Hearts And Minefields

By Jill Smolowe

Scott Peck felt the first stirrings when he was just six years old. While his first-grade classmates in Odenton, Maryland, near Annapolis, wrestled with their ABC's, Scott grappled with a bewildering attraction to men. "I thought it was a phase I'd grow out of," he recalls. As the years passed, Scott fought his feelings. He dated girls and even slept with a woman in an attempt to disavow his inclination. Though he says it was "torture" trying to be a heterosexual, Scott fought on, at one point coming "dangerously close to getting married." Finally, Scott gave up the battle. "A year ago," he says, "I pretty well concluded that I was gay." Like many other homosexuals, Scott hugged that realization close, fearful of what might happen if his father, Marine Colonel Fred Peck, found out. "So many of my friends have lost their families," he says. "That's what I thought was going to happen."

But last week Scott's closet door blew wide open in front of a Senate panel probing the legitimacy of the military ban on gays. For Scott, the feeling was bittersweet as Colonel Peck strove before the committee to reconcile his unwavering love for his homosexual son with his steadfast support of the ban. For the millions of viewers watching the televised hearing, the colonel's poignant struggle humanized a search for a compromise solution that has become shrill and riddled with stereotypes.

The drama was set in motion by a seemingly innocuous message, sent to Washington from Mogadishu. Colonel Peck had taken a break from his duties as chief spokesman for the U.S. military forces in Somalia to write the Senate Armed Services Committee with a request to testify in favor of the military ban on gays. When Scott learned of the pending appearance, he feared disaster. During the past year, while studying journalism at the University of Maryland, he had written several articles for a student publication, the Retriever, that, he says, "left no doubt that I was gay." Scott was afraid that gay activists "would 'out' me to the media" in a bid to discredit his father's testimony. Pre-emptively, Scott phoned his stepmother, Marine Major Joanne Schilling, and asked her to inform his father about his homosexuality.

Four days later, the colonel called from his home in San Diego, and the father and son had an emotional two-hour conversation that swept away years of obfuscations and lies. "My dad found no moral problems with my being gay," says Scott. "He believes, as I do, it is a genetic factor, unchangeable, and not a matter for moral condemnation." By the time they hung up, their relationship, which had been shaky ever since Peck and Scott's mother divorced in the 1970s, was stronger than ever before. "I've been dealing with some stereotypes about Marines," Scott admits. "After hearing his response, I wish I'd talked to him 10 years ago."

The next day the colonel faced the Senate committee, armed with knowledge of his son's homosexuality, a fact that both Peck men agreed should be made public. His fingers laced tightly and wearing what Scott calls "his nervous face," the colonel testified, "My son Scott is a homosexual, and I don't think there's any place for him in the military." In a single breath, he added, "I love him as much as I do any of my sons. I respect him. I think he's a fine person. But he should not serve."

The father's pain was evident as he expressed a personal concern for his son's safety. "He'd be in grave risk," he said. "I would be very fearful that his life would be in jeopardy from his own troops." Peck seemed far less disturbed, however, by the prospect of a breakdown of military discipline so thorough that a soldier's life might be endangered by deliberate friendly fire. "I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. I'm telling you that's the way it is," he said. "Fratricide is something that exists out there."

Peck's personalizing of the debate was a touching surprise in what many critics saw as an orchestrated compromise on the gay-ban issue conducted by committee chairman Sam Nunn. "It's Nunn's dog-and-pony show," says Lieut. (j.g.) Tracy Thorne, a "Top Gun" navy bombardier who is being removed from active duty because of his homosexuality. "He's got the witness list totally skewed against those who want to lift the ban." When the Senate panel | toured the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base last week to hear from the rank and file, 15 of the 17 witnesses supported the ban. Thorne claims that several straight officers and enlisted personnel had volunteered to testify in favor of lifting the ban but were screened out by base officials working with Nunn's staff. The Campaign for Military Service, a coalition of groups opposed to the ban, also collected affidavits from more than 100 gays and lesbians at Norfolk who were willing to testify, provided they would not be fired. Nunn's staff turned them down.

During the tour, Thorne was particularly taken aback when Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina publicly lectured him about his homosexuality. "Your life-style is not normal," Thurmond said as the audience at the base applauded wildly. "It's not normal for a man to want to be with a man or a woman with a woman." Thurmond then asked if Thorne had ever sought help from "medical or psychiatric aids."

Back in Washington, Nunn brought in a military luminary to dim all others. "In every case that I'm familiar with," said retired General H. Norman Schwarzkopf of Desert Storm fame, "when it became known in a unit that someone was openly homosexual, polarization occurred, violence sometimes followed, morale broke down, and unit effectiveness suffered." Schwarzkopf argued that the military had its hands full with deep defense cuts, troop reductions and base closures. He also offered a graphic description of how military leaders would respond to any order to integrate gays into the forces: "They will be just like many of the Iraqi troops who sat in the deserts of Kuwait forced to execute orders they didn't believe in."

Committee members peppered Schwarzkopf and other witnesses with questions that seemed designed to depict gays as a greater risk to "unit cohesion" than women and blacks, two other groups that initially met with resistance before being successfully integrated into the military. When officers responded with sweeping generalizations that painted homosexuals as HIV infected, flamboyant and sexually predatory, they were not pressed for specifics.

While gay activists charge that the Senate hearings fall far short of the fair review promised by Nunn, some straight members of the military have also begun to question the fairness of the proceedings. "Nunn's already made up his mind," says a Navy admiral, voicing a view that has echoed through Washington corridors in recent days. Last week in an interview with the Washington Post, Nunn maintained, "We've had as fair a hearing as I know how to put forth." He seemed to undercut his own argument when he added with irritation, "Is everyone in this town supposed to be partial but me?"

Although there are more hearings to come, the Senate committee is rapidly moving toward the compromise that Nunn describes as "Don't ask, don't tell." In effect, it would make permanent the interim order issued by the White House in January that put a halt to asking new recruits their sexuality but still kicked out those whose orientation became known. Gay groups see that as no compromise at all. "It's based on the flawed assumption that people are proclaiming their sexual orientation, but the fact is that the majority are discharged because of rumor, innuendo, harassment, investigations," says Thomas Stoddard, executive director of Campaign for Military Service. "Gays and lesbians will continue to serve in fear of having their careers destroyed."

The thinking at the Pentagon, which is also formulating a new policy to present to President Clinton by July 15, runs more toward "Don't ask, don't shout." This would place restraints on conduct that draws attention to a person's homosexuality. But, says a Defense official, the policy would strive to halt witch-hunts and protect homosexuals "from somebody shining a flashlight through the keyhole."

Like many other homosexuals, Scott Peck doubts that whatever policy Clinton eventually embraces will accelerate the number of gay disclosures. "The same constraints that incline most gays and lesbians to stay in the closet in civilian society apply to the military as well," he says. For Scott, such fears are no longer an issue. His candid conversation with his father and his many interviews with TIME and other media last week left few bases untouched. His father now knows that he plans to marry his lover Bobby if and when Maryland laws change. According to Scott, his father's "only stipulation was that he wouldn't give me away at my wedding."

In arguing against gays in the trenches, Colonel Peck suggested to the Senators that they try to imagine the disruptions that would ensue "if you took someone of a different sexual orientation to live in your home and how it would affect the way you carry out your daily life." He seemed not to connect that he had done just that when Scott went to live with him at age 16 -- and that instead it was Scott's life that was miserable, the result of being closeted about his gay feelings. While the colonel remains convinced that gays can't make a home in the military, Scott says, "I have more faith in the Marines than my father does."

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington