Most of us have a degree of control over how and when we come out as gay or lesbian.  Not Grethe Cammermeyer.  In 1989, an ambitious Col. Cammermeyer had applied to the War College and was in the middle of an interview for top-secret clearance when she had to decide between making the truthful statement that she was a lesbian or denying that truth and advancing toward her dream of promotion to general.

Her integrity won her a court martial and eventual separation from the military she had dedicated her life to, earning among many other honors the Bronze Star for Meritorious Service in Vietnam.  But it also led to an autobiography, Serving in Silence, which was named Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America, followed by a triple Emmy Award winning movie of her autobiography, starring Glenn Close.

As she continues to speak out for the rights of others, particularly gays and lesbians in the military who are still forced to serve under the untenable circumstances of the dysfunctional Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, Grethe Cammermeyer is definitely a woman with something to say, so let me just get out of her way and let her say it.

MM:  You’re close to the action surrounding DADT these days.  What’s happening out there to result in so many talented service members still getting caught in the DADT trap and discharged against their will?

GC:  Unfortunately there is the arrogance of free speech belief by many young service members.  So they go into the military and let their buddies know that they’re gay.  They don’t have a clue that they could be blindsided and thrown out of the military.

When your friends know, there is always the potential for a backlash if someone wants your job, wants sex with you, wants to follow the rule explicitly, is a fundamentalist, or is someone who doesn’t understand that it’s quality of service that counts.

MM:  Which brings up the point that we all call the law Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but that’s a little bit misleading, because they will ask, and they are always probing and asking, correct?

GC:  They are not only probing and asking, but there are witch hunts.  There are lists of people identified as potentially gay because of who they hang around with, because they play softball, or if they live off base and their roommate happens to have short hair and looks like she might be a lesbian.  I think since 1993, with all the coming out, that there’s a heightened awareness of gays and lesbians in society that was not as prevalent previously unless you had your gaydar working.   Now there’ s a different level of scrutiny.

MM:  Reading polls, you’d think that the majority of straights in the military are comfortable serving alongside gays and a majority of voters want DADT repealed, so where does the impetus for these witch hunts come from?  Does it come from the more than 1,000 flag and general officers who signed that letter to President Obama and Congress in support of keeping DADT in place?

GC:  Who were born in 1905?

MM:  (laughing)  Maybe so.

GC:  Apparently there are many people who have been retired for a number of years who are on that list.  They are old, out of date, don’t have a clue, and are just engendered in their bias from past ignorance.  So I really discard that letter altogether as being irrelevant.  It’s not as though the Center for Military Readiness went out and got signatures of active duty personnel today.

Because senior military personnel haven’t had current personal exposure to gays and lesbians, they live with their preconceived ideas.  Just like us old folks.

Until I knew I was gay, I didn’t know what gay was other than, ‘Gee, they must have something mentally wrong with them.’  I had no exposure other than that.  And so my internalized homophobia was saying ‘Gee, there’s something wrong with me.’  When I figured out I was a lesbian, it was like ‘Are my kids going to want anything more to do with me, are they going to want us to spend time with the grandkids?’  All of that stuff was thrown out into society in the past 50 years or so and has only been challenged in the last 15 years.  So, I think that’s one part of it with regard to those thousand old fogies who signed onto the letter of support of the DADT.

I remember the shock, when I was testifying at the Senate Armed Services Committee, where there was this female Marine, married to a Marine, who had kids on military base, who didn’t want any homosexuals there because she wanted to protect her kids.  What that clearly showed was that she was living in such an insular society, which you know the military is, that she never got a chance to know that she was working side by side with gays and lesbians every single day, and that her kids were either taught by gays or their classmates were gay.

MM:  And all of that could have been defused with a little knowledge.

GC:  Yes.  And the thing is that when you’re in the military, just as with those senior officers, there is no way today to educate on the insignificance of a person’s sexual orientation.  People can’t come out in the military and say ‘You know, I’ve been your adjutant for the last four years and it’s never been an issue.’  Or ‘I’ve just gotten the Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, and now I’m not good enough to serve?’  There is no opportunity for those discussions to take place.

I think it will take quite some time before there is that comfort level of senior service members saying ‘This is a red herring.’  And we’re just not there if civil rights and the right to serve is going to have to be permitted by senior military personnel.

Social justice and human rights don’t come from those who have the power to deny it.  They come from the people who are most affected and from their allies realizing that we need to change policy and that some of these issues are not worthy of a country as great as the United States of America.

MM:  I remember being told as a young airman that if I went on holiday and got sunburned, I could actually be court-martialed for damaging government property.  Is that thinking still alive and contributing to the atmosphere that makes witch hunts possible?

GC:   That’s true.  You are considered government property and not being able to work because of that sunburn is misuse of government property.  So there’s a certain part of all this that’s perhaps grounded in tradition in some way, but it’s also grounded in such irrational thinking, which I have to say is sort of consistent with the irrational thinking of the far right today.

There were school districts that didn’t allow their students to hear the President of the United States talk to them about education.  What country have we become?  I’m stunned as I’m listening to an America that I don’t recognize.

Where is all of this coming from?  Of course, it has to be coming from internalized racism that then becomes lumped in with everything else.  That’s extremely scary to me.

MM:  We have a sound bite society that’s easily motivated into these irrational mob-mentality rages, and the Republicans have figured that out, so they’re going to hammer it, and hammer it.  Every time we raise our heads, they’re going to knock us back down.

GC:  Yes, well, unless we just keep on popping up.  Because they make up such a small minority of Americans as a whole but certainly can play on fear and anxiety just like the Nazis did.  I am so appalled at the loss of civility and the way people act all for the sake of winning.  But we digress.

MM:  Well, since we’ve gotten onto politics and President Obama, what do you think of the apparent disconnect between his very, very strong support of gays and lesbians when he was a candidate and now his actions since taking office, which are beyond passive.  He’s actually been unsupportive in many cases.

GC:  I think there’s a certain amount of political naïveté that we should have learned from the Clinton era, in that we have expectations of being treated equally and that people may not be as powerful as they think they are or as they would like to be.  So the need for developing a cadre of supporters becomes more and more important.

If you think about it, what can he, as one man, do?  Well, he could make a strong statement to Congress about wanting to overturn this existing law and moving forward with the Military Mobilization Enhancement Act for him to sign.  He could write a letter to the secretaries of the various services to stop enforcing the discharges.  But beyond that, unless there is real support in Congress, and for him to lose the health care debate because of gays in the military, the tradeoff there is pretty rough.  Yes, we all believe in our civil rights and it needs to happen, but I’m not sure he has the political capital, until we have a Democratic Congress that has a spine, to make this happen.

Obviously they’re doing political things behind the scene, but you don’t hear it.  You don’t hear the passion.  You don’t hear the commitment.  You hear ‘Let’s not move forward, because of the risk of a filibuster,’ rather than ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’

Let’s make these people accountable and see if we can get the population at large to say this needs to change.

We’re moving in the right direction.  We’re getting more co-sponsors for the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (MREA).   But I’m concerned we’re not going to get the momentum this cycle because of all the other issues and the frank racism rearing its head that I don’t think anybody was expecting.

This does not have as much to do with the military per se as it has to do with the fact that our federal government has a law that separates out and discriminates against a group of people based on sexual orientation regardless of their ability to serve this country.  And that ought to be not only embarrassing, but it is so obnoxious that it ought to be something we would all want to have changed.  To me, it is no less offensive than to have someone three-fifths of a person.

MM:  I want to get back to something you said earlier about perceptions.  In Serving in Silence, Glenn Close had the most incredible military bearing.  Did she study your movements to develop that?

GC:  What she told me at one point – because I’d commented that it took me 18 years to become a colonel and she did it in a month – is that, well I don’t know how much she studied beforehand.  But I think that by the nature of who she is, she comes well versed.  We did talk a little bit about stride, and to walk with a purpose.  For the movie to be credible, she had to be credible, and I thought she did a phenomenal job.

MM:  The reason I asked you about that is it loops back to what you said about having short hair or not having a spouse, and women getting picked out for those reasons.  A woman with your bearing, or just a woman with a positive walk, can get pegged as a lesbian in our society.  In the movie, when you went into that question and answer session to have your clearance raised, it seemed like that was the first time the issue had come up.  Was it?

GC:  For me it was.  I don’t recall ever having been asked before.  But I was also married with four children.  And I didn’t know that I was a lesbian until way later, after my divorce and sort of having my aha! moment.  But I would think that if I wasn’t married with kids that I would absolutely have fit the profile.  Because I was planning a military career and I wanted to be the first female general , sexual orientation or anything else to do with sex was so far removed from my way of thinking about myself that I think that’s one of the reasons it took me forever to figure things out.

I think it’s almost by nature that competent women presenting themselves competently and not having a traditional relationship that’s visible will cause questions to be asked, even though they’re subliminal.  And I think all of us look at someone and make some assumptions or speculate about them.

MM:  Yes, but when it’s us good guys, we get to call it gaydar.

GC:  Well, yes.  And, you know, I wonder about George Clooney.  Now how come we never see him with a woman?

MM:  (laughing)  That’s true.  And I know gay women who really like George Clooney.

GC:  It’s like the old days of Cagney and Lacey.

MM:  Or Charlie’s Angels.  As blatantly heterosexual as they were, Kate Jackson was just so competent.

GC:  (laughing) Then you begin to say, ‘Well, they just don’ t know yet.’

MM:  (at a loss for her next question)

GC:  Are you getting anything substantive?

MM:  Yes, lots of good stuff.  If I put the George Clooney part in…

GC:  He’s been outed on a military interview.

MM:  There you go.  Okay, bottom line, as a pioneer in this fight, what do you see as the absolute surest route to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell?  I think you’ve already hinted that it’s getting MREA pushed through.

GC:  I think the quickest way for this to be solved would be to enact a draft.  Enact a draft, because you need more people in the military, and have it so that gays can’t go in.  It will be asked, and we send only straight people into the military.  I would think there would be a reconsideration of the policy.

But MREA is the path that’s most relevant.  You know, we might think about our individual rights and human rights and all of that.  But that’s not going to fly.  The only thing that’s going to fly is something that has meaning for the military itself and that has to do with military readiness.

What sort of game do you have if you take out your quarterback?  When you look at the records of so many gay and lesbian service members, they are the quarterbacks, they are the leaders.  They have ribbons out the kazoo to reflect the caliber of the work they’ve done.  Why would you throw those people out?  Since 1993 over 13,000 troops have been discharged under DADT.  Fighting two wars, while discharging trained troops makes no sense.  To replace these trained servicemembers the military has lowered mental, physical and personal standards of recruits.  You can enter without a high school degree and they can now recruit someone who is fat, felon and over forty.

When you look at not only the cost of training individuals, but then the cost of discharge and having to replace them, it’s just a travesty.

The estimates are that there are 65,000 gays and lesbians serving in the military today and that there are over a million veterans.  So we’re dealing with a large population that would have a significant impact if they were known and were discharged.

MM:  Added to being a military professional, you’re also a medical professional.  Before we stop, I’d love to know your thoughts on the current health care reform efforts.

GC:  You know, the military and the VA have health care that really works.  Medicare really works.  The fact that this country doesn’t have universal health care for everyone is obnoxious.  The fact that people can lose their homes and their entire life savings to medical illness is a travesty.  If I had my rathers it would be a single payer system for everyone.  Again, I think the reality of the dollar, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and people who don’t understand the cost benefit analysis of health care means change is going to be very incremental.  It may be Custer’s first stand in terms of trying to convince a population that they’re not going to lose anything but they’re going to gain a lot by having health care for all here in the United States.

MM:  Especially with the other side screaming much more loudly than we’re willing to scream.

GC:  Well, we have much more class.  We don’t have to scream like uncontrolled children, but rather can have a dialogue.

To have a public option might be a way to begin this process.  But when you have people who are not looking at the whole picture and are jumping onto information that is totally inaccurate…it’s… to hear people talk, they have already read the bill.  Even though there is no bill.  Let’s fight over the design of the 2020 automobile.  It’s the same logic.  You don’t even know what the design’s going to look like, you don’t even know what the fuel is going to be.

MM:  It’s probably going to be called the death mobile, though.

GC:  Well, they talk about the death squads and yet now, every person who goes into the hospital has to fill out an informed directive as to ‘What do you want to do if you have cardiac arrest?’

And why is this now such a big issue?  Because we can make it an issue.  It is just so ludicrous.  And yet, if you are scared, you are bound to scream out if you are also uninformed by your ignorance.  The way to change that is to become informed.  But get the correct information.  Don’t have it filtered to you.  Read the bill.

To be given incorrect information by legislators…we ought to be able to do better.

On her Web site, this fiercely patriotic woman who sincerely loved the military and offered it her life gives gays and lesbians the following advice:

If you would join the Boy Scouts of America, or a Fundamentalist church, then perhaps you are masochistic enough to join the military. But you are worth more than that; your skills, talents, gifts should be nurtured, acknowledged and appreciated. Find a place where you are appreciated for all of you – serve that organization for the greater good.