Sailors and Sexual Identity

Crossing the Line Between "Straight" and "Gay" in the U.S. Navy

Steven Zeeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136589775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

In Sailors and Sexual Identity, author Steven Zeeland talks with young male sailors--both gay- and straight-identified--about ways in which their social and sexual lives have been shaped by their Navy careers.Despite massive media attention to the issue, there remains a gross disparity between the public perception of "gays in the military" and the sexual realities of military life. The conversations in this book reveal how known "gay" and "straight" men can and do get along in the sexually tense confines of barracks and shipboard life once they discover that the imagined boundary between them is not, in fact, a hard line.The stories recounted here in vivid detail call into question the imagined boundaries between gay and straight, homosexual and homosocial, and suggest a secret Pentagon motivation for the gay ban: to protect homoerotic military rituals, buddy love, and covert military homosexuality from the taint of sexual suspicion.Zeeland's interviews explore many aspects of contemporary life in the Navy including:

• gay/straight friendship networks
• the sexual charge to the Navy/Marine Corps rivalry
• the reality behind sailors'reputations as sexual adventurers in port and at sea
• men's differing interpretations of homoerotic military rituals and initiations
• sex and gender stereotypes associated with military job specialities
• how sailors view being seen as sex objectsEveryone interested in the issue of gays in the military, along with a general gay readership, gay veterans, and gay men for whom sailors represent a sexual ideal, will find Sailors and Sexual Identity an informative and entertaining read.Visit Steven Zeeland at his home page: http://www.stevenzeeland.com

Gregg: The Unmaking of an Activist

A nuclear machinist’s mate and petty officer second class at the time of his discharge, Gregg is the only one of my interviewees to have come out publicly. He did this after becoming the first active duty service member ever to head a gay veterans organization, a distinction that landed the 23-year-old Flagstaff, Arizona native on the cover of the “authorized unofficial” weekly Navy Times.

Seeing his face on a magazine rack in Oak Harbor, Washington, I thought I felt a strong presentiment that we would somehow become friends. To this end, I wrote Gregg a letter. As a result of his sudden fame Gregg was the recipient of several hundred letters from supporters and various crackpots. He responded to mine with a stiffly cordial note of thanks and a disconnected pager number.

(I arranged for Gregg to receive a prepublication copy of Barrack Buddies and Soldier Lovers. He only recently confided to me that he hated the book and drafted, but never mailed, a vicious poison pen review. Gregg resents comparisons between his own story and anyone else’s. And, like a good Dutch-American, he feels sexuality is a private matter inappropriate for public discussion.)

After moving to San Diego I again tried contacting Gregg, who continued to ignore me. Finally I did manage to catch up with him at the Veterans Day parade, where the eminently recognizable figure (he is six foot seven inches tall) led a small contingent of gay vets and me (not media whoring, but representing my absent military friends) down Broadway Street to wary acknowledgment from the parade marshall and public (Clinton had just been elected, and change was in the air. Or so it seemed). But many months passed before I saw him again.

I had frankly given up on the man when one night I ran into him at West Coast, San Diego’s premier gay dance club. I succeeded in buttonholing him for his telephone number. Soon after we met for dinner and, in fulfillment of my presentiment, hit it off.

Military gays who come out publicly are expected to say certain things. How they are model service members (as if it will be forever in doubt that gays can perform as well as straights, or that they must actually perform better). How they did not choose to be gay (as if choosing would be sinful). How they are patriotic and clean-cut Americans (and, by implication, sexually monogamous and free of disease). How their “sexual orientation” does not mean they will engage in “sexual misconduct” (although under military law, all homosexual and many heterosexual acts are illegal).

Gregg made all of these requisite pronouncements in his public appearances. But as the President of the San Diego Veterans Association he became something of an activist gadfly, bluntly denouncing what he perceived as the hypocrisy of certain gay community leaders and articulating his sometimes idiosyncratic ideas in tactless violation of the party line.

Gregg has a penchant for shocking people. Once, at his dining room table over spaghetti marinara (thrift is another mark of a good Dutch-American), he told me a story about a friend who had died of AIDS. In his last will, the friend asked that he be cremated, his ashes mixed with paint, and rolled onto the ceiling of his surviving lover’s bedroom. But during the final stages of his illness his lover abandoned him and moved on to a new relationship; upon the man’s death he could not even be bothered to visit the crematorium. Acting as instruments of justice Gregg and a collaborator collected the ashes, blended them with off-white latex, gained entry to the lover’s bedroom, and executed the dead man’s last wish—much to the faithless lover’s irritation.

“Of course,” Gregg chirped brightly, “when you get the remains back from the crematorium, they’re not just ashes. There are also some pretty big chunks of bone fragment in there. So we had to sift those out. In fact, we used the same colander I used for the spaghetti I made tonight.”

And then there is this story. At the height of his fame after the Navy Times piece, a New York City talk radio host telephoned asking if he could interview Gregg the following week. Gregg consented, then promptly forgot about it. On the day of the scheduled interview, when the talk show host called and announced he was ready to patch Gregg into the cars and homes of thousands of listeners, he caught Gregg masturbating. They went on the air, and Gregg continued to masturbate until, while a woman caller was articulating a long question, he came. Gregg says (he has kept the tape, but I have not asked to hear it) that some significant seconds of dead airtime passed before the host inquired whether he was alright. “Oh yes. Much better than before,” Gregg said, and then answered the woman’s question.

Gregg has since dropped out of activism.

For part one of this interview Gregg drove me on the back of his motorcycle to Julian, California, an old mining town in the mountains some 50 miles east of San Diego now regionally famous for its apple pies. He took me to the ruins of the town jail, which he suggested would make a fun setting for a porno film, and selected as his interview site a tree stump in a hillside cemetery overlooking the town. In this exceedingly peaceful setting we were interrupted only by a fire ant, which Gregg killed, and by a salamander, who skipped by unmolested.

Gregg: I spent a little over two years on the USS Long Beach. We had gone on a WESTPAC over to the Persian Gulf in time for the Gulf War. We were over there, and on the ship—there was a lot of tension in the air. We had been out to sea for a long time. A lot of people were really stressed about that. The morale on the ship was very low. People were angry with each other, looking for places to vent that anger. The liberty ports really sucked because they were very expensive, alcohol was in short supply, and there were no women for the guys to go screw, except for the women off the tenders and they tended to have a lot of attitude. So when you got liberty, it wasn’t a relaxing release kind of liberty that people had expected.

My division was about sixteen people, and we were short one guy. Nine of them had been on-board as long as I had, or longer. They pretty much accepted me; even if they thought I was gay they pretty much just ignored it. But there were six new guys who had come aboard. For whatever reason they had taken a dislike to me. My being gay—and it was sort of well-known by then that I probably was—especially upset them. There was one guy, his name was Johnson, he used to have a rack right below mine; he’d sit there and tell me, [sing-song voice:] “Don’t come down and fuck me tonight. Stay out of my rack or I’ll have to kill you.”

We pulled into Bahrain. We had been on liberty there for a couple days. One night I had been at the administrative support unit, which is a Navy base there. I was walking out past this dark alley when someone reached out and pulled me into the alley and threw me down and people started kicking me and hitting me. And even though I was screaming out, the shore patrol and the MPs—nobody came around. It was on a base; right on the other side of the building people were in the pool and drinking at the bar. I know people heard me. There’s just no way that they could not have. Yet no one saw fit to see what was going on.

This lasted for a little while. Then somebody said something about the MPs and they all ran off and I was left in the alley. I staggered to my feet. My face was bleeding; I had obviously been kicked around, but when I went to get on the bus to go back to the ship everybody just stared at me, like “What happened to you?” But nobody asked it. And when I got back to the ship, the next morning when I reported what had happened, the XO [executive officer] told me that if I pursued it he’d kick me out of the Navy for being gay.

There was a lot of other stuff. Pretty much just those six guys and the few other cohorts they had on the ship would throw their elbows out when I was walking down the hall. Somebody smashed my Walkman to pieces. There were a lot of nasty things being said.

Zeeland: You didn’t have friends that were able to counter that at all with support?

G: Not really. Because so many people thought I was gay, the other gay people didn’t talk to me. They tried to avoid me as much as possible.

Z: What about straight friends?

G: I didn’t really have many straight friends on-board the Long Beach. I had sort of a policy, and later I realized how stupid and vain it was, but I didn’t party with the people I worked with. Part of that was... just by saying “I don’t party with the people I work with” no one would ever ask to come over to my home, and that made it easier. So, there was no one I could really turn to for help. And there wasn’t really anything that could be done anyway. If the XO decides to ignore it, the only thing you can do is take it to the captain, and chances are he’d just follow the recommendations of the XO.

Shortly after that I was accused of doing something. We had some secrets leaked from the ship and they accused me of forging some signatures and allowing those papers to be released. Everybody knew who had done it, but the accusation fell on me since I was in charge of the division and ultimately responsible for what happened below me. I didn’t fight it, just because at the time the pressure on the ship was so great, and I knew that if I didn’t fight it I’d be transferred off the ship. And so I got found guilty at captain’s mast, which later was overturned by an admiral, but they took me out of the nuclear division. I worked in the A-gang, auxiliary division, working on auxiliary equipment, until we reached the Philippines and I got transferred off the ship.

When I got back to the States I was put on-board the USS Berkeley, which is a small destroyer. I was really happy about going to the Berkeley because I had met a guy [from the Berkeley] named James. He was gay and we had dated for a little while before we both had gone overseas.

I reported on-board. The Berkeley’s a real small ship, real tight quarters, and so you’re bound to run into somebody. And James walked by and I said hello to him. He turned around and his mouth just dropped open. He looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “This is my command now.” He walked away, and the rest of the time he was on the ship we only talked once. He avoided me like the plague. A lot of that was due to the fact that shortly after that I became very out, and was involved with the media, so he didn’t want to be associated with that. Which is really funny because a lot of other people who were straight, it didn’t bother them.

The presidency [of the San Diego Veterans Association] was open for election. I had been a member for a couple of years. I decided I didn’t want to come out publicly and say I was gay, but I thought by taking the presidency of SDVA as an active-duty member—the Navy had never said if it was OK to join and participate in a gay organization without declaring your sexuality. It took a couple of months for the Navy to respond; there was a gap, and during that time I was working on the Berkeley and becoming good friends with the people I worked with.

When the media first hit, I talked to the guys I worked with and told them I had taken the presidency of a gay group, but I didn’t tell them whether I was gay or not. My CO [commanding officer] started to harass me, and called me up to his cabin and called me a faggot. He said he knew that I was gay and that he was going to throw me out. But the Navy soon afterwards issued a statement saying it was alright for me to participate in SDVA because that in itself did not mean I was gay, and they made it an official policy whereby sailors and Marines could on their off-duty time associate with gay organizations. Which I thought was a major step in the right direction. But my CO started an NIS investigation to prove that I was gay, and started really harassing me. NIS was following me around. Finally I just got fed up with it, and I decided to come out to my command and just sort of end it. I knew that they would discharge me after I came out.

The day that it was going to be published in the paper that I was gay I went in front of quarters... everyone was assembled there in the morning and my division officer asked if anyone had anything to say. I said, “Yeah, I have something to say. You’re going to read it in the papers today, but I’m going to tell you first.” I said, “I’m gay,” then I got back in line. The division officer looked at the chief and they really didn’t know what to say about it. But a lot of the guys started talking to me about it. Unlike other people, they had no choice, they had to work with me. And it was such a small division that if they didn’t work with me they would end up carrying more of the workload. So as we would work we would discuss things. They wanted to know about gay things. Most of them said that they’d never known someone who was gay before; I corrected them and said they never knew anyone who was openly gay. Over time we all became very good friends and they just accepted it. By the time I left, the ten guys I worked with had all gone to a gay bar with me, and many of them had spent the night at my house. And it was no big thing; I was one of the group and it didn’t matter. Then at the end—a ship’s decommissioning party was held two days after I was discharged. My shipmates had pulled together to buy me my tickets to go, because I couldn’t afford them myself, but the CO refused to let me in because I brought a male date. The crew was very upset. When I left, out of three hundred and fifty people aboard ship a hundred and forty-four signed a letter to the commanding officer saying they wanted me to stay, that my sexuality wasn’t an issue. It was just a matter of them getting to know me and understanding that it didn’t make a difference. In contrast to the Long Beach—where it was just a suggestion that I was gay that drove people crazy—on the Berkeley, once they had a chance to talk about it and express their feelings and learn about it... it was a lot different.

There were only a few people on-board the Berkeley who didn’t accept me. It was impossible not to know I was gay because it was published on the front page of Navy Times.

I had a party and there was a yeoman who came over. All the women who were there were lesbians, most of the guys were gay. When he realized what was going on he said “You’re an asshole!” and ran out the door. But then there were other guys I’d come out to and it was just cool. Most of the people who said, “You’re an asshole,” I think were dealing with problems of their own or just were afraid. They didn’t have the inner strength to stand up to someone who said, “You’re friends with a fag.” That was very difficult for them sometimes.

Z: What led you to join the military?

G: I was from a small town. My parents were very domineering and I wanted to get away from them. The Navy seemed to be something different. F ve always wanted to do things that are sort of eccentric and not tow the line, so I decided to join the Navy. It had really nothing to do with sexuality. I knew I was gay wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue: “Are You in the Navy?”
• Introduction: The Myth of Heterosexual Purity
• Anthony: The Boot Camp Dream
• Eddy: The Sea Bitch
• Lieutenant Tim: The Uniform
• Trent: The Boatswain’s Locker
• David: “Hard,” Not “Tough”
• Ray: The Navy Corpsman Nipple Piercing Ritual
• Gregg: The Unmaking of an Activist
• Russell: Strong Friendship
• Sonny: Navy Tradition
• Kevin: The Network
• Jack: “Don’t Kiss Me, I’m Straight”
• Chaplain Phil: Gay, Straight, Whatever
• Joey: I’ll Always Be a Sailor
• Anthony (Coda)
• Reference Notes