‘To serve with integrity and honor’

Dallas Voice
By Tammye Nash Staff Writer
Jun 15, 2006, 22:10

Pepe Johnson wants to spare other gay soldiers the ordeal he endured — and maybe have the chance to enlist in the Army again

Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, gays and lesbians in the military spend their lives looking over their shoulders, censoring their conversations and guarding details of their private lives as if they were national security secrets.

“That’s what we want to change,” said Pepe Johnson, a former U.S. Army sergeant who was discharged in 2003 after telling his commanders he is gay.

“We don’t want to affect the military in any way, except for that one, tiny part of it. We just want to eliminate that paranoia and give gays and lesbians the chance to serve with integrity and honor,” Johnson said.

Since his discharge more than three years ago, Johnson has been active in several organizations aimed at educating the public on the issues and ending restrictions on gays and lesbians in the armed forces.

He recently participated in efforts coordinated by Servicemembers Legal Defense Network to lobby Congress in favor of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act. The proposal, which is likely to die in committee during this congressional session, would allow GLBT people to serve openly.

He also has participated in the Call To Duty Tour, the traveling group of GLBT veterans who make stops around the country to speak out against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and he has formed an organization himself called the Military Equality Alliance that is focused on passage of laws ending anti-gay discrimination in the armed forces.

“We’re going to launch this new organization at the first of July,” Johnson said.

“Our mission is to organize folks around the country to write to their representatives in Congress and tell them to end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ to say that it is a ridiculous, wasteful policy and that qualified GLBT Americans should be allowed to serve without fear of harassment or losing their jobs.”

President Bill Clinton, who during his first presidential campaign had called f
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy into law Nov. 30, 1993. The new policy was supposed to be a compromise that would end the military’s anti-gay witch hunts and allow gays and lesbians to serve — as long as they keep their orientation a secret.

But according to statistics compiled by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, 11,092 servicemen and women have been discharged under the policy, substantially more than before it was implemented. The peak of the discharges came in 2001, the network reports, when 1,273 servicemembers were discharged for homosexuality.

Johnson was one of 787 gays and lesbians discharged in 2003.

Johnson joined the Army and entered basic training at Fort Sill, Okla., in 2000, after graduating from college the previous December. He said that for a young man with limited financial resources from a small town in West Virginia, the military offered a wealth of opportunities.

“I was looking for something different to do, something that was a bit of a challenge. I had several family members who had been in the military, including some who had made a career of it,” he said.

Johnson was a field artillery cannoneer, stationed at Fort Sill as part of the training command and working in support of the Army Field Artillery Training Center. He enjoyed his work and the discipline of the military, and performed his duties well — so well, in fact, that in 2001, as an E-4 specialist, Johnson was named Fort Sill soldier of the year.

A couple of months later, he was promoted to the rank of E-5, or sergeant, and had decided that after completing his first four-year stint, he wanted to apply to officer candidate school.

“I wanted to make the Army my career,” Johnson said.

But his own growing awareness of his sexual orientation and a drastic change in command at Fort Sill stood in his way.

Johnson said that even before he enlisted in the Army, he knew, deep down, that he was gay. “But I hadn’t accepted it. I hadn’t dealt with it. It was something that at first I just chose to ignore,” he said. “I come from a very religious family, and I had a lot of religious obstacles to overcome before I could come to terms with being gay.

“But once I did that, and once I realized this was who I was and not something that would just go away, I started to look into exactly what ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ was and what it really meant in terms of Army regulations,” he added.

At first, Johnson thought he could live with the restrictions.

“They weren’t asking me, and I had no intention of telling them. It wasn’t their business, anyway,” he said.

But then Johnson’s battalion underwent a change in leadership. New commanders came in, bringing with them “a very different attitude, a very homophobic attitude. They didn’t like gays, and they didn’t hesitate to let people know it,” Johnson said.

At first, it started with anti-gay jokes, he said. “I am pretty thick-skinned. I didn’t let those things bother me,” he added.

As the situation got worse, the anti-gay comments became “an everyday thing,” Johnson said. Commanders who would never make a jokes or belittling comments based on race or religion or ethnicity had no qualms targeting gays and lesbians.

“Things I had never heard before in my first two years in the service, suddenly I was hearing every day,” Johnson said. “They set a ‘command climate’ that said it was okay to belittle gay people, to make fun of them and even beat up on them. I had straight soldiers coming to me and telling me they were not comfortable with the things the commanders were saying.”

Some of the junior officers and enlisted men began to follow the commanders’ lead. Those who didn’t including Johnson, quickly became targets for the commanders’ anger. And Johnson started to worry that the situation might affect his until-then exemplary record. Eventually he even began to fear for his personal safety.

Johnson had already come out to his family, and he started to consider the idea of coming out to his commanders. He knew it would probably mean the end to his military career, but at the same time felt that would be better than seeing his record blemished or possibly becoming a victim of anti-gay violence.

So Johnson contacted Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
Representatives of the organization talked to him about what “don’t ask, don’t tell” actually meant, what to expect from his superiors and how to prepare for the coming ordeal.

“I got all my paperwork ready, and then I sat on it for a few weeks,” Johnson said. “Finally, I went to my commander. The first thing he said to me was, ‘What if I tell your mother you’re saying you’re gay?’ I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Feel free. My mother already knows.’”

It was the first in a series of what Johnson called childish tactics that his commanders used to try to humiliate him before finally granting him an honorable discharge.

Johnson said most of his peers and subordinates supported him throughout the discharge proceedings, and many still do now, even since he left the military.

“I wasn’t supposed to talk about what was going on during the discharge proceedings, but everyone was hearing about it anyway. When I finally told my soldiers what was going on, 100 percent of them said they didn’t care.

“They said, ‘We support you, and this is the Army’s loss,’” Johnson said. “The really neat thing about it is that it wasn’t just my soldiers who felt that way. I’d say about 90 percent of the people I served with in that unit — and even some people from other units — stood by me.”

Johnson described one of his fellow sergeants, a Texan about the same age as he, who was always very scrupulous about treating everyone equally, regardless of their race or religion. The only exception he made was in dealing with gay people, Johnson said. But after learning Johnson was gay, the Texan’s opinions began to change.

“He had served with me. We had performed lots of additional duties and special tasks together. I had actually helped him out in the process of becoming an NCO,” Johnson said. “He said because of knowing me, he had to reconsider his opinion on gays.”

Johnson continued, “I see that happen a lot. Once a person realizes they know someone who is gay, they start reconsidering a lot of things they had taken for granted before. But ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is a major roadblock to that because it keeps people from seeing us as individuals instead of as some monolithic group that they perceive as a threat.”

In fact, Johnson said, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy actually harms the unit cohesion it is supposed to protect.

“You develop a certain camaraderie with your fellow soldiers in the military. There is a special relationship there, and ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ violates that relationship,” he said.

“My soldiers told me that it isn’t the fact that someone is gay that bothers them. What bothers them is that a person can’t be honest with them about being gay. The military forces you to be dishonest.”

The policy forces soldiers to violate the oath they take to serve with integrity, and it forces them to violate the spirit of the training they go through.
“One of the points I often make is that the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy hems you in. It puts you in a box, and you are stuck there with no way to fight back,” Johnson said. “When you are trained to be a warrior — to defend and protect and serve — and you can’t even stand up for yourself, it creates a feeling of helplessness. For a warrior, that’s one of the worst feelings you can have.”

For now, Johnson is working in customer service for an information technology company and completing his master’s degree in political science at the University of Texas in Arlington. But he hopes that the battle to end anti-gay discrimination in the military will be won soon enough for him to re-enlist.

“We were a good fit, the military and me,” Johnson said. “My friends tell me I just reek of the military. When I first got out, I was relieved. I was glad I didn’t have to put up with it anymore. I was so relieved to just be away from that uniform. Then, on the second day, when you really realize your not just on leave, but that you are not in the Army any more, you just know that isn’t right.”

Gays and lesbians, as a whole, are like any other group, Johnson said. Despite the stereotypes, plenty of gays and lesbians feel it is their duty to serve their country in the military, he said, and it is wrong of the government to deny them that opportunity.

“Even though coming out to my commanders was a conscious decision on my part, it isn’t right what I went through. And a lot of people had it a lot worse,” Johnson said.

“There’s just no excuse for the kind of behavior I had to put up with in a professional military in a democratic country. That standard of behavior is not acceptable. We need to let our leaders know that, and our leaders need to change the standard.”

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