The officer and the gentleman - my perspective - retired navy officer reflects on homophobia in U.S. Navy - Column

There were no gays in the Navy when I joined in 1947. We had queers. Oh, the officers called them "homosexuals," at least to us enlisted men. Whatever they were called, they weren't to be trusted or tolerated, and they were discharged as soon as they were caught, simple as that. I stayed in for 23 years and learned bit by bit that things weren't simple as that."

As I climbed up the promotions ladder, I tried to share some of what I learned with those in my charge. By the late 1950s I was an instructor at a basic Navy school. My students were sailors and marines right out of boot camp. One day a couple braggadocios were making with the same old theme I'd heard back when I was a young sailor--rolling queers as a pastime. The justification was that they were, "ya know," queer.

I pointed out that assault and battery, even if done to someone they were encouraged to hate, was still assault and battery and carried severe penalties. My main objective was to keep the young men out of trouble. I had no particular empathy for the men they might assault. I knew no homosexuals, so this wasn't my fight. Such is the way of apathy.

Not long after that, one of my fellow instructors referred to me as the chief who gave "queer" lectures in class. Content and context doesn't matter to those who need someone to look down on.

Then a few years later, Greg, my skipper, got caught in bed with another man and was booted out of the Navy altogether. I was a brand-new ensign, a "mustang," with 15 years' enlisted service. The Navy had sent me to radio station on a faraway island. Like me, Greg was of World War II. His many campaign ribbons and personal decorations told the story of a proud sailor who had served his country well. His demeanor shoed he also had served it proudly. Then this very masculine guy went to Washington to straighten out some problems. I never saw him again.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice uses the phrase penetration, however slight to prove a violation of forbidden sex. I don't know if Greg penetrated or was penetrated, but he did something forbidden.

That did it! Twenty-six years of naval service were flushed down the drain immediately, No pension. No medical care. Nor farewell ceremony. No nothing. I hope he was able to keep his ribbons. He had so many of them and was so proud of them.

Greg was a person: a group, an overbearing martinet at times, and maybe even a homosexual-at least for a night. I realized that the only trait of his that carried a penalty was the one that hadn't harmed anybody for 26 years. For the first time I saw one of them as merely a person. The journey from apathy to realism is a long, tedious one.

I'm long retired from the Navy and look back with nostalgia on the most significant 23 years of my life. That near quarter-century shaped my attitude and opinions in many ways. All of them show up in a regular column I write for a military paper. As the token liberal on a conservative paper, I've ranted against the wacko "don't ask, don't tell" rule, the attempted railroading of a gay sailor who had been rated with the highest marks before a careless E-mail nearly did him in, and the recent banishment of gay linguists from the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. Each article evoked a spate of comments to the editor or to me personally.

They generally started out with something like "I have nothing against them personally" or "Some of my best friends are gay" or "You just don't understand." Then would come the explanation of how gays just wouldn't fit in.

I've been around too long to be surprised. Nothing has changed much since 1947 except one word and the opinions of one old man who used to be a sailor.

Taylor writes for Navy Times and was a five-year president of the San Diego Association for Rational Inquiry.

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