Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back

By Bill Boushka

The original Bill of Rights, sponsored largely by James Madison, is now about 210 years old. Reinforced by the Fourteenth Amendment, which eventually applied many of its provisions to the states, it has served us well. It is time to re-evaluate our fundamental constitutional rights and to seriously consider their major renovation. This is my central proposal.

Are we ready to trust ourselves as individuals with the personal responsibilities that go with rights? When government defines personal moral values, we tend to take less account for not only our own actions but also our own underlying values, for those spiritual yearnings that make us, all unique people, who we are. We tend to lose interest in speaking for ourselves and tend to leave moral judgments to "experts" who get paid to pass judgment on all of us. I discuss a philosophy, often called libertarianism, of extremely restricted government. I present it from the personal perspective of a gay man who grew up in a period of enormous change and migration toward cultural individualism. My argument is intended for everyone, but I provide my own detailed perspectives on many issues.

The parallel between draft deferments during the Vietnam era and the gays-in-the-military battle today How close the gay community, as we know it, came to total catastrophe during the early days of AIDS crisis What the "family values" debate is really all about Volunteerism and social obligations, and how both military service and parenting fit into these What "discrimination" is really all about How the "Dont Tell" mentality interferes with political and social debate in many areas Why equal rights for gays is important for everybody A science of personal growth and why libertarianism is good for personal growth

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 30, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469758442

Bill Boushka

Bill Boushka is a libertarian activist and gay conservative freelance writer. He is the author of Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back, and Our Fundamental Rights and How We Can Reclaim Them. Mr. Boushka was also involved in opposing the Child Online Protection Act in court.

Book preview

DO ASK, DO TELL:

A GAY CONSERVATIVE LASHES BACK

INDIVIDUALISM, IDENTITY, PERSONAL RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITY AND COMMUNITY IN A LIBERTARIAN THIRD MILLENNIUM

Bill Boushka

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Do Ask, Do Tell:

A Gay Conservative Lashes Back

All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Bill Boushka

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Writers Club Press an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

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Contents

EPIGRAPH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL: 1961

SPUTNIK, THE DRAFT AND THE PROLES: 1968

MY SECOND COMING: 1973-1992

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL: 1993

TELLING WITH PRIDE AND FENDING FOR YOURSELF: 1997

A RIGHT-TO-PRIVACY AMENDMENT

ENDNOTES

APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EPIGRAPH

What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed a beast no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse. Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused.

Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarter in a straw When honor’s at the stake.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV, final monologue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to the individuals and organizations that helped me prepare this book each with direct assistance or informal advice. These individuals include Amy Belson, owner of AIM Creative Services, Reverent Everett Goodwin, now the pastor of the Baptist Fellowship of Metropolitan Washington, the attorneys of the Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network, Dean Hannotte and Robert Fink from the Ninth Street Center, Attorneys Bridget Wilson and Robert Cassler, Editor Frank Whitworth of the Colorado Ground Zero News, and many of my friends in Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty.

Let me state a special tribute to the writings of many other authors, not all of them well known, whose work adds so much to the intellectual and cultural foundation of liberty that I take up in a most personal way. These authors include Herman Wouk, Paul Rosenfels, Joseph Steffan, David Boaz, Charles Murray, Randy Shilts, and Jonathan Rauch.

Since the manuscript is lengthy and detailed, I have kept the writing somewhat informal by relaxing the strictest rules concerning contractions, spelling out of numerals, and so forth.

My manifesto is a gritty and detailed offering. I want to walk the reader though the incredible maze of arguments and issues that bear on individual rights and responsibilities. While moral principles may seem like they ought to be simple, their fair implementation in any reasonably democratic political system is difficult, complicated and always controversial. I have tried to be as thorough and fair as possible; I have specifically avoided the usual practice in most commercially successful political books from major houses of leaving out difficult and distracting details. I give the reader a microscope because she does need to be told everything. One needs to understand the trees to know the forest. In college, I was once required to write an annotated bibliography to discuss the information sources for a term paper to be written later that semester. Some of my detail will help the reader evaluate my sources and place them into a reliable perspective. I urge the reader to go back to some of my sources, either at the library or by purchasing copies of them, and study them carefully. It is not my intention to compete with anyone else writing on these subjects today. I have my own message.

The book is protected by federal copyright, dated November 18, 1996. Fair Use allows the quotation of brief passages from this document for illustration or argument, without permission. If quoting from this document or from any reference, please provide proper bibliographic credit to the author(s). Anyone with questions on copyright should refer to a recent, detailed copyright textbook or to an intellectual property attorney.

This book is intended for adult use, by persons eighteen or older or by minors of high-school age with parental (or teacher) consent. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 contain a very small amount of sexually explicit material. I intend this material to reinforce and illustrate certain political or moral arguments being advanced.

This book does contain unusually candid discussion of sensitive issues such as sexual orientation, race, religious faith, and cultural identity, some of which may be disturbing to some people.

All opinions and conclusions stated are, unless otherwise specifically noted, strictly my own. I do not speak for any specific organization. I am not an attorney, and the reader should always consult an attorney as to the specifics of a given problem.

The book does identify by name certain public figures and authors of copyrighted works. Other than these, all other persons are referred to by fictitious names (or left unnamed) in order to protect their privacy. I will never disclose personal facts about anyone not already publicly known to anyone. No member of the Armed Forces has ever made a statement to me indicating that he or she has violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice. No person since 1975 has made any statement to me indicating the possibility of having committed a crime.

The content of the text of this book was closed on May 18, 1997.

Bill Boushka Annandale, Va. May 1997 Minneapolis, Mn. March 2000 [e-mail]

INTRODUCTION

YOU DIDN’T ASK, BUT I’LL TELL ANYWAY

As I became aware of my fascination with virile young men during my high school years, my father often mentioned my preoccupation with rights. At that time, I couldn’t connect my flinching at the desecration of some people, such as men maimed in war, with what was happening inside me. Fortunately, my parents also talked about telling the truth and about learning to work. Gradually, I would recognize the connection between responsibility and freedom. Even so, I recoiled at the idea that I would ever be penalized for my private life.

My homosexuality developed as a covetousness for male qualities and a vicarious link to those attributes in other men. Often, I have perceived myself as ugly and have been disinclined to remain in intimate relationships with others. This has left me more time to contemplate my own personal standing, not just with others in a family setting, but also with the larger society. I would like to attract attention, earn some recognition by communicating my experience, and achieve some good by doing so.

I will propose some political and social changes that would deny politicians the opportunity to use government to keep people divided over psychological issues. Of course, I admit to this immediate ulterior and selfish motive: I have some confidence in my capacity to fend for myself in a free market if the politicians aren’t allowed to fence me out or to include me among their scapegoats. I don’t ask government to tell private interests directly not to discriminate against me; I just don’t want government itself to discriminate against me or use criminal code or social policy to goad others into treating me as a second-class citizen. One can call my approach libertarian, but libertarianism and the related market liberalism are loaded terms which I will explain in more detail in the book. My greatest interest is hardly gay rights, but, rather, individual rights—for everyone—and associated responsibilities. Equal rights for gays follows directly from properly understood and implemented individual rights for all.

To provide a focus for implementing my ideas, I will propose a detailed constitutional Amendment to enhance the Right to Privacy and Intimate Association, and to limit further the capability of government to mold the inner lives of citizens. This Privacy Amendment would counter several other recently proposed amendments dealing with issues like abortion and marriage. Of course, I can’t expect to introduce and get passed such an immodest proposal exactly as I have phrased it. I hope that we, the American people, will become interested in rethinking our Bill of Rights and in deciding just what we want it to say. Then, we must write down our consensus! We shouldn’t leave that prerogative to judges only. Debate about such an amendment would cover the content and implementation, both political and judicial, of a number of affected public policy issues such as family values (including same-sex marriage), the workplace, where initiative must engage discrimination, the environment, education, and public safety. My public town-halls would focus especially on victimless crime laws, including sodomy laws. Some of the issues unravel when I examine closely the Clinton administration’s controversial (if evasive) handling of homosexuals in the military. Underneath all the policy questions are the psychological and moral issues of our personal values, which over the past forty years have gradually moved away from emphasis on the welfare of community to the self-expression of the individual. If government distances itself from moral issues, public debate on these values becomes all the more important in order to maintain practical social justice, especially for gay men and lesbians. Thorough public discussion of issues requires profound deference to free speech in both statutory and common law.

My central question on personal values is this: do we believe in the principle that every adult person is totally responsible for himself or herself? This objectivistic notion would limit the responsibilities of government to consequentialism. Individuals, through their own conduct and performance, would become their own moral agents. An individual will, in principle, be held accountable for her actions regardless of biological or circumstantial parentage. When may an individual rightfully set her own personal priorities, and when should she consider the recognized and established interests of family and larger community first?

Both the liberals and the cultural conservatives would insist the answer to my essential conjecture is No! and that government must, on one hand, remedy injustices and indigenous inequities between groups, and, on the other, guide more vulnerable members of society with certain universal, yet intangible, models for right and wrong in values and motivation as well as in actual deeds. For common welfare and survival, people need to be protected, largely by the state, from their most dangerous instincts and compulsions. A more libertarian view would say that, if government stops redefining moral values, people can learn on their own to be their brothers’ keepers. Free competition eventually rewards individual excellence and provides every hardworking and deserving person appropriate opportunity.

The focus on personal responsibility is especially relevant to gay issues. I have always been uncomfortable with the old-fashioned, trite notion of my involuntary membership in an oppressed minority, perhaps comparable to people of color or to Jews. Now, connection between race and homosexuality comes across as a lazy rhetorical device. Liberal interpretations of my homosexuality demanded that I ignore my own accountability for what I say and do. My race is a benign and totally superficial and (for my ancestors) environmentally adaptive genetic characteristic, whereas my sexual orientation, while possibly having substantial biological roots, has profound implications for my future behavior and what I find important in other people. Sexual orientation (or preference) crosses all the political territories covered by other traits such as race, religion, and gender; but sexual orientation also demands responsibility for the consequences of actions and values that underlie or promote behavior.

When I hear cultural conservatives slander homosexuals, I want to challenge them and force them to admit that their hot air is plain double-talk. They want to have it both ways; they talk of toleration yet elicit a disapproval strong enough to stigmatize gays with second-class citizenship and perhaps total exclusion from critical areas of society, such as the military. They make vague charges about homosexuality’s challenge to family values without forthright explanations. To put it bluntly, the cultural conservatives see gays as cultural freeloaders, who cheat by leading adult lives which apparently allow them to spend all of their resources on themselves without the adaptive psychological sacrifices (particularly for men) necessary to become providers for wives and children. They really don’t care very much about what gay men do do (even when it includes commit sodomy), as what they don’t do to validate the supposed male responsibilities for initiative, domain over, and protection of women and children. Gay men and lesbians, they feel, sap the potential energy out of missionary intercourse. The outright homo-hatred described by Navy Lieutenant Tracy Thorne during the debates over the military ban certainly originates with personal fears of vulnerability and inadequacy in sexual and economic performance.

Homophobia is easily rationalized by viewing homosexuality as a character disorder. This flaw, fed by a visual preoccupation with self-image, is supposed to spurn the responsibility to procreate and parent. Homosexual curiosity allegedly obstructs the socialization of men in collective pursuits (like the military) to protect society, and male homosexual practice is believed to endanger public health. In comparison, racism is much simpler: it comes from a tribalism in which people view survival and well-being as not within their own empowerment but as a ration or dole given by the state to them through the community with which they identify. Honest debate about homosexuality forces mainstream people to ponder what makes their own lives tick, and this process can make them uncomfortable.

Gay people, therefore, have every reason to embrace a political philosophy that would, when implemented, end government’s warrant to tell people how they ought to live their lives, especially through enactment of sodomy laws and preferential treatment of legally married people. This modern political paradigm aims for effectively equal individual rights for gays without pitting gays against others. It encourages more self-empowerment At the same time, this approach would force gays, like everyone else, to seek private (rather than legislative or judicial) solutions to discrimination and incentives to fund public goods, whether AIDS and cancer research, or energy-efficient transportation. It forces us to consider weaning ourselves from government as the ultimate economic safety-net.

* * *

There is a deep anger underneath the recent outcries against big government, and it is becoming more personal than the natural resentment against government for confiscating one’s wealth to give to the poor or to its own pork. People sense that government is siphoning their money to relieve them of the discomfort of taking care of their own immediate families and communities. Sometimes, they sense they are leading borrowed lives with an artificial freedom from their own limits, subsumed by their obligations to their own neighbors and fidelity to particular functions of their gender roles. People make it today on the sacrifices of their ancestors, without accepting the same family responsibilities. Some people feel insecure about these new freedoms; like kids, they want new limits established and want to see everyone forced to adhere to these boundaries. Relief from the suffocation of too much government, then, belongs to traditional families with children. This moralizing leads some people back to politics and power-mongering, so that they may gain a sense of recognition to compensate for the lack of substance in their own personal lives. They fling vindictive rhetoric and remain angry, desperate for attention.

The middle-class wage earners, seemingly shafted by the leverage of the winners in today’s more Darwinian, globally competitive economy, ought to scream just as angrily, but they tend to just cry.

Of course, three decades ago the anger was more like a righteous indignation from an opposite direction. Some groups of people—African and native Americans, women, gays, and, in a meaningful sense, the working poor—were surely denied a full place in society or the chance to compete fairly as individuals. Christian moral values came across to many as a ruse to maintain a sheltered, privileged establishment. As we have seen, for example, in the Simpson trial and supremacist movements, racist and sexist tensions, and even oppression still simmer today. Arguably, government leadership has always been needed in the past. The increase in standard of living and opportunity for psychological growth for much of the population has turned this around, rendering individual initiative more effective in securing social justice within our general moral values that in any previous time.

The problem of equal rights for gays creates a benchmark on a time-line of history, as it brings the notions of classical liberalism, which makes the welfare of the individual the first priority, to people of moderate means. Individualism is itself a new experience, potentially emancipating man from the tribal balkanization that practically nuked us as if we were dinosaurs. Individualism must indeed answer to subtle, motivational moral values if it is not to decompose into a new darwinian separation within society where unguided young people drift into crime and destruction. But community responsibilities may well be better transferred by family, church, or other cultural peer group when government stops bartering rights as conditional privileges and political tribute and becomes willing to leave people alone.

The biggest moral problem today is the inability of many people to make and keep personal commitments. They mix up self-actualization with self-indulgence. Breakdown of the family is a major symptom. However, family values do not equate to fulfillment of conventional gender roles. Furthermore, people should not allow government and other large social institutions to dictate solutions to moral problems; people need a new level of self-trust and responsibility. Government has facilitated the hypocrisy, particularly in matters of sexual and personal identity, that we once assumed we needed to keep our ordered liberty well lubricated. It’s still embarrassing to talk about sensitive matters. But in an age where easy access to information gives individuals so much more incentive to account for their own choices, we really need to find more truth within ourselves if we are to pursue personal fulfillment and simultaneously support social justice for others. Social and economic fairness has a moral and psychological foundation, based on study of the merits of issues and motives behind them, as well as a political basis in coalitions. Government needs to be ordered out of engineering personal fulfillment, and, in the more easily politicized areas, be forced to cede economic governance as well.

* * *

The first two chapters of the opus will present my own expulsion from college for admitting being gay and my own subsequent and unusual stint of military service during the Vietnam years. By young adulthood, I had already eschewed not only the duty to offer my life and well-being for women and children, but also the notion of competing (and simultaneously joining into cohesive political blocks) with other men just to provide otherwise undeserved advantages to bearers of my own genes. I’ll report some rather esoteric (call them New Age) psychological resources I unearthed when I came out second (and third and fourth) times. Coming out became a growth experience, bringing with it the skills and insights needed to absorb new ideas and to appreciate people whose notions of identity seemed alien. I learned to relish thinking about an issue beyond what’s in it for me. During the AIDS epidemic, my perception of myself as a gay man hit another low; then my recovery of self-respect led to my under-cover involvement in 1993 with the attempts to lift the military ban of gays. The ban was originally conceived to keep the Armed Forces a sanctuary for some culturally disadvantaged real men and to maintain, under the excuse of national security, a contingent capacity to impose fidelity to gender roles upon the rest of society. Today it has degenerated into legalized sexual harassment of both genders. It just has to go! In the aftermath of the 1993 debacle over the ban, and of the public’s insensitivity to the governmental abuses the military antigay policies require, I became involved in a local gay market liberal group and began publishing essays about the ban and about family values in its newsletter. This led me to examine the politics of specific issues, to apply inductive reasoning, and to support a strategy that eliminates the powers of politicians to play Robin Hood with the cultural resources of their various constituent groups. I would become more radical as I began to realize that, at least in setting personal moral, and even economic, priorities, government just doesn’t work. I would see that legal precedents sometimes leave our liberties up to political barter, and that to simultaneously protect personal rights and encourage personal responsibility, we need a bottom-up review of our Bill of Rights.

My own friends and associates know me as a very out-spoken guy, not afraid to take unusual, costly and pre-emptive actions both to make my points and to prevent myself from becoming economically over-extended later. I will build my standing in a public policy based on personal initiative largely from my own unusual, when considered in combination, personal experiences. Law professors can build their published arguments for extending privacy rights from detailed case analysis, and economists can promote self-governance by funding and presenting studies and simulation models, but these efforts tend to be ignored or at least lost in the shuffle of academia.

A personal approach can add dimension and credibility to otherwise dry intellectual precepts and arguments.

Some readers may take umbrage at what might sound like an attempt to capitalize on my own oppression. But, when I review my life I can hardly say I have been cast down. I take responsibility for my own limitations and for missing certain family experiences others take for granted. I have found a subtle justice within my own bounds when I can make personal sacrifices and keep my own special focus; an institutional guarantee of fairness to my own minority group can hardly protect my self-concept. My experiences can contribute to my playing devil’s advocate to illustrate the narrowness of conventional motions of self-interest and to show the dishonesty of appeals to government for cultural protectionism. My somewhat clandestine, if voyeuristic, life—which sometimes has the aspect of a detached observer suddenly engrossed in an IMAX movie showing the panorama of quick, radical cultural change—as motivated me to stitch together the grains of truth among all the suppositions of today’s defensive cultural dissonance. I can carry political debate beyond the conflicts of typical special interest groups to psychological areas and challenge people to ponder why they need government to help them reinforce who they are.

Others will urge me to shut up, to leave it to the leaders who know how to defend my rights. No, I don’t want either side of any issue directing my thoughts or specifying which causes I must support just for solidarity or political mass. I haven’t earned credentials as a corporate executive, journalist, or public servant by climbing up a conventional career ladder and paying the required psychological tributes, especially by raising a family; yet I want to be taken seriously. I think my situation as an outside man actually presents an advantage as I attempt to persuade people to look at policy issues substantively, rather than affiliate with political blocks to get them their way in legislatures, or, indirectly, courts. I don’t want to be forced to support causes that I may find morally objectionable (such as abortion or affirmative action) to buy protection for my rights. I don’t want to play foot soldier for any politician. I want to see issues, with their psychological and moral, as well as political, consequences, debated on their merits, regardless of who wins the next election or gets appointed to the Supreme Court. People must learn to think constructively about issues and emphasize not how their politicians can manipulate government to get people their way at the expense of others, but how individuals may do more for themselves and enjoy more freedom. Social and ethical problems are challenging because they are difficult and sometimes ambiguous; they cannot be resolved just by taking sides and letting friends remain comfortable with the adaptive loyalties of a permanently adversarial world. Life is not always black and white; it is, indeed, a rainbow. We must debate the tension between self-image and prerequisite obligation. I want to organize everything relevant and put it down between two book covers. So this is my time to tell the truth.

1

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL: 1961

A Warm Fall

On the day after Thanksgiving in 1961, as I returned to my dormitory room in Brown Hall at the College of William and Mary, I found a note, a folded sheet of composition paper, taped on the unlocked wooden door. That first freshman semester, I shared this very cramped living space with a roommate who exhibited a somewhat macho culture very different from my own upbringing.

The note, written in neat, oversized, feminine penmanship, ordered me to report to the Dean of Men at once and stated that the dean had become concerned about the array of patent medicines that had been noted in my room during recent inspections.

I didn’t know about the inspections, and even at age eighteen, I was rather shocked that such dirty laundry would be aired for the public to read, as if it were an eviction notice.

I walked through a mild mist at early dusk, typical warm late fall weather in Tidewater Virginia, where fall plumage lasts through November. Why was the dean waiting just for me late on a Friday afternoon of a day that most colleges took as break? The college, well supported by the Commonwealth of Virginia, indulged in some upper-management redundancy in those innocent days; it had a Dean of Students, and separate Deans of Men and Women.

Thanksgiving day itself had been sunny and fulfilling. My parents had come down and had taken me along with a new college chum who shared my musical interests to the Jamestown settlement, then on to the wide-screen, stereo history movies about Colonial Williamsburg; finally we enjoyed a turkey dinner at the Williamsburg Inn. That Friday morning, my parents had driven to Charlotte, N.C. to visit close family friends. I thought for a moment about one muggy October day four years back, when, while our northern Virginia home was being brushed by a hurricane, I asked my father about whether he had any special men friends; he mentioned just one man, whose family had shared a beach house in Ocean City with us one week every June for years before recently moving to Charlotte.

But now I marched into Wren hall, the oldest academic building in the United States, and walked upstairs to the dean’s office and knocked on the milkglass door. He was waiting for me, indeed.

The office was dark, almost clandestine. I recall a little green lamp on his orderly desk. He started by thanking me for coming by immediately. I reassured him that the drugs were harmless patent medicines—neosynephrine nasal sprays, Rolaids, and especially iodine and glycerin for sore throats. I had always been a high-strung hypochondriac. We then talked very quickly about my studies—I had all A ’s at midterm.

"A couple of B’s probably wouldn’t hurt you, he said, his voice still oddly somber.

Your grading scale is actually easier here than it was at Washington-Lee. I still wonder how I had made valedictorian, when one had to make 95% for an A and 81% for even a gentleman’s C.

The dean was not to be sidetracked; he moved quickly to obviously more sensitive areas.

Bill, please tell me, how do you think you are getting along with the other boys in Brown Hall?

For five whole seconds—far too long to wait for a car’s oil pressure light to go off—my mind churned about two adjectives, latent and overt, used to modify homosexuality as discussed in a supposedly innocuous psychological self-help book right next to our 1950 World Book Encyclopedia¹, so satisfying with its colorful topographical maps of all the states, in our den bookcase at home. Now, I felt proud of a few of my high school friends, and I had even come to feel secretly proud of my internal sexual arousal in their presence. I felt good about myself by worshipping these friends! My feelings had given me the capacity to identify and select, in my own fantasy world if nowhere else, the best and most complete men. The other boys had visualized their own powers as reflected in the sexual allure of girls. By courting young ladies, they set themselves up for the tender trap of marriage; they would give up their desultory power quickly. These ostentatious boys didn’t even know about their own vulnerability, and I wanted to teach it to them. My fantasies—a potential verbal weapon—were still just mental games, but they pointed to a truth I wanted to tell. Boys cared about their own self-images and their own bodies; they really didn’t care about women as equals (or as their sexual superiors and their own futures) yet. After all (in subsequent military parlance), women are so stupid, they’re playthings to dominate.

A comment my roommate had made a few days ago played through my head like a warped phonograph record that got stuck. He had said, I’m not modest about my body. But I know it bothers you to go without your shirt. It did. We just had to be able to talk about these things.

Actually, the boys had brought it up anyway. Just a week ago, there had been another sign on my dorm door, Blow Jobs from Golden Genius, 25 cents. I had quietly taken it down as if it were a Christmas ornament.

I made my announcement quickly. I have come around to considering myself to be a latent homosexual, I said. With that statement, I had pinned a label on myself, as my father would later put it.

Now what makes you think you’re a homosexual, he said dispassionately, as if there were nothing particularly alarming about my statement.

I’ve never done anything, but I find myself getting sexually excited around a few very select men that I admire, although I don’t tell anyone. It’s all just thoughts. That’s why it’s latent.

The moon-faced dean sat very still. He maintained his calm control by saying nothing for the moment and keeping the ball in my court.

Oh, the boys, I lectured. I’m not alone with these feelings. They were all so curious about each other’s endowments, about where their physical maturity put them in the male food chain. Some of the more homely (often fat) men had suddenly become the most vociferous in bragging about their conquests of girls (not grown women); actual performance in intercourse would neutralize their visibly obvious inadequacies as man-likenesses. They would tease me late at night with questions like, Bill, what do you think of sexual intercourse before marriage? Bill, what do you think of homosexuality? My father had reassured me in a letter that they must already feel guilty about taking advantage of most gorgeous gals. They would soon give up opportunity, control of their own lives and vitality to validate their manhood in sexual performance and perhaps by getting girls pregnant; at least that’s how I saw them. I wanted to make them admit it.

I realized I had talked myself into a trap. The somewhat vulgar, dead-end male-bonding I had observed in some companions hardly approached my own sensation of sexual urgency. I stopped.

He leaned back in his upholstered chair and spoke softly. Well, I had heard rumors that you’re a homosexual. Now, Bill, you don’t want to think of yourself as a homosexual.

I should have challenged him with a contentious Why? Really, what’s wrong with being attracted to men? If I don’t date girls, that’s somebody else’s problem. Then, I allowed myself to be mentally distracted by the rumors. My roommate had said, You put your hands on other boys’ knees, and I didn’t recall ever doing that.

This is all just feelings inside me, I protested, and a little talk.

He paused, like a jury member deliberating. No, you’re not a homosexual. You just can’t be. I think you just have some anxieties that we’ll have to work out.

We all do.

But, Bill, I really have to talk to your parents about this. Are they home tonight?

I told him my parents’ weekend plans and immediately gave him the name of those family friends in North Carolina.

I don’t know the number. You can call information.

Well, thanks for the cooperation. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll track them down tonight and get us all together next week. I’m sure we can work this out. We won’t ask you to leave school or anything like that. I distinctly remember that promise.

It turned out to be a lie.

Look, I’m glad you told me, he added. The day you admitted to yourself that you’re a homosexual, you should have come to me. Already, he had contradicted himself. Maybe he knew I was telling the truth.

My parents must have been stunned to receive that long-distance call out of the blue while they were on holiday—these were the days before direct dial and cheap rates, when a long distance call was a special occasion. But they appeared on Monday night. None of us were very worried. I had believed the dean. After all, I was in the right.

On Tuesday morning, I went to the 9:00 A.M. qualitative analysis class lecture as usual. That afternoon, we would have lab and get back our second laboratory examination, which I thought I had messed up. The chemistry professor had announced and fulfilled his propensity to come up with word problem questions where we would have to apply the facts we had learned to calculating molarity of solutions or to predicting the presence of unknowns. After all, he had to weed out those students who didn’t belong in chemistry. But I would never find out how he did it.

My parents met me at the entrance to Rogers Hall, the science building, and a few minutes later I had climbed into the back seat of the Ford Galaxie. It was November 28, 1961, sunny and windy, the first cold day of this late fall season. The days had grown very short.

As I closed the backseat door, my father said, This is going to come as a blow to you, Bill, but we have to take you out of school. He then explained that my situation had been quickly presented to the president of the college and that the college insisted that it could not take a chance of legal problems if it allowed a known homosexual to remain in an intimate dormitory environment, where there was at least a possibility of future overt conduct or emotional trauma to other students. At the least, the college needed to maintain order and discipline among otherwise rowdy adolescent young men.

Initiations

Being asked to leave William and Mary was indeed a setback.

I had earned a chemistry scholarship the previous year, by grades and a competitive exam at the College the previous April. Except for $1.25 stuffed into my hand once for playing piano at a Cub Scout function, this was the first consideration I had earned in my life. My senior year in high school had been eventful; it was the first time in my life I gained recognition in a valuable peer group, the Science Honor Society. I had been initiated into the society one pre-blizzard December evening in the basement of my own home, as my parents hosted the informal dinner for about sixteen of us, including a much admired physics teacher. The ritual was nothing more than giving a technical talk, which for me had been the speculative possibility of a life chemistry based on substituting silicon for oxygen. Another initiate gave a talk about the various kinds of white blood cells and talked of lysing leukocytes (killing certain immune-modulating cells), perhaps twenty years ahead of time. Before the talks, we sat around card tables or at my undersized chartreuse ping-pong table (which had given me a decided home-field advantage) eating fast-food fried chicken; my friends even admired the wood-paneling my father had put into the recreation room back in 1949, when the house was new. Indeed, I was proud that this ceremony was held at Boushka’s house. The evening concluded as the physics teacher, standing in front of a calf-warming fireplace, spoke about the sudden importance of science in preserving freedom.

In 1957, the Russians had launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. A few weeks later, I cried when reading in The Evening Star that the Navy’s first attempt, the Vanguard, had exploded. Supposedly comfortably ahead in the development of doomsday weapons, we quickly caught up with and passed the Russians in space shots. Still, I felt vaguely uneasy. Not too many years before, I had experienced the duck and cover drills under grade school desks. I had grown up hearing it’s a free country without clearly conceptualizing what free means; my father had said that in Russia, kids never even talk at home, and when they do, a policeman assigned to their home turns them in! Once, driving me and a bunch of grade school classmates to the monuments in Washington, my father remarked that the country wouldn’t last more than another 25 years. The response of government and corporate America seemed to be, grow brains! Suddenly, our country caught on to the fact it would have to value learning at any social price. In some circles, traditional young male brawn, by comparison, almost seemed like a burden. Young scientists should probably be excused from the military draft. The science television program, Watch Mr. Wizard, encouraged students to take all the science and math you can. This advice most certainly included young women, who, if anything, tended to exceed the men in scholastic achievement, especially in verbal, but sometimes even at math and science. Already, by about the ninth grade, I had found that the better male students (who often seemed to come from Jewish backgrounds), nice boys who didn’t tease, would value my companionship. Though, unlike me, they were cautiously dating girls (and much more eager to yield seats to ladies on busses or hold doors for them). They saw typical reckless male behavior—the aggression, showing off, smoking, and fast cars—as stupid and unnecessary. Grades, however mundane, had gained me recognition and a real place in this precarious world.

Science, I had already noticed, provided a certain intellectual shelter from uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. In biology, we had learned about the basic functions of life: respiration, ingestion, irritability, reproduction. Sex (whether pollination or intercourse), it seemed, could be looked at with intellectual antipathy as no more than a natural selection process.

The previous autumn had indeed brought a social coming out, as I was around young men whose company I really valued. I would walk back to the high school for Friday night football games with the hymn-tune from Brahms’s First Symphony playing in my head, and then join my friends at our assigned fund-raiser, selling cokes in the stands and during intermission. There would be harmless jokes then about homosexuality, even my apparent homosexuality (a rumor which started when I blurted out in chemistry class that a boy shouldn’t kiss a girl on the lips). Once, I lightly embraced a couple of the students as we made jokes that homosexuality was really some kind of psychological, esoteric priesthood. There were even lighthearted rumors that our esteemed physics teacher was a homosexual, perhaps due to his total lack of interest in women. This was just a rumor; there had never been any kind of incident. The teacher would suddenly resign at the end of the school year and complain about the social backwardness of the Arlington school system. A few years later, I would read in the Washington papers that the teacher, now a traveling lecturer, had died of hepatitis.

One friend, the math genius in the society, introduced me to mountain hiking that next April (he used to say, A hike in the mountains is worth any grade). Over Memorial Day, we took a field trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, including two nights in rustic cabins on Bear Camp Pond, a night-time hike up Rattlesnake Mountain above the pond, and a drive to the Mount Washington Summit (the physics teacher canceled the climb because of late spring cold and wind).

That summer, I formed a particularly close bond with another classmate, who would that next fall go away to Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI was the only place to which he applied), eventually become an Army officer and ultimately earn a doctorate in physics. We would play chess (I won) and tennis (sometimes he let me win). He sat by me in a notehand (baby shorthand) class we took in summer school; we had expected note-taking skills would help us get through that first year of college when rumor held it professors would flunk out as many as they could. Toward the end of the summer, I confided in him that I felt attracted to him, and he was not at all alarmed. He would talk about his weekend trips to New York to see a girl friend, but he refrained from making it sound serious. Before I went away to William and Mary, he treated me to a World War II battle movie, The Guns of Navarone, downtown (toward the end of the era when downtown Washington owned those movie palaces). He confided in me that I was one of his best friends, and that he appreciated how utterly frank, although socially naive I was; he had once laid awake all right deciding whether he should be my friend. The tenderness of his comments ignited my feelings of excitement, which I contained. I actually wondered if he would get roughed up as a freshman himself in his chosen school’s rather notorious plebe hazing.

The Arlington County school system had become regarded as one of the top in the nation for student scholastic achievement. The emphasis on grades, and the incentive for egghead students like me to identify with them, could get exaggerated by some teachers; for example, an English teacher who demanded a second term paper for an A-B credit. This apparently meritocratic, absolutist notion of excellence may have been recent; in the third grade, letter marks had been assigned according to ability and the teacher had even said, If you do the best you can, you’ll get an A. Now, their academic standards were associated with a very strict classroom discipline. In grade school, the report card had included a conduct page broken into two sections, Progress of the Pupil as an Individual, and Progress of the Pupil as a Member of the Group, which included such juicy items as practices self-control. But what the schools regulated was conduct, on issues such as smoking, drugs, gum chewing, talking in class, tardiness, absence, and appearance. (Once, I had been sent home to get a belt for my trousers. I was once called before the assistant principal for failing to sign the roster when I went to the library for study hall; that was my only close encounter with the disciplinarian in senior high school.) I felt no pressure to court girls or to think about the idea of having a family of my own some day. Whatever the physics teacher’s experience in the school system, I never heard homosexuality mentioned (for condemnation) in the classroom.

The school system did an outstanding job of teaching basic concepts of American history and government, and it started early. In seventh grade, our general education teacher drilled into us the facts about Brown v. Board of Education (1954) because she believed we would have to adjust to school integration in a matter of months. That would have meant, for sheltered Caucasian kids like me, sitting next to Negroes on school busses or in class, an idea that seemed unthinkable to many people in those days. Even my father had spoken of the Bible’s fixing their bounds thereof… The idea of integration didn’t bother me. I saw black people as different, harmless outsiders; but then, so was I likewise not like everybody else. I dimly sensed that segregation ultimately intended to preserve undeserved collective economic advantages for us Europeans rather than to avoid directly the discomfort of having slaves’ descendants living in our neighborhoods (but not in our bedrooms). A few blocks from my parents’ suburban home, there was a brick wall which separated the colored (as people called African-Americans in the 1950’s) from the rest of us; the wall came down during the 1960’s.

In grade school, the teacher would show a history film and then order us to write it up, to test how well we had paid attention. I could not imagine what the significance of all these legal and cultural trends could be, until I started recognizing what was happening inside me.

As early as third grade, Arlington taught us conversational Spanish. Starting in ninth grade, I took four years of French. By college, foreign language study had already impressed upon me how grammar affects the way ideas are perceived. French (like many other languages) has a special subjunctive mood which separates supposition from fact. In English, this distinction must be inferred from context. French also benefits, in didactics, from a separate impersonal form of the pronoun you. Attaching gender to nouns gives ideas a suggestive psychological color. Our first-year French teacher explained, Everything is either masculine or feminine; absolutely nothing is neuter. The consistent attention to language and mathematics skills conveyed to me an impression that I could learn to think things out to their ultimate conclusion and go to the root for myself, not having to depend on the authority of others. I saw this in tenth grade English, where the teacher allowed one student to write a theme attempting to argue the existence of God, and then to share that with the class; we were then allowed to show where her conclusions were based on assumptions (postulates) she ultimately could not prove. Teachers often admonished, Read, don’t watch television! in an era when TV was still relatively novel. The inability of many adults to read critically today and identify relevant information in large volumes of printed matter hampers their ability to think for themselves and respond to reasoned appeals to their self-interest.

In eleventh grade, I enjoyed a Virginia and U.S. History teacher, himself a combat veteran of World War II, who insisted with considerable controversy on making his exams all essay. He would require us to explain in our own words such concepts as mercantilism, the bearing of geographical concepts such as the Fall Line on settlement, the relationship between secession and abolition, reconstruction, suffrage, the economic depression cycle, and the differences between fascism, communism, and socialism. He made us prepare an in-class book report on John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage² and graded us on how much he learned from our comments. In the spring he taught passionately that World War II had forced us to prove as a nation that freedom works.

Since I had been born during World War II (in 1943), just before the winds of war started to turn the Nazis back, I had already felt that I had woken up in the world at just the right time. Three decades later, I would watch the events that set the stage for today’s version of personal liberation on the excellent history serials of Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. On D-Day, that stormy Tuesday morning about fifty years ago, western civilization proved that democracy and ordered liberty really work. Hitler had assumed that his Folk—young soldiers and workers regimented by allegiance to the nation state—would prevail over those softened by relative personal freedom. Hitler was proven wrong. Motivation to serve family, faith, and country, and only then perhaps to indulge the self, turned out to exceed social order, blind nationalism, mysticism, hero-worship, and consequent unquestioning obedience. World War II had indeed exploded as a conflict among moral value-sets that stirred passions far beyond conventional political conflicts; a modern society had talked itself into countenancing horrifying cruelty. By V-J day (and after Truman dropped two atomic bombs) Americans danced in the streets on confetti August snow and looked forward to personal rebirth and to unknowable freedoms and prosperity ahead. In their celebration, they could not imagine how understanding of morality, justice, and freedom would evolve in the decades ahead.

The history course had shown how the American people would witness a full circle on the context of freedom, which had varied from the rugged individualism and autonomy of the frontier, through a growing grasp of community good and social justice during the many wars, back to a modern individualism that would experiment with the form of social constraints. Western civilization’s political dynamics would migrate back towards cultural squabbles, away from class struggle or nationalistic racism³, and from earlier dynastic state-system political conflicts, which themselves had been derived from feudal times when the wealthy had learned how to build the state to suit their own ends. Homo sapiens, after all, had competed with other species (as dramatized when our organism survives, minus 700 million individuals, an alien invasion on Independence Day); then races and tribes (separated, according to Biblical lore, at the Tower of Babel) had competed to propagate their own genes, with persons having to put the welfare of the kinfolk over their own comfort. From Bible story books at home (my father’s favorite had been Van Loon’s Story of the Bible⁴, aptly illustrated with woodcut-like sketches), I had during my high school glory days understood how humans became civilized. Eventually the tribes could join through marriages into nations; but progress toward the time when human beings could contemplate their own differences as maybe something good, something that drives personal accomplishment, would take centuries.

Life had been difficult for most Americans during and before the War, and one could wonder indeed exactly what we were fighting for. My father had been just barely too old to be drafted. Both he and my mother had always lived in rooming houses until their marriage in 1940; they never knew the independence as singles that I would. For four years, there had been nothing to do but win the war; by first grade, I was barely able to grasp that I was living in the sunshine that closely follows a terrible storm. In 1950, as I sat drinking lime Kool-Aid on my grandmother’s porch, my mother suddenly said, There’s war in Korea. My cousin and I would bang out tone-clusters—random noise—on the bass notes of the upright piano in grandmother’s den, and I would ask, Why would any boy ever want to go to war? By high school I knew the communists, who had already killed more people than Nazi Germany had in concentration camps, could roll back our affirmation of democracy at D-day. My world was now searching for a new balance between an individual’s self-direction and a community’s need to survive, provide some sort of fairness and prosper collectively. I sensed the uneasy joy and peace; it felt good that we had won the war, but the feeling wouldn’t sustain itself for long if I felt too afraid to fight.

The freedom that democracy protects for me had come to mean a freedom to excel, succeed, and be recognized as important—having a visible position of leadership. Theodore Reich describes this as Consciousness II⁵, in which personal identity is enjoyed relative to meritocratic position in organizational structure (or corporate state). In kindergarten—where we were sent to learn to behave—the teacher separated the class into brownies and elves; I certainly did not get to be an elf. I saw the adult world as one in which the smart people made it—went to work in good clothes, solved intellectual problems and made decisions—and the others did the dirty work for them. I vaguely knew that some of this manual labor was downright dangerous: skyscraper iron-hangers often died, as had the immigrant men who had blow out the tunnels for New York City’s subway system⁶ . I developed a resentment of the idea of (as I then called it) low work, largely because I was clumsy and not good at it, but also because I felt it somehow erased my individuality. I even resented the idea of addressing elders as sir or ma’am. Very recently, I volunteered for the AIDS Quilt candlelight march and was sent into the House of Representatives Cannon Office building to help with a VIP reception. I felt just a trace of resentment at the idea of a uniform T-shirt, and I jumped when approached with, would you like to serve food? Of course, I did so: I served setups and soft drinks (a reprise of those high school football games) and enjoyed wonderful opportunities to bounce my ideas off the congresspersons and media people who walked by; so by now I had become a semi-VIP, I guess.

Even having been educated at an academic level about segregation and poverty, I still viewed discrimination and oppression (even the witch-hunts of McCarthyism) as other peoples’ problems. In America, even during difficult times during the Depression when survival came first, anyone could, in principle, make it. Anyone could be valued as an individual. War was perhaps the most obvious threat, something that could force me to learn the pain and subjugation that others experience. I did not yet understand that most grown-ups experience freedom through their ties, even obligations, to families they form after courtship and marriage. I knew that my parents loved and were totally loyal to each other; I thought this what they had both always really wanted.

In my senior year, my government teacher continued the tradition of political consciousness-raising. During the pre-Inauguration Day blizzard of 1961, we were required to write a complete comparison of communism and democracy. (He should probably have asked for a third comparison, to Fascism⁷. ) Then, to make a point about citizen participation, through networking as well as voting, the teacher also made us memorize the names of our representatives in the County Board, State, and Congress. In a private conference, he said he expected me to understand what he was getting at, in drumming in the workings of democracy, and that I would then teach it to others later in life. Like many of my other teachers, he knew that social values were poised for change, however scary the Cold War and shadow of McCarthyism; the phase-out of segregation was only a promising beginning. The world seemed like just the right place for me to discover myself; it had the right constants of physics, orbit around the sun, and had provided me a side that always won to play on.

House and Home, and Family Trips

From my first memory of personal sentience at age three, when my father showed me how to operate a Mars electric train making a perfect circle around the Christmas tree, I had always been somewhat a bookworm, and a mildly spoiled, but independently and critically thinking only child. Modern psychology predicts that I will conduct my life conservatively and always remain conscious of what I have to lose⁸. My father, a sales representative for a glass manufacturer, often traveled from our Virginia home for two or three weeks at a time, although he was home all day with us when not traveling. Supporting a family demanded much from men in the prosperous 1950’s, just as everyone complains it does today. The fact that he had his family and child—me—became very important to his standing in the company and industry and to his success. Selling, to him, was proof that he could convince the customer that the customer really did need the product; truth in business could itself be generated by masculine power. I would watch him fill out orders and compute the charges on his invoices on a crude mechanical adding machine. I would grimace at television commercials claiming, This is the best toothpaste. I would challenge my father, "They