The AIR FORCE vs. the " Practicing Homosexual "

[Segami]

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" ...When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one .."



......" Thirty-five years ago this past September, when it was still one of the prime drivers of the national conversation, Time splashed on its cover the image of a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant who was facing a less-than-honorable discharge for being, as the magazine put it, "an admitted professed practicing homosexual." By that point, many Americans were already familiar with Leonard Matlovich, who had earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart during three tours in Vietnam and who was vowing to fight for his reinstatement all the way to the Supreme Court.


Time's editors had selected him for the cover of an issue devoted to the increasing prominence of homosexuals (then the customary term), who were beginning to assert themselves in ways that unsettled and alarmed many of their fellow citizens.


Less than two years earlier, the American Psychiatric Association -- following a six-year campaign by "militant gays" -- had voted to stop labeling homosexuality a mental disorder; the Federal Civil Service Commission had just decreed that, contrary to previous policy, gays were not unfit for employment; and a handful of major corporations, including AT&T, Bank of America and IBM, had even, as Time put it, "declared themselves equal-opportunity employers with regard to homosexuals." And now Matlovich was pushing even further, mounting an unprecedented legal charge against one of the country's most revered institutions.


Three weeks after the issue ran, Time printed a sample of the letters it received. The few letter-writers who were supportive all identified themselves as gay.


"I was revolted by Matlovich's face proclaiming, 'I am a homosexual,'" a Georgia man wrote. "He is a disgrace to the uniform of an honorable service." A New Hampshire woman branded the entire issue "disgusting, repulsive, lowbrow, nauseating. I'm no Victorian, but those individuals should crawl into a hole and pull it in after them -- and take TIME with them." A retired Army colonel from Florida was even more crude: "From time immemorial we have recognized yellow fever, malaria, syphilis, leprosy, perversion, degeneracy, garbage and homosexuality in about that order."


This was the atmosphere in which Matlovich set out to wage the first concerted legal challenge to the military's ban on openly gay service members, a policy that had been first enacted on the eve of World War I.


The son of an Air Force officer, a 12-year-veteran, and a staunch political conservative, he was a wholly unlikely activist. It wasn't until he was 30 that Matlovich had his first same-sex experience, an event that he described as almost instantly transformative. "I had never held another person in my arms, never kissed another person since I was a child except for family," Matlovich told Time. He quickly established a circle of gay friends and within months decided to disclose his orientation to the Air Force -- fully aware of what would come next. His superior officer thought it was a joke. "It means Brown vs. Board of Education," Matlovich replied.


Informed that he'd be discharged less than honorably, a fate that thousands of gay servicemen before him had accepted in quiet shame, Matlovich invoked his right to an appeal hearing before a three-man panel of Air Force officers. Asked on the stand to promise that he would no longer "practice homosexuality," Matlovich refused. His appeal was rejected. The discharge was official.


cont'

<http://www.salon.com/news/dont_ask_dont_tell/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/12/01/matlovich_dadt>

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[LeftinOH]

1. Thankfully, the use of the absurd phrase "practicing homosexual" has mostly been discontinued

[Segami]

2. Unfortunately, the phrase still lingers within certain groups

[LeftinOH]

3. Crap- you're right:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9664643