The witch hunts were conducted throughout the whole federal government from the late 1940s into the 60s. It was a big thing when I was in the Air Force. There was a real effort to get rid of all homosexuals. They hunted them down and gave them bad discharges. Basically, wrecked the rest of their lives.

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I knew about the witch hunts before I entered the Air Force. It was 1963. I had flunked out of college and decided the military was the only option. But it took some time to process and get in. In the meantime, I knew a lesbian, Donna, who had been booted out of the Air Force. She sat me down and told me the cold, hard facts of life:

• Don't play in your own backyard.

• Don't develop any close friendships on base.

She scared the piss out of me. I heeded her words, and I determined that I was gonna make it through all four years.

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I was stationed at Stewart Air Force Base, about an hour north of New York City. I spent most of my free days in the City, looking for the lesbians I’d read about in the Beebo Brinker novels. People noticed that I was always going to the city on my days off and they started asking questions.

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The big bugaboo was always the witch hunts. That controlled my life. It didn’t stop me from going to the City and looking for lesbians, but I quickly came up with a cover story. My grandfather actually lived across the river in New Jersey, so did my old friend Florence. I never went to visit my grandfather, but I did once visit Florence just so I could truthfully claim that I was visiting them.

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The witch hunt was my big fear and I saw it playing out on a very close, personal level.

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The first was Bev, who was very obviously a dyke. I guess I was fairly obvious, but not out on base. I was complaining to Bev that I couldn't find a gay bar in the city. I tried following butchy-looking women in Greenwich Village, and ended up going to a laundromat. That was my luck.

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So, Bev had a car and we went down to the City together. We tried the same thing, riding around, looking for dykey women, but no luck. So we're getting ready to go back to base, but the night was still fairly young. We decided to get something to eat at this little coffee shop-type restaurant and the waitress was kind of flirting with us. She was very obvious, very feminine with puffy hair.

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Bev was bolder than I was. She asked, “Do you know of any places around here where the women hang out?” The waitress said, “Just so happens that I do,” and she told us how to find the Sea Colony. Of course, we went right over.

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That was my first venture into a gay bar in New York City—actually, any gay bar anywhere. I was a totally innocent baby dyke and I felt like a kid in a candy store. There was this bar with a bunch of dykes sitting around it. There were a couple of booths on the other side where a bunch of very feminine-looking women sat looking at the dykes.

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And then, Maria, the bartender, came over, and said “Welcome to the Sea Colony. Are you sure you want to be here?”

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Oh yeah, we wanted to be there.

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Maria showed us the back room where couples were sitting together, hugging, making out, dancing. There was a red light over the doorway. If that light started flashing, you were supposed to head for a seat and look innocent. Periodically the police raided the place. I was never there during a raid, but I heard about them.

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That was the only time that Bev went down with me. But she did go back down to the restaurant and picked up that waitress.

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Bev was the first lesbian I knew who got hauled in by the Criminal Investigation Division, the CID, but I knew a couple of other women who got booted out at the same time. I guess Bev must have just fessed up. Luckily, she didn’t mention my name, but I did get called to the CID office, where I was questioned by a male officer. I was terrified. Heart pounding, palms clammy, the whole bit.

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He said, “We understand you're friends with Bev.”

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I said, “Yes, we live in the same barracks.”

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“We understand she drove you down to New York City once?”

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“Yeah, but she dropped me off at the Port Authority bus station.”

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And he looked at me like, yeah, sure. But, he didn't have anything else to go on. So I skated through that one.

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The next one was Carol.

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To set the stage, I tried out for the softball team, because that's where all the dykes were. But I wasn't good enough to make the team. I was a scorekeeper. Our coach, manager—I'll call her Sergeant Smith. She was highest ranking sergeant on base. A real nice woman. I really liked her. She was kind of a dyke but never said anything, did anything incriminating. Oftentimes after a game, we would all go to her house, have a beer or two, and just talk. Sometimes people stayed over, slept on the floor or the couch. It was pretty evident that was all that was going on.

 

But Carol, who, as far as I knew, was as straight as they come, developed this crush on Sergeant Smith. And she started confiding in me. She was like a high school girl with a crush on the gym teacher. She said, “but she doesn't even notice me!”

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Oh, poor Carol. I told her to stay cold, don't get yourself in trouble.

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Well, I came back from the city one weekend. Carol had tried to commit suicide. All she could say was, “Sergeant Smith doesn't love me.” She was saying that to everybody.

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So, of course, I got called in on that one. I was playing a doubles match in tennis tournament on base. I glanced up at the sparse audience and there was my old friend from CID. The sight of him distracted me from the game. Fortunately, my partner was a better player than me, and covered for me while I regrouped. We won the tournament.

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After the match, CID approached and said, “You probably know I’m here to talk with you.”

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“Yeah,” I said. “I figured as much.” This time, I felt calmer. I figured that since I was following my old friend Donna’s advice and keeping my nose clean on base, I could continue to outsmart them. I had a pretty cocky asshole attitude.

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“We understand you're good friends with Carol?” he said.

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I said, yeah.

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“What do you know about her and Sergeant Smith?”

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I said, “There's nothing to know. Carol had a crush on Sergeant Smith, but I wrote it off as a schoolgirl crush on their PE teacher.”

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There were more questions: did I ever see anything? Who else hung out there? Etc.

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So Carol got booted out. I don’t know if there was any attention pointed at Sergeant Smith. They never asked me about her.

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Then there was Lieutenant Jones. Before I ever met her face-to-face, I had to deal with her on a professional level. I handled one aspect of personnel things on the administrative end and she handled it on the squadron end. I had to bug her to get reports in, and we were always joshing and joking around with each other. One time she was very late with a report that I really needed. She said, “It's almost done, I'll meet you down at the BX (Base Exchange) and we can have some coffee. I’ll give it you there.”

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She gave me the report and we engaged in a little flirtatious conversation. Something anyone overhearing really wouldn’t understand. But it was obvious that we were on the same page. She knew that I knew, and I knew that she knew.

Not long after that, she got the assigned duty of being our WAF (Women’s Air Force) Squadron Commander, and I saw her almost on a daily basis. She kept asking why I went down to New York City all the time, and did I know any interesting places. She said she’d like to follow me down sometime, I could show her around.

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Not long after that, she got involved with an enlisted person, a sergeant. They both got transferred at the same time to the same place. Via the grapevine, I heard that they both got kicked out together.

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Just before I got out I met a young male airman who was from my neck of the woods in Southern California. My job was to clear him into the base, fill out forms, and get information from him. It was very clear that he was gay. And he must have picked up on me as well. He talked about Laguna Beach and his favorite place to hang out, which was bar that I was familiar with. We developed a pretty close relationship. We actually talked about getting married. He only had one year left to go, and I had about a year and a half. We were winding things down. We both wanted to go back to school in California, and we figured we'd make a team of it.

 

So, I come back from New York City to find the CID agent sitting in my room. Crap, I thought, What now?

 

My friend had tried to commit suicide.

 

They found letters and other incriminating stuff. He was still in the hospital and had refused to give any information about his family. But I broke confidence a little. I knew that his father was a full colonel in the Army. His father showed up, and I never saw my friend again.

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But, again, CID wanted to know what I knew. I said we'd traveled down to New York City on many weekends, but we ended up at the Port Authority bus station. He always went on to Pennsylvania, somewhere, but I didn’t tell them that detail.

I'm sure by this time, CID really had my name and number but try as they might, they couldn’t prove it. I managed to get through the whole four years.

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After getting out, I went right back to school and looked for work. Even though my college degree was an entry into an interview, they always seemed to be more interested in my military experience than my education.

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While I hated being targeted by CID, I appreciated the military. I learned discipline, the chain of command, following orders, and gained leadership experience. And with the GI bill, I finished college and law school. But the witch hunts left me scarred for years, afraid to be myself at work or in many other situations. Ironically, it was in a federal job, where my co-workers accepted me and my partner even before I came out to them, that allowed me to heal.