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When I signed up for Officer Candidate School for the Navy in the late ’60s, it’s a good thing that my mother filled out the form and not me, because it asked if I had had any “homosexual tendencies”.
It was on the list of maladies that you needed to recognize before they let you in. So I didn’t have to lie about that, but I knew in my heart what was going on with me, who I was attracted to, all of that.
It was a big dark secret that I hadn’t acted on at that point, but I knew what I wanted to act on. And fortunately, the Navy provided more inspiration in that regard, if not actual action on my part.
I had been asked to appear on a television show, I think, to talk about the Navy. I don’t remember what. It was something in Charleston. It was my first time on TV, and I made every effort to make sure that I didn’t come off like a big sissy. I’m sure I did when I look back on it, but I put a little swagger in my step in order to pass. It’s hard to think about it now. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anybody to not know I was gay, but I didn’t at that point.
I wrote a number of letters home, which my mother saved religiously. And those letters are now in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley as part of my archives. I’m very pleased that it’s there, by the way.
I’d like to read you an excerpt from a letter that I wrote home to my family just a few days after I had reported on board the USS Everglades. I’d already made a joke about the ship being named after a swamp. The letter really captures what my mood was at that time.
Here we go.
Dear Mummie and Daddy,
The last three days have been a real jolt to my system. For a while I felt so depressed and inept and frightened that I was eleven years old and back at Camp Seagull again, wondering what humiliation my uncoordination had in store for me that day.
The captain, Tidd (it rhymes with Kidd ) nodded gravely when I told him of my lack of training in crypto and communications procedures and all I could see was Wyatt Taylor filling out a little green card reading…
Wyatt Taylor was the big guy at camp.
“Needs to improve ability to play various types of ball games.”
That’s very much true about me then and now. I have no interest in various types of ball games.
I was so awkward at camp, and I felt the same way really on board the Everglades. It was 600 men, and it was just a big factory. It was in the stinky heart of North Charleston. It was pretty miserable, actually. There were mosquitoes, and it was a very hard time for me because I felt like I was not where I belonged at all.
I was constantly getting lost. I couldn’t even find my own room sometimes. And it was embarrassing for an officer to ask an enlisted man if he knows the way to his room — especially if you call it a room. It was a cabin.
I was just really a fish out of water, and Charleston didn’t make it easier on me.
The ship itself was a destroyer tender that held 600 men. Its function was to sit in port and take care of other ships, other destroyers. That only got interesting when you went ashore, which is what we did eventually.
But on board the ship, the captain sort of embraced me. I think he knew I was a doofus and wanted to help out. And he let me write the ship’s newsletter, which I named The Tenderloin, as in Destroyer Tender: Choice Cuts on the Chopping Block.
I spent way too much time picking on the executive officer, who was very unpopular, a little martinet of a man. And I’m a little ashamed of that now when I think about it. I think he must have needed some friends, and he didn’t have any.
I was a communications officer, which meant that I was in charge of the signal flags and the radio and a lot of other things that I had no clue about whatsoever. I soon learned that enlisted men do all the work on one of these big ships, and officers have to pretend that they are, so that’s what I did.
I had something called a Cosmic Top Secret clearance, if you can believe that, which meant that I would go ashore once a week and pick up these rotors that had something to do with encryption on board the ship. And I would go ashore and I would bring those rotors in. I remember feeling really nervous that I was going to drop them into the bay. But you can see what my state of mind was. I was always living in fear.
Captain Tidd was a tall, affable — very affable — man with protruding ears and a pleasant smile that somehow or other, for me, conjured up Donald O’Connor in those Francis the Talking Mule movies. He was basically a decent chap, and I was really lucky to have him take me under his wing in the way that he did. Later on I would follow him to Vietnam.
He demanded professionalism. Even when he was chastising me, he did it in a nice way. I’ll never forget the day he approached me about the fact that I was sunbathing on the deck. And he said, “I don’t mind if you and the men sunbathe on the deck, but if they’re sunbathing on the port side, then I’d like you to be sunbathing on the starboard side.” And I think that was the first clue I had that he had some sense of what a threat I might be if they unleashed that monster.
There were a dozen men in my division, and I really liked most of them a great deal. Some were smarter than others. Some were cuter than others. One of them really stood out to me, a 19-year-old Billy Budd of a blond named Spikes. He was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. He was a signalman, which I considered the most romantic of all the Navy jobs.
My father learned of my birth when he was in the South Pacific through signal flags. I think it said, “Mother and son doing fine,” something like that. But Spikes, when he worked his flags, every muscle in his body seemed to participate in the procedure, and it was a lovely thing to watch. I still get chills thinking about it today.
One of the other officers on the ship told me that he thought that I was spending too much time with Spikes, showing favoritism. I believe that was the way he put it. And I couldn’t imagine what he would have seen in my behavior that would have made him think that, unless it was the time that Spikes was in the hospital having an appendectomy and I went to visit him, which is what naval officers are supposed to do with their enlisted men when they go into the hospital. And Spikes sort of pushed his trousers down — not his trousers, whatever he was wearing in the hospital — so I could see his “war wound,” as he called it.
He was a very sweet guy. I still remember him with affection. Nothing, of course, ever happened. I just dreamed of it.
As you can tell, I was quite smitten with him. But there was temptation everywhere on board the ship, not just Spikes. During the morning muster, some of the men very proudly wore their morning wood against their thirteen-button flies and made jokes about it. It’s when I realized that something that was very real and powerful for me was just a joke for other guys. They would grab each other’s asses and say, “I’m going to get me some of that,” completely in a joking mood, but it was still homoeroticism.
My writing in The Tenderloin caught the attention of Captain Tidd, who could tell that I had a taste for the vivid, and he put me in charge of the welcome-home committees for the ships coming into the harbor. This usually involved tugboats doing a water welcome, which was a huge ejaculation of water to celebrate the arrival of the ships returning home.
I worked with some cheerleaders in the Charleston area who participated in some of those welcome-home committees. And then I had the brainstorm of hiring a stripper to be standing on deck and welcoming — doing a little hoochie-cooch on the deck for the men — until the captain said, “Nice try, but this doesn’t happen in the Navy. Civilian women aren’t allowed on board a ship in the Navy.”
So we had to come up with another solution.
And finally, it happened when the captain said two words: “Get Lurch.”
Lurch was a machinist’s mate way down in the hole of the ship who was known for doing all sorts of wild stuff. I knew what he meant, and Lurch immediately volunteered for the job of being in drag, basically, to welcome these ships home.
It was an amazing thing to watch. He got into it completely, and I think the guys who were being welcomed home, the ships that were coming in, were more on board than they would have been if we’d had an actual female stripper.
Lurch ended up doing the bump and grind to the “Bump and Grind” number from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and ended up in a bright red cocktail dress, tearing it off and shaking his hairy ass at the troops as the ship pulled into the harbor. It was a memorable moment, to say the least.
Those first few months on board the ship were a mix of things for me. The terrible awkwardness I felt in my own body and the raging lust that I felt for my shipmates that I knew I had to keep under control. And I did. But it makes those memories so vivid in several different ways.
I want to talk to you more about that, and, as a matter of fact, to tell you about my time in Naples, which is coming up, I think.
But thank you for coming along today, and I’ll see you soon.
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