Gay dating in the military

He signed the paperwork on his eighteenth birthday, and eventually applied to join a K-9 unit in Bahrain, training to be a dog handler. None of these things appeal to me—one, because my mother was a drug addict; two, because I had a Catholic upbringing. Nothing to do with the fact that I was gay. I felt that I deserved to not have to answer that question. So then all I did was make it worse for myself, in that it became a curiosity that was insatiable for them. The harassment grew worse. Of a number of escalating events—Rocha was also force-fed dog food and locked into a shit-filled dog kennel—the most abusive and explicitly homophobic was when he was ordered by his commander to act in a dog-training scenario, repeated over and over so that every dog in the unit could be run through it.

Like a domestic dispute, or an armed individual who has been spotted on the base, or someone strapped with explosives. He would coach as to how exactly he wanted it played out, which was the sickest part of it. As they repeated it, his commander ordered Rocha to make the scenario more extreme. He wanted me to pretend like there was stuff on my face. Loving it so much that each scenario was gayer and more disgusting—the introduction of fake semen, that I would have to wipe my face, or that I would have to make slurping noises.

Nonetheless, Rocha chose to say nothing about what had happened. There he reluctantly decided that he was no longer prepared to live with the fear of being discovered: You would have to have no gay friends, no friends that knew you were gay, no friends who understood what it was like to be you. Following full repeal, Rocha intends to rejoin.

It was only really around the Second World War that military discrimination became codified and organized, and that the focus moved from simply sanctions against homosexual acts to an attempt to identify and weed out homosexual tendencies—though, as would be seen again and again, when fighting bodies were needed badly enough, such concerns would often evaporate. I was 19 then. The myth was, if you volunteered instead of waiting to be drafted, you would be treated better.

Well, that was false. I do have to thank the military for tearing me out of the typical hometown setting where I would have been trapped in Scranton, Pennsylvania. If I had stayed there, I would have had to get married like everybody there, and it would have been a disaster.

I would have been crushed. No space for homosexuals back then. It was something to be ashamed of and hide. Jack Strouss, We thought they were the all-seeing people. So we were a little apprehensive. And I love to dance. John McNeill, This man tried to rape me on the troop ship between Boston and Le Havre.

Edward Zasadil, I did have one or two incidents, but no one noticed it. We were in two-man tents, a good-looking fellow from another platoon was bunked with me, and I woke up at night, finding he was playing with my penis. And we did that every night after that. It was taking a chance. But all in all I just kept everything very straight. But I passed it off. All my life. Acted as straight as possible.

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Listen, my life was a pretense the whole time. We were sent into combat right at the Battle of the Bulge—I was with the 87th Infantry Division and we were the first in the Alsace-Lorraine to cross the border into Germany. And the Germans counterattacked with Tiger tanks and the whole group was either killed or captured. I ended up a prisoner of war within two weeks of arriving at the front. We were literally starved—I went down to about eighty pounds. All we could think of was where the next meal was going to come from. The drive for survival greatly outweighs the drive for sexual fulfillment—under those circumstances, this is not an issue.

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As soon as I got back and started eating well, the problem was back again. Oh, that was a kick. There we were, sleeping on straw. Absolutely no lights. We wound up next to each other. And it was just easy, it was natural. That was it. Troops that pass in the night. In the morning we opened the boxcar doors and we were in Germany, and very quickly the word came to us that Germany had that morning surrendered.

Wow, can you imagine the exhilaration in that boxcar? A day earlier, I could have become a statistic. We were flown out to the Philippines to form a new army to invade Japan. Well, timing. The day my plane landed in Manila, the U.

We were brought home, sent to a big camp in North Carolina. Play out in these vast fields at night. Everybody was just waiting to be discharged, so lots of people were taking chances.

It just happened, it was spontaneous. Just because: Mission Accomplished. This was the beginning of the huge gay communities in the major cities. We were being hit by mortars and rockets every day, we had car bombs going off. A friend of mine was killed the fourth day we were there. That experience made me come out to myself and accept it. Finally my supervisor said he could tell something was wrong, and I told him: Sadly, Wilson passed away in July, just before this article went to press.

This was the summer of But that is not what happened.

A month later he was called in to see his battalion commander and told that the investigation had been closed: Manzella was puzzled. As far as he was concerned, this meant that he no longer had to hide his sexuality, and in an era when no such category of person was supposed to exist, he started to live as an out soldier in the U. When he returned to Iraq, it was on that basis. The generals knew. Even after the interview aired in December , the military took another four months to decide.

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This time it was agreed that he would leave with an honorable discharge. I was very lucky at every step. Just before 10 a. I was confused until it became clear that, partly by chance and partly by a chain of personal recommendations over the years, this trailer park had become some kind of gay-veteran hot spot: There are eight or ten others living here, and more nearby. And some of them like to gather in the trailer shared by Schoen and his partner of forty-two years, fellow veteran Jack Harris, for this morning ritual.

They had very different experiences, too. David Schneider, for instance, served in the navy until doing aircraft maintenance, retiring with a pension after twenty years of being secretive and careful. He avoided gay bars because he was worried about undercover agents and so would use prostitutes and hustlers instead. When he had a relationship with someone for three years, he never told his partner he was in the navy.

The thing that went through my head: And to this day I am very happy with the decision that I made.