A Gay Sailor Remembers
 By Mick Meenan

Pacific combat veteran outlives his silent service
Date of Publication Unknown

Bill Horne, a 79-year-old gay veteran of the Second World War, remembers reading about the Navy pilot who went below decks and blew his brains out after learning that he was the subject of an investigation because he was gay.


"Why should gay troops serve openly?" asked Horne. "Because they are people. They have rights under the Constitution. They are Americans."

On December 23, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll indicated that 79 percent of Americans believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces.

This past July, the Urban Institute, a non-partisan research group in Washington, D.C., released a survey that estimated that of the nation's 27.5 million veterans, one million are gay and lesbian, based on a methodology that counts the overall American population as 4 percent gay and lesbian.


The study was based on data gleaned from the 2000 Census that for the first time included information about same-sex relationships. Gary Gates, who compiled the veterans' research, admitted that the results are not statistically foolproof and do not include an age or term of enlistment analysis. For example, as a percentage of the population, there were certainly many more gays and lesbians in uniform in the "Greatest Generation" during the Second World War, due to mandatory service requirements and the duration of conflict, than there are gays serving in Iraq today. However, America's gay soldiers must remain closeted while troops of the nation's two leading allies, Israel and Britain, may serve openly.


In 1943, Horne was a young sailor serving on a Navy destroyer, the U.S.S. Murray, in the South Pacific. The battles in which he served and fought are as immortalized in the American consciousness as Gettysburg or Appomattox, and are emblematic of the nation's passage into superpower status. Saipan, Tarawa, Truk, Leyte Gulf, Tinian. The names conjure hard-fought contests that left thousands buried on foreign soil, or in the ocean's deep.


Leaving Louisiana as a 17-year-old boy, Horne's self-recognition of his
sexuality was curtailed by a repressive society's prohibitions and his own self-hate. He described high school in terms not unusual for many young gay Americans, regardless of era, as a time of bafflement and confusion, a time of growing awareness in his "otherness" and the nearly unceasing desire for physical intimacy with another young man which only shameful fumbling in a backwoods lot infrequently permitted.

 

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