Professional Military
Ethics Education
I
I was sitting in a class
called Professional Military Ethics Education. A
cadet who I very much respected said that he didn’t
believe that gays should be serving in the military
and that he was glad that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
policy existed because he was glad he was not forced
to serve alongside people who he morally and
religiously disagrees with. And then someone else,
who happened to be a closer friend that I still
respected very much, stood up and said something
along similar lines but then said something about
gays really bothered him, and that he thought that
they would undermine the military, and that he also
supported the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. And then
finally someone that I considered even closer stood
up and said that he just thought homosexuality was a
sin and the thought of sex between men disgusted him
and that he believed with every fiber of his being
that gays were going to hell and that they had
absolutely no place in the military.
II
I went to West Point so
that I could become a leader of character, so I
could live with honor and integrity and also to
develop myself holistically, both professionally and
personally, and commit myself to a cause that I
really believed in. And I realized that the
military’s policy was forcing me at that moment to
be a coward. I wanted to stand up and say something.
I had a very physical reaction—I was sweating and
there was a lump in my throat and I just wanted to
stand up and say that I was gay and, you’re saying
these things about me, to my friend. But I knew I
couldn’t. It’s not because I didn’t want to or that
I didn’t have the courage to, but rather because the
law mandated that I stay silent.
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The poems that appear here
are taken from interviews with Tom Carpenter, Denny
Meyer, Sue Fulton, Jacob Richardson, Kristen Kavanaugh,
and Katie Miller.
Gabriella Lyth Donofrio can be
reached at asktellproject@gmail.com
© 2013
Gabriella Lyth Donofrio,
Gay Military Signal |
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