Historian, Hampton Roads Naval Museum
On a recent morning at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, a Chevy Volt whipped into a VIP parking spot just outside an auditorium side door, bearing a special delivery. Stepping swiftly around the car after plucking a large box from under its rear hatch, Chester Tention bounded out of the Tidewater summer heat into the auditorium lobby with his magnum opus. “It’s all edible,” the Culinary Specialist Second Class said proudly as his shipmates began to gather around to behold his creation.
“Whose car is that parked outside?” bellowed Command Master Chief (CMC)William Caraballo as he entered the lobby, reversing the polarity of the attention Tention had only begun basking in. Cake or no cake, the gruff CMC from the Bronx wanted nothing blocking the smooth arrival of the naval station's commanding officer, Captain Robert Clark, who was due any second.
Tention dashed back out the door to move the car.
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Culinary Specialist Second Class Chester Tention describes the making of his cake commemorating LGBT Pride Celebration Heritage Month 2015 to Naval Station Norfolk commanding officer Captain Robert Clark as (far left) event organizer and activist Information Systems Technician First Class Christopher Hooper and (far right) Command Master Chief William Caraballo look on. (M.C. Farrington)
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With the exception of the master chief's displeasure over the culinary specialist's double-parking, such a scene would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The United States Navy inherited many of its standards of conduct from the Royal Navy. What was in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries known as “buggery” was a capital offense in the Royal Navy until 1861.
Article 29 of the Royal Navy Articles of War from 1749 stated:
Sentences of as much as 1,000 lashes were usually carried out against lower-ranking British sailors caught in the act during the 1700s, usually after being convicted of "indecent liberties," "indecent behavior," or "uncleanliness." More senior crew members and officers risked being drummed ashore, discharged or cashiered from the navy. Those convicted of sodomy during courts martial in those days, regardless of rank, were occasionally sent to the gallows or sentenced to be shot. University of Denver professor Arthur N. Gilbert wrote in 1976 that “mariners charged with desertion to the enemy during wartime or striking an officer were as likely to be sentenced to death as men on trial for buggery.”
If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery of sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of a Court Martial.
As the American Navy developed its own separate identity from that of its estranged British progenitor during its first century, particularly as it remade itself from a wood-and-sail to a steel-and-coal “New Navy” as the century drew to a close, the concept of the new kind of Sailor to man these ships was shaped by the changing social mores concerning manhood throughout the nation itself. “Through the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt and others, the Navy would theoretically provide a sphere where American men could flourish,” wrote National Archives historian Michael J. Hussey in 2002, “shielded from the traps of corporate domination, labor radicalism, effeminacy, and immorality.”
A testament to the stubborn durability of the social mores within the American defense establishment, inherited from the British armed forces and refined by Progressive-Era American concepts of patriotism and virtue, can be seen in this official Department of Defense policy statement on homosexuality issued in 1982. It held that:
Homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The presence in the military environment of persons who engage in homosexual conduct or who, by their statements demonstrate a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct, seriously impairs the accomplishment of the military mission. The presence of such members adversely affects the ability of the Military Services to maintain discipline, good order, and morale; to foster mutual trust and confidence among servicemembers; to ensure the integrity of the system of rank an command; to facilitate assignment and worldwide deployment of servicemembers who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy; to recruit and retain members of the Military Services; to maintain public acceptability of military service; and to prevent breaches of security.
Anyone seeking to join the US military at that time had to answer questions confirming that they were neither homosexuals nor members of political organizations seeking the violent overthrow of the US government. The questions equated homosexuality with disloyalty, and recruits who were lesbian, gay, bisexual, or whose gender identity was not fixed were for decades forced into duplicity in order to serve their country honorably. And so it was that a young man from Chicago named Allen Schindler had to lie in order to join the Navy in 1988.
By the fall of 1992, Schindler was facing discharge after admitting his homosexuality to an investigator, but before his dismissal from service could be carried out, the Radioman Third Class serving aboard the landing helicopter assault ship Belleau Wood (LHA-3) was beaten so severely that his mother, Dorothy Hajdys-Clausen, could only identify his corpse by the tattoos on his arms, one of which was reportedly the badge of the aircraft carrier USS Midway (CV-41), the ship he most wanted to serve aboard.
As a combat cameraman assigned to document the closure of Naval Station Subic Bay in the Republic of the Philippines, I was temporarily detached to USS Belleau Wood less than a month after the murder, and the ship was rife with rumors and innuendo. Most of it was false. The only thing that seemed clear was that Schindler’s murder in Belleau Wood's new homeport of Sasebo, Japan, was no random act of violence perpetrated against a hapless Sailor in a foreign port. There was something of profound historical significance in what was already being called Shindler’s “martyrdom” in the national news media.
As an aspiring photojournalist seeking to make a name for myself in the civilian world, I sought out people in my off time who knew Schindler after my return to San Diego and before long found myself in the apartment of Jim Jennings, a former Hospital Corpsman First Class with 14 years of service, who by his own account was forced out of the Navy because of his own homosexuality. With him was Schindler's mother, Dorothy Hajdys-Clausen, who had in a matter of weeks been transformed by her personal tragedy into a nationally known advocate for homosexual rights in the military. I asked if I could take their portrait, united as they were by Allen Schindler’s death.
As they sat for the portrait, there was something missing in their pose and facial expressions, and I didn’t know what to do about it. These were two people united by the untimely, violent death of a Sailor serving overseas, and unless I acted quickly while taking meter readings, that was all the photograph would convey. While the case of every Sailor who meets an untimely end is in itself a tragedy, this particular loss was not only tragic, but it was rapidly becoming transcendent.
Schindler was not killed in action during declared hostilities against an officially-defined foe. He was not the heroic victim of a terroristic act as Steelworker Second Class Robert Dean Stethem had been in Beirut a few years earlier, for which he was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Schindler was, it seems to me now, a victim of lethal violence not so much because of the uniform he wore, but because of what he was inside. It was a fratricidal violence borne of the blinding hatred of a shipmate who had run afoul of those he served under and with, not because of disloyalty, but because of difference.
There would be no medal presentation for Hajdys-Clausen, nor an invitation for her son’s earthly remains to join the hallowed, honored dead interred at Arlington. Finally internalizing this fact, and the feeling of justice denied that seemed to permeate the air in that quarter of San Diego, I gained just an inkling of an insight into what my subjects might be going through at this moment in time. I asked Jennings and Hajdys to look at me as they would look at those responsible for Allen Schindler’s death. This was the result:
Writing for Esquire Magazine in 1993, journalist Chip Brown wrote of the case’s impact:
My personal photographic project would be derailed not long afterwards by the grueling pace of deployments as a member of Navy Combat Camera Group, including another stint aboard Belleau Wood to cover the United Nations withdrawal from Somalia. Hajdys-Clausen, however, remained focused and committed to her cause during a quixotic two-decade struggle to reclaim dignity for her son and secure legal standing and rights for all LGBT military members, past and present.
This struggle would unite a coalition of the powerless: Active duty, retired, and discharged LGBT veterans who had served or were serving without legal protections of any kind; and powerful: Lawmakers like Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, voted into office by an electorate that had changed over the decades while the U.S. Military hadn’t. Their political consciousness was shaped by an act of murderous hatred that occurred one month shy of 14 years before Schindler’s murder: The assassination of former naval officer-turned San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Milk, the first openly gay American elected official, and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated on November 27, 1978. Both the shootings and the light sentence meted out to the gunman, a former colleague of Milk’s, touched off a revolution in the American body politic. In subsequent years, openly gay politicians would become members of Congress and the House of Representatives, and those who were until then serving in silence would openly declare their sexual orientation without fear that for that reason alone they would be voted out of office. Those members and other politicians sympathetic to the plight of homosexual servicemembers, including President Bill Clinton, would push to repeal the ban on homosexuals serving in the United States Armed Forces.
The political push-back was intense, and as a result the compromise measure that came to be called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) was put into place in 1993. Although much maligned and even reviled by those on both sides of the debate for the next 17 years, DADT did accomplish one small but fundamental thing: The official presumption, clearly elucidated to presumptive military recruits, that homosexuality was as great a threat to national security as a communism or anarchism, was over.
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| Dorothy Hajdys-Clausen and Jim Jennings, San Diego, 1993. (M.C. Farrington) |
Who could have known that within a matter of months, the death of a young sailor halfway around the world would come to symbolize the struggle to end fifty years of discrimination against gay servicemen and servicewomen in the United States? Or that hundreds of thousands of protesters assembled on the mall in Washington D.C., would take up the martyred sailor’s cause and, driven to their feet by the colloquial oratory of his mother, would tomahawk their fists at the Capitol and cry, “Justice! Justice! Justice!”
My personal photographic project would be derailed not long afterwards by the grueling pace of deployments as a member of Navy Combat Camera Group, including another stint aboard Belleau Wood to cover the United Nations withdrawal from Somalia. Hajdys-Clausen, however, remained focused and committed to her cause during a quixotic two-decade struggle to reclaim dignity for her son and secure legal standing and rights for all LGBT military members, past and present.
This struggle would unite a coalition of the powerless: Active duty, retired, and discharged LGBT veterans who had served or were serving without legal protections of any kind; and powerful: Lawmakers like Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, voted into office by an electorate that had changed over the decades while the U.S. Military hadn’t. Their political consciousness was shaped by an act of murderous hatred that occurred one month shy of 14 years before Schindler’s murder: The assassination of former naval officer-turned San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Milk, the first openly gay American elected official, and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated on November 27, 1978. Both the shootings and the light sentence meted out to the gunman, a former colleague of Milk’s, touched off a revolution in the American body politic. In subsequent years, openly gay politicians would become members of Congress and the House of Representatives, and those who were until then serving in silence would openly declare their sexual orientation without fear that for that reason alone they would be voted out of office. Those members and other politicians sympathetic to the plight of homosexual servicemembers, including President Bill Clinton, would push to repeal the ban on homosexuals serving in the United States Armed Forces.
The political push-back was intense, and as a result the compromise measure that came to be called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) was put into place in 1993. Although much maligned and even reviled by those on both sides of the debate for the next 17 years, DADT did accomplish one small but fundamental thing: The official presumption, clearly elucidated to presumptive military recruits, that homosexuality was as great a threat to national security as a communism or anarchism, was over.
Forever.
Although the photo essay that I hoped would one day grace the pages of Life never materialized, the experience taught me to be a keener observer of and cultivate a greater appreciation for the lives of others. In some modest way I hope that this post will remind us all that we must do the same if this great republic our military works hard to protect from external threats, now with lesbians, gays, and bisexuals officially authorized to be members (with the status of transgender servicemembers remaining as of this writing a work-in-progress), is to avoid collapsing from within.
“Lest we forget their sacrifice,” is a maxim of the Naval History and Heritage Command under which I serve. That is why, in addition to more accomplished or famous LGBT servicemembers whose once-hidden heritage we now honor, I also ask that we remember people like Allen Schindler, Jr., whose sacrifices go unheralded by all but a few; whose untimely appointment with destiny came not in the midst of war upon the treacherous slopes of Mount Suribachi, nor in a fetid prisoner-of-war camp in Kamakura, but in a time of peace within a quiet municipal park in Sasebo.
Although the photo essay that I hoped would one day grace the pages of Life never materialized, the experience taught me to be a keener observer of and cultivate a greater appreciation for the lives of others. In some modest way I hope that this post will remind us all that we must do the same if this great republic our military works hard to protect from external threats, now with lesbians, gays, and bisexuals officially authorized to be members (with the status of transgender servicemembers remaining as of this writing a work-in-progress), is to avoid collapsing from within.
“Lest we forget their sacrifice,” is a maxim of the Naval History and Heritage Command under which I serve. That is why, in addition to more accomplished or famous LGBT servicemembers whose once-hidden heritage we now honor, I also ask that we remember people like Allen Schindler, Jr., whose sacrifices go unheralded by all but a few; whose untimely appointment with destiny came not in the midst of war upon the treacherous slopes of Mount Suribachi, nor in a fetid prisoner-of-war camp in Kamakura, but in a time of peace within a quiet municipal park in Sasebo.
NOTE: None of the preceding post, its contents, nor its hypertext links should be construed as official US Navy or Naval History and Heritage Command policy, nor official endorsement or sponsorship of any individual, group, or organization. The views and opinions of the author are his own.
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