grieve; acknowledging I was a Marine was difficult. I talked to some of the greatest leaders after I got out. The same gunnery that asked me to come work for the sergeant major in the Marine Corps said to me, “It’s not everyone in the Marine Corps, it’s just individuals. Always remember that.” And she was right, it’s just individuals.
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YVONNE BISBEE, ATASCOSA, TX, 2012
TECHNICAL SERGEANT, U.S. AIR FORCE, 1979–1999
SIGINT Analyst, Intelligence Analyst. Retired; repeatedly threatened with being outed throughout military career; suffers anxiety and panic attacks
I lived just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. I knew I was different. My mother was physically, verbally, and mentally abusive. I fought tooth and nail every step of the way, but I learned at a very young age that it wasn’t me who was the problem. That protected me. I’ve always been strong-willed. I don’t think she liked the defiance she saw in me. My stepdad was the buffer between us, but when I came out to him, he would have nothing to do with me.
I did not want to be stuck in a small town for the rest of my life. I had a partial scholarship to a local school to play volleyball and I talked to my mother about it. They couldn’t afford to send me to college, so she took me to the Air Force Recruiting office: “My daughter wants to enlist—sign her up!” I enlisted with delayed entry in December of ’78. I was pissed at my mother, but it turned out to be one of the best things she ever did. It opened the world to me.
I was seventeen, barely out of high school, and I fell in love for the first time with a woman. I met her in tech school and it was an instant attraction for both of us. My stomach was in knots when she would come around. She made me realize that is how I want to live the rest of my life, but I knew enough not to show it, because my career was important to me and I wasn’t going to jeopardize what I could become for who I was out of uniform.
My older sister and I were never close; there was always a mutual dislike. She entered the Air Force in 1978, a year before I did. My first job was a Morse systems operator. That was also her career field. The intel world is small and her presence in it haunted me my entire career. I cross-trained and became a SIGINT [signals intelligence] analyst before being sent to RAF Chicksands, England, where she was already stationed. A few days after I arrived, we were driving onto base and she pointed out the female security police on duty and told me to stay away from Mr. Man—she referred to lesbians as Mr. Man.
I never told my sister I was gay; we never discussed my personal life. I’m not sure when she actually found out, but with that knowledge came power over me. At first it was comments like, “Are you seeing Mr. Man?” Then it was not being invited to my nephew’s school events, to not being invited to birthdays and holidays. If I pushed her about it, she would say, “You know I could end your career with one phone call” or “I’m sure OSI would love to know you’re gay.”
I never doubted for a minute that she would make that phone call. It got to the point where I quit trying to be a member of my own family. I was afraid she’d go through with her threats and my career would be over. I was more afraid of the fallout to my friends. The Air Force loved getting other gays simply through guilt by association. It was one thing if I lost my career, but I wasn’t about to see it happen to my friends. I finally quit being afraid of losing my career on the 21st of May 1999, the day I retired.
My anxiety/panic attacks began in the mid ’80s as a result of living two lies, or lives: I couldn’t talk about my job at home and I sure as hell couldn’t talk about my personal life at work. I started to feel invisible. At first the attacks were minor. They would come out of nowhere. Large crowds of people would cause them; movies at the theater became a thing of the past. Knowing I had to be outside in formation would guarantee one. Trying to explain to someone what was going on made others look at me like I was crazy, so I quit explaining and suffered through them. I drank to avoid the attacks and mask the symptoms.
My first major attack landed me at the ER in the summer of 1998. I thought I was having a heart attack. After hours of tests the doctor came in and told me I had a severe anxiety attack. There were many contributing stressors: caring for my mother after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I was about to have major surgery myself, and looking at less than a year left until retirement and not knowing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, plus the fact that I was still invisible. It took a while, but I quit drinking and now take medication to mask the symptoms.
For thirty years I lied about who I was; twenty years in the Air Force and ten years in the corporate world. Gays didn’t fit into the grand scheme of how things should be. Some of the best analysts and linguists I’ve ever worked with are gay. We have gone places. We have done things. And we have done it twice as well, because we’re dedicated to the job and mission. We had to prove to our straight counterparts that we were just as good as, if not better than, they were. It’s always been a challenge. Lesbians and gays in the military have always been more motivated to doing a better job. I don’t know if it’s just a sense of pride in ourselves, or if we’re just overachievers.
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JAMES HALLORAN, SAN ANTONIO, TX, 2012
SERGEANT E–5, U.S. ARMY, 1974–1978
Russian Linguist Voice Intercept Operator. Honorable discharge
I was born 1954 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Roman Catholic identity was a large part of growing up. Neighborhoods were defined by which parish you belonged to, which was a surrogate for, “What is your ethnic heritage?” The highest political office (although it wasn’t elected) was the bishop, because that was the ultimate authority. The rules of the road were not voted on, they were handed down. And the value was on submission rather than on what we would call one’s individual process. That environment does a very good job of creating the appearance of living by those rules and believing those rules!
That was the ’70s, the era of great promise, the Age of Aquarius. The staff of life was beer! Smoking dope and popping speed was just how the world was. I went to university in Philadelphia. Being in the bigger city presented opportunities that did not happen at home and I remember having sex with somebody, though I don’t even remember exactly how it happened. Still no sense of declaring myself to myself as a gay man, and a common rationalization [I used] was, “OK, if I do this, I’m not going to get sent to Vietnam,” because my concept of the military–“the Army” we used generically to mean military service—was just part of the fabric of our life.
Perceptions of the Army had changed and the draft and war in Vietnam was about over. So that wasn’t going to happen to me if I went and talked to these guys. The attraction for me was quite practical, actually. I heard that the Army had these tests they can give you to tell you what to do. And my recruiter, Sergeant Doll, made it sound like finishing school. He painted it up wonderfully. And that was where it started. After boot camp, I was stationed for a year close to San Francisco. Language school seemed to have a good number of gay men. Many were training to work in intelligence or security fields and there was a generalized paranoia, much like in the civilian world. Lots of speculation and nothing said out loud, but recognition of a shared attribute and an emergence of social networks, but little if any sexual activity in the barracks.
One weekend our classmates went to Disneyland. Ben, like me, remained behind. He let me know he had a friend who lived in San Francisco, the epicenter of the emerging gay movement in the 1970s. Ben was urban Detroit to my suburban Scranton, black to my white, Protestant to my Catholic, musical to my tone deaf, savvy to my naive. We were young, buffed up from boot camp, and new on the gay block in the Castro. I had my first date with a guy, Rick, who lived there and we saw each other whenever I could get to San Francisco. It was the classic summer romance, Memorial Day to Labor Day.
After language school, I spent a couple months in West Texas at a small air force base where the commander was a not very secretly gay woman who earned respect from all. Despite being a security