Major Conflict

by Jeffrey McGowan, Maj USA (ret. )

  “Oh yes, he does, my friend,” Andy said, taking on a serious, almost scholarly tone. “It’s how he marks them for hell. It says it in the Bible. You need to read your Old Testament, McGowan.”

  I hadn’t yet learned that trying to engage this kind of thinking is futile, that, in fact, to engage it is to dignify it in a manner it doesn’t even begin to deserve. “Give me the chapter and verse, Andy,” I said. “Where exactly in the Old Testament does it say that God will give you AIDS if you’re gay? And besides, a lot of people sin every day, does that mean that they should get AIDS, too?”

  “That sin is worse than others. It’s on a whole different level. And it’s in Leviticus or Judges, I’m not sure, one of those. It doesn’t talk about AIDS, McGowan. Whaddya think, it’s all spelled out like a rule book or something? But it’s clear what the meaning is.”

  “So, what about someone like, say, Hitler. Should Hitler have gotten AIDS, Andy?”

  “Maybe he did. How the hell do I know what the freak did with that Eva Braun chick in the bunker.”

  “What about the people in Africa with AIDS? What about the starving people in Africa and India? Have they done something wrong, Andy, that God has made them suffer with starvation and get AIDS, too? Are people dying of starvation in Somalia because they’ve displeased the Lord, Andy? Huh? Tell me.”

  “Well, I’m not saying anything, but Jeff, those aren’t exactly Christian nations, if you get my drift. But let me get this straight, are you defending the homos?”

  “I’m just defending clear thinking, Andy. I think you’re smarter than this, and I know you’re better educated than this. It’s ridiculous to say shit like that. God does not hate groups of people, Andy. God doesn’t hate, period.”

  “Are you calling me stupid, McGowan?”

  Fred broke in, with a slightly bemused look on his face. “You can see them serving in the military? I mean, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think that it will happen eventually, no matter what we want or think. Look at women and blacks,” I said.

  “Women and blacks?” Andy erupted. “Are you out of your fucking mind, McGowan? And you call me stupid! Women in the army is a complete and total mess. Should have never happened. Just look at how many pregnancies there are.”

  “Really, Andy, is that so? Tell me, what are the numbers? I haven’t read anything recently.”

  “You know what, McGowan, I don’t know the numbers, okay? I think I read it somewhere. But it doesn’t matter. You know what I’m talking about. Look at all the sensitivity-training bullshit. And God forbid you should correct or discipline one of them and they’re out there quicker than you can say ‘cock tease,’ screaming, ‘Oh, sexual harassment! Oh, his tone was inappropriate. Oh, he stood too close to me!’ ” Andy was prancing around again in mock hysteria, speaking in the same voice as the queen on Dexedrine. “At least we don’t have them in the line units; that’s all I have to say,” he added, taking a seat again.

  “Listen,” I said, hoping to put an end to the whole thing. “I don’t really know what it’s like in the other units with women. Never been in one. What I do know is that we win every war we go to, no matter who’s in the lineup. So we must be doing something right. As for fags, I used to work with them when I was in college at a big bookstore in the city. They weren’t all that bad, just people, really. It’s not such a big fucking deal.” As the words came out of my mouth I knew I was skating on very thin ice. I worried that I’d misjudged the whole situation, and that what I thought was just standard common sense was, in fact, only the common sense of a gay man—that a straight guy could never really have the opinions I was expressing—that I’d somehow inadvertently outed myself.

  “You hung around with fags in college?” Fred said, incredulous. “What, like, were you in the Communist Party, too? I thought you went to Fordham. Those Jesuits put up with all that homo shit?” He had a big smile on his face. This was just good-natured ribbing now.

  “Take it easy, nimrod. I didn’t say I hung around with them, but I knew them. They were pretty normal really. I didn’t actually know they were . . . homos. The bookstore had nothing to do with Fordham. And don’t say anything about the Jesuits, Jones, the Jesuits know what they’re doing.” I was backtracking a little, and lying, of course. The image of Greg’s face when he said he had HIV popped into my head. I have the virus.

  “Listen, I say again, the only good faggot is a dead faggot,” Andy said brutally, with a finality that left no doubt I’d wasted my time in trying to reason with him.

  “Listen,” I said, “someone once told me that fear of the unknown is usually fear of the all too well known.”

  “Are you calling me a faggot?” Andy said. His back straightened, and he pulled himself to the edge of his chair.

  “Well . . . now that you mention it, I just happened to be over here yesterday and I needed a pen so I went into your desk to find one and whaddya know I found one right next to a bottle of bright pink nail polish and lipstick. I mean, Andy, it’s your business after all; it’s none of mine. I don’t want to get personal, but I’m beginning to get the distinct impression that you’re at least a half a fagola if not a whole one.” I tried to inject the word fagola with as much Archie Bunker as I could muster. Everyone broke out laughing then, even Andy himself, and the subject was finally dropped.

  Alone at home that night I couldn’t help mulling over the conversation. President Clinton really had balls taking this on, I thought, but was it even remotely possible politically? I didn’t think so. Still, I was learning that things could change in the most surprising ways. The cold war, for instance, and the Soviet Union, and the Berlin Wall— these were things that had seemed unchangeable, fixed forever. If in, say, 1985 someone had told me that by 1992 all three would be consigned to the dustbin of history, I would’ve said they were out of their minds. And remember, too, I thought, just how different things were culturally in the not-too-distant past, the 1950s, say, for women and blacks especially, and how things changed so dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe it was possible, after all. And suddenly I could see it, or at least the possibility of it. Like a small, faint ray of light at the end of a long tunnel, the vision of a military that included every qualified American, even gay Americans, became visible to me for the first time.

  But I still felt slimy from the conversation with Fred and Andy and Major Crist. In my heart, I knew I’d done my best. I’d done what could be done, under the circumstances. I’d said what could be said. But a part of me still felt cowardly, a part of me still felt that I hadn’t done enough, I hadn’t defended myself more vigorously and openly. But they weren’t attacking me, I told myself. I was no mincing queen on Dexedrine, after all—that’s who they meant, not me, but then, no, I thought, I’m wrong. It was me, too. They were attacking me as well. They just didn’t know it.

  I’d been in the military for a while now. And I’d pledged a fraternity in college. So it’s not as if I wasn’t used to run-of-the-mill faggot jokes. I’d learned how to hear those jokes in such a way that the proverbial “faggot” in each could never be me. I simply wasn’t that type of gay man. The jokes were about the typical, swishy gay guy; he was the target, not me.

  But what I’d listened to today was different. In the back of my mind I think I knew that Andy and Fred, and maybe Crist, too, held these strong feelings about gay men, but I’d never been confronted with them quite so viscerally before. Seeing it laid out so baldly was strange and kind of chilling. The sheer intensity of their animosity was truly astounding. Where did that come from? How much of it was fear, as so many people claimed, how much of it was truly homophobia, and how much of it was just plain old hatred? Some of it was just showboating for the other guys, professing a hatred of gay men in this case (gay is interchangeable with weak—the argument is almost not about sex at all, simply about a perceived lack of strength and a degree of vulnerability) as a way to kind of prove your mettle as a man. What was most interesting t
o me was that otherwise these three guys were pretty much perfect examples of a kind of moderate, easygoing, American male. This Jekyll-and-Hyde bit was more than a little unnerving.

  They were talking about me, after all, and, I realized, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I was hurt. It hurt me to hear them talking that way, all that mean spirit, all that bile, all that blanket rage aimed at something perceived to be weaker yet predatory at the same time. It was the strangest thing, so hard to comprehend fully. But more than anything it was just personally hurtful. I was hurt because I had been welcomed into their homes; I’d eaten dinner with their families. I was a trusted friend and colleague, and now it appeared that all of that would change if they learned the truth. But why should it? Wasn’t the friend they’d come to know really me? I thought it was. And I would have done anything for those guys. I would have stood by them. In combat I had been ready to lay down my life for the men I was serving with. Would these guys do the same for me if they knew I was gay? See, Andy, I wanted to say, I didn’t fall out of the tree! I didn’t complain about breaking a nail! I’m not that kind of gay guy! I’m a man just like you! I imagined taking the three of them out for beers and coming out to them.

  “Andy, Fred, Major Crist, thanks for coming and cheers.” I’d start, raising my bottle of beer. “I’ve asked you here today to let you know something. I like men. Now, save your protestations, you shall not sway me from my preordained path. There’s nothing you can say.” And they’d be supportive. “No big deal, McGowan,” Crist would say, “you’re not one of those obvious ones, so it doesn’t matter. Live and let live, that’s what I say.”

  Who was I kidding? Andy and Fred would be shocked, that’s for certain, and Major Crist would be, too, no doubt. They’d never see me in the same way again. Right before their eyes I would instantly transform into something else, something unfamiliar and strange, something they feared and hated. All the good I’d done for the unit, for the army, and for them personally as friends, would be immediately wiped away by this one revelation.

  And I’d thought the war in the Gulf was a major conflict! The question was, still, How could I do what I loved and still be the person I am? I wondered then if I’d actually been a kind of traitor up until this point, collaborating to survive, so anxious to fulfill my dream of being a soldier that I’d been willing to work with people who’d actually hate me if they discovered who I truly was. “Go along and get along” was a powerful expression, and it had begun to represent for me a certain cringing mediocrity from which only the small-minded derive comfort. It is the box inside which every bureaucrat, every company man, and, as it turns out, every soldier ends up being forced to think. I had begun to feel like a small-minded, hypocritical bureaucrat with his head stuck firmly and deeply in the sand. “It’s like a disease,” Greg had warned, of hypocrisy, back in 1985. “It’s like a cancer,” he’d said. “It’s insidious, it’s going to eat you up until you’re empty.” I could feel it eating me up now. And what if there was a point of no return, a point at which my long years of denial would render me incapable of ever actively engaging that part of myself? Would I die a soldier, perhaps a hero, but still unloved and alone?

  I reminded myself that we all have to make sacrifices, that we all have our unique cross to bear, and that I, as one man, was certainly not going to change an unjust military policy, let alone the world. What I didn’t realize at the time is that change often occurs when individuals do take a stand. Through a simple, straightforward act, a complete nobody can make the world sit up and take notice. And even if that one person doesn’t succeed, whatever he does accomplish will almost certainly make the effort easier for the next person who tries.

  The conversation with Andy and Fred and Crist pushed along a process within me that had already been well under way for quite some time, and would subsequently speed up as the issue grew more pressing once the new policy was in place. My thinking was changing dramatically. That I was experiencing regret at having failed to stand up for myself adequately was evidence enough that I was growing in a wholly unexpected direction.

  There was a time when I would have given barely a second thought to the conversation. Like I said, a part of me had learned to think of the “faggot” in those discussions as referring to someone other than me; the “faggot” was the stereotypical gay guy you still saw all too frequently on television and in the movies. I had never associated that guy with myself.

  But now, the consciousness-raising that had started with Greg was moving forward, seemingly on its own. I’d never expected to feel so differently, but here I was. It happened so gradually, like the way the flow of water in a river shapes a stone, that I didn’t notice the changes until the major moment of stumbling upon those guys discussing Clinton’s policy and hearing their antigay feelings expressed so baldly. I no longer feared being sidelined or failing in my career because it just hadn’t happened; I’d advanced and succeeded. I’d done well. Maybe it was time, I thought, to start taking care of myself, to start tending to my own personal needs as rigorously as I’d worked at being a good soldier.

  But I wasn’t yet prepared for the big leap. My identity was so wrapped up in being a soldier that I couldn’t find room there for my sexuality. I still was failing to understand that a person is more than his work, that a person’s identity goes far past what he does for a living, what his title is, how people address him. Change would come, but not yet. The next day I would get up and go to work, and I would interact with everyone as I always had. I would go along and get along, not making a fuss, swallowing my pride, not making waves, just so that I could continue being a soldier, so that I could continue fulfilling the dream of that little boy from Jackson Heights, Queens. That I had fulfilled that dream I had no doubt now. No one could take that from me. But I wasn’t a boy any longer. I was a man, and life was complicated.

  And so “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was instituted, and I watched along with everyone else as courageous soldiers and sailors and air-men came forward to proclaim who they were on all the talk shows, only to be summarily cashiered—rejected, dishonorably discharged. It reminded me of what happened to the resistance fighters as the Germans pulled back across Eastern Europe. Thinking that a new day had dawned, they emerged only to be ruthlessly annihilated. For some reason, everyone thought the new policy would usher in a new era of freedom and openness. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  It was true that, after a considerable struggle, a compromise of sorts had been struck. It sounded somewhat promising on paper. Theoretically, it guaranteed that a soldier’s private life was now off limits to a degree never seen before. But the policy was virtually meaningless in the face of the entrenched antigay culture within the military itself. Laws and rules don’t change people, only people change people.

  Couple this with the new realities of the post–cold war era, and you have a recipe for the discharge of massive numbers of gay people. Instead of making the military safer for gay service members, the new policy actually made it worse. Things were changing in major ways.

  The contrast with the 1980s could not have been greater. Instead of being like a football player on steroids, to whom every wish was granted, we were now asked to slim down and make do with far less. People were dropping like flies as we were forced to shrink to a ten-division force—from just under a million to a little more than half a million. The dreaded mentality of the zero-defects army began to creep back into military culture. Being gay was decidedly a defect, no matter what the new president said. One could stick to the letter of the new gay policy, but totally disregard the spirit, and gay men and women were thrown out in record numbers as a result.

  Andy and Fred and I often had lunch together. The day after our conversation with Major Crist, we went to one of the local Korean restaurants. You could get a great, cheap (five or six bucks) meal at these places. We’d usually order the bulgogi and kimchee, and that day was no exception. Just when our food was being served
Andy started in again on the gay issue.

  “I was reading in the newspaper that the policy is going to be called ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ ” he said. “What the fuck is that? I mean, we gotta know. How the hell is this gonna work? What if you see someone, like, going into a fag bar or something? Maybe we should just set up snipers to deal with it.”

  I decided I wanted to be a little more aggressive in dealing with this today, so that maybe when I went home I’d still feel as if I had some self-respect.

  “Hey, Andy, the Gestapo called and wants your résumé. The CQ has the number. Looks like the concentration camp should be open soon and it will be busy,” I said with a smile on my face.

  “Listen, McGowan, I am not a Nazi. Just because I hate fags and want to see them dead doesn’t make me a fucking Nazi. I happen to be a moral guy. I wouldn’t just kill people because of their religion. We’re talking about faggots here. Faggots are sick, pure and simple. It’s like child molesters. They’re total perverts and child molesters, and there’s no way in fucking hell they could cut it in the Eighty-second or anywhere else, for that matter.”

  “Okay, help me out here,” I said. “You tell me one religion or philosophy, whatever, that says hating people is good or that killing them is okay.” I had little chance of reaching this idiot, but I was entirely in the moment now and not thinking about being cautious.

  “Islam,” he said simply.

  “You moron, Islam doesn’t advocate that. Religion is strictly about peace and love.”

  “It’s also about morals and standards, right and wrong.” He was getting excited again, and had turned red. “Faggots are wrong, end of story.” He said it flatly and with the same conviction as he might say that the world is round or that two plus two equals four.

  “What they do is wrong,” Fred said. “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”