Poetry, Part Fourteen

Despite all of the talk of First Strikes versus retaliatory strikes; and Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.); and throw weight; and MRVs and MIRVs; and a nuclear triad of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and armed bombers on Alert 24/7; somehow the whole crazy scheme, in retrospect, worked. Despite the fears and the enormous costs and all of the sacrifices by everyone involved, the United States and its allies, nuclear and non-nuclear powers, and the Soviet Union and its allies never did turn the keys (it was not a "button") to launch the missiles that would have effectively destroyed the world.

Despite all of the many brinkmanship crises during the Cold War and the several hot wars that flared up around the globe, it never came to that.

Those of us on alert simply hauled our alert stash out each 36-hour or 24-hour alert in large, green, canvas crew bags. Within them we carried out our own food when we got very tired of the generally bland or nasty-tasting foil packs that they served at the sites. We also brought out books and magazines and porn and newspapers. Before there were radios and TVs in the capsules in my last year or so on alert, we did whatever we could to pass the long hours when we didn't have anything else to do but watch the many missile status indicators, answer the phones, communicate with topside personnel, and wait for our relief to arrive at the end of our shift(s) below ground.

Some of us worked on getting a Master's Degree. Even though we weren't supposed to for the first few years I was at Minot, at least one of us was asleep most of the time. Later, they cut the size of the crew force by one third to save money, adjusted back to 24-hour alerts, put a magic strip of tape over the Plexiglas covers that guarded the key holes, and one crewman at a time could now legally sleep on alert. Rarely were alerts anything but boring. But the boredom and the threat of complete annihilation kept the peace for approximately three decades until the Soviet Empire fell apart and the Cold War faded into memory and history books.

Missile Launch Facility (Golgotha)

I know it now.
As long ago as these were implanted
there is no war.

At the point of succeeding fear,
through the great, wide extremities of earth,
these silver spikes are driven.
The heart is spared,
but spirit urges lie as a sacrifice.
Fenced-in, connected sections cross the plains,
stunned against the thought of taking life.
We bind both savior and vampire alike--
each victim.

---

Poetry, Part Thirteen

Attending missile school at Vandenberg Air Force base was fun for a few months. I was back in California where I could visit friends and family in the LA area on weekends, at least for the first several weeks. Soon, though, the gasoline shortage crisis made the trip tougher. I'd have to get up early on Saturday morning, to try and find an open gas station to fill up before the trip back on Sunday afternoon. Because my car had California plates that ended in an even number, I could only get gas on even days. I finally gave up trying to make the drive because one weekend I returned to the base on fumes, afraid that I would not make it back.

I drove to Minot when missile school was over with a friend, Tim McConnell. We tried to drive through Yellowstone, but the roads were snow covered and finally they were snow packed and impassable. We had to return the way we came and then drive around the park on the west side and eventually through Montana to the north of the park.

I had already been assigned to the blue squadron, the 742nd in the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. (The 740th--red--and 741st--green--were the other two squadrons.) I was given the additional duty of Squadron Supply Officer, ensuring that each new arriving officer got his issue of cold weather gear.

Lt. Mitchell from Alabama was my first commander. I had two others before I was able to upgrade from Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander to Commander as a 1st lieutenant, probably in late 1976. I was assigned for most of my tour at Minot to Kilo Launch Control Facility (LCF), one of the farther launch facilities, to the far northwest of the base itself. We served our tours 60 feet underground in one of the fifteen Launch Control Centers (LCCs) or capsules.

I would read the LA Times newspaper on alert which I had subscribed to for most of my tour of duty in Minot. If I found an interesting article, with a pointed remark within it, I'd cut out the statement and secretly tape it over the door at Kilo or at one of the other launch sites we'd be sent to over the years from Alpha to Oscar.

The most amusing statement I read was from an appropriate article about nuclear war. It advised, "The best way to survive a nuclear blast is to not be where one goes off." Our launch sites were likely the primary targets of any Soviet first strike against the U.S., so there was no way we could obey this suggested safety advice. We could harden our LCC and hope to ride out any actual first strike attack, launch our retaliatory missiles, and then leave the LCC eventually, even if we had to dig our way out.

My commander and I were out on alert during the Bicentennial celebrations on Independence Day in 1976. We had received warnings at our predeparture briefing about possible protesters showing up (I don't believe anyone thought we'd see any actual terrorists). They might try to disrupt events around the country or even make threats against our military facilities. We had to treat any strange event or sighting as a potential attack. What our security personnel saw that early morning in the dark could simply have been a drunken local farmer, whooping and hollering it up along with the rest of the country. Or it could have been a local kid out for a joy ride who decided to give the Air Force a brief scare. Who knows?

4 July '76 -- Kilo LCC

Farther from freedom this early morning,
amid the year of celebration,
we manually harden our separation to protect us
as quiet threats increase to noisy gestures:
an elusive figure clings to the topside fence
and then is gone.

We had been warned.
Valves close,
emergency air flows,
and we know how blind we become down here.

These are striking depths,
deep for feeling patriotic.
More confusion as I react,
only man alert among these Minutemen.
Questions confirm I am correct,
lifting switch guards, punching buttons.
I had practiced my response.
Though never was it for real. Not like this.

Sounds flow disturbingly.
Most of them dull.
A few so rude that I jump in sleepless anger--
irritated to fight each noise any night.
I would challenge Edison,
and all who improved him into this--
this capsuled form for our fears--
lighting and powering someone's vision of final revenge.

Never in your dreams,
Rarely in your thoughts,
But always in our reliability.

---

Poetry, Part Twelve

I was fated to become a missile officer.

I went to OTS to become an Air Force pilot; but during the three-week Flight Screening Program at Hondo Field, flying the T-41 single-engine Cessna, I kept getting airsick. I never got caught up and eventually washed out.

I returned to a new squadron other than the one I was in when I first got to OTS. It would take some time to process my discharge paperwork. I tried to fit in with my new squadron, but I knew that my days in the Air Force were numbered. Then, one day by the slow-pitch softball backstop during a game, my flight commander told me that my paperwork had arrived. I would be discharged the next day.

Then the miracle happened. We began to hear rumors that the Air Force needed volunteers for missiles at such bases as Grand Forks and Minot AFB in North Dakota, and Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and two other bases, one in South Dakota and one in Wyoming. The Air Force was focusing their search primarily upon prior service Air Force enlisted men. (Women were still not allowed to serve in missile launch control facilities.) Those of us who had washed out of the Flight Screening Program were not even an option.

During lunch that day, I was sitting in the cafeteria with others in my flight, feeling sorry for myself. The others told me to get myself over to the OT club where the briefings were being held and tell them I wanted to volunteer for missiles. I had no time to ask for permission, so I went anyway. I was not alone. Two or three of the other washouts from FSP were also there. We were not given much encouragement by the primary missile recruiter, but we weren't going to give up.

The next morning, I was in class with my flight mates when the squadron commander paid us a surprise visit. One of my flight mates brought up my predicament to him and of my effort the previous day to be considered for missile duty. Everyone else in my flight began to speak up on my behalf. The Major looked surprised at this show of support for me, and I was completely stunned. Obviously, I'd made a few more friends than I had anticipated. The squadron commander looked to our flight commander and told him, "Hold up on Greg's paperwork for now and I will see what I can do."

Weeks would go by with no word at all. I'd continue to go to class and participate in flight activities and wait. Once in awhile, I'd get some positive news that some high ranking officer or other would mention that the Air Force takes care of its own and point to my situation. Finally, just a few days from graduation, I got word to report to a sergeant in an office not far from the OT Club. When I arrived and told him who I was, he slowly told me as I stood, waiting impatiently at each spoken word, about to fall over at any second with anticipation, that my application for missiles had been approved. I was ecstatic. I now had a career path laid out: Minot Air Force Base for my four-year missile assignment, and Vandenberg Air Force Base for missile school in California in the late winter and early spring. I was about to become an Air Force second lieutenant and a missile officer.

My mom flew to San Antonio for my graduation, and we drove back to California in my new 1973 Chevy Camero. I spent Christmas in San Pedro at my mom's newly rented house where she had moved from South Gate after I had left for the Air Force (my sister had moved out on her own a few years earlier). In early January 1974, I flew to Minot and got off a Frontier Airlines 737 at Minot International Airport. My face was met by the coldest blast of winter wind I had ever felt in my life, never having remembered living anywhere other than Southern California. The sun may have been shining, but the temperatures and the wind chill were well below zero. I didn't care. I was home at last.

Missile Combat Crewman

Feeling more secure than any other living,
I have been where sun and moon
draw from the sea a motion,
wearing the touching death edge of Point Loma.

As far as I could be a Marine,
I shared enough to feel an equal
but declined to be complete.
I thought to save lives,
but the Coast Guard never chose me.
So I pound no earth and no surf.

I am from all of that,
well beyond and beneath.
Underground is a new inspiring,
a source of unleashing so multiplied--
nearly absolutely efficient.

I am one at the consoles,
and as with others,
I await.

---

Poetry, Part Eleven

This was the late summer and fall of 1973, when I attended Air Force Officer's Training School in Lackland, Texas. In the Marines the year before, when a Marine officer at an auditorium class mentioned that we graduates might still have a chance to fight in the Vietnam War, many of the young officer candidates--those who had not had prior military service--were verbally and loudly gung-ho about the possibility. I glanced over at Zebal, a guy who had been a Marine enlisted man in Vietnam, and he was simply shaking his head at the foolishness of the others who did not know of war first-hand.

During one of our classes in the large auditorium at OTS, however, when an Air Force officer mentioned the possibility of our getting a chance to fight in the war before it ended for U.S. forces, he was roundly booed. These men and women were no longer fooled by the lies we'd been told about the war. Nixon may have been massively reelected the year before--I'd proudly voted for George McGovern in my first election now that I was 21--but the President's administration was already beginning to experience the first stages of coming completely apart the following August because of Watergate.

The war was not only winding down, the several branches of the military were beginning to downsize, as well. The need for officers and enlisted men and women was no longer as great as it once had been when the war was at its height. Significant changes were in the air.

The F-102 Delta Dagger was the Convair fighter jet that had entered service back in the 50's, before the more-advanced F-106 Delta Dart.

Air Force OTS, 1973 (Forbes Hall F-102)

I was a small part
of a greater diminishing
in barely noticed ways.
Numbers were not the need,
and there were enough weekends
through the window where I could see
fewer officers train to salute in passing.

We were more significant now;
not like the powerless fighter on display:
winged
without insides remaining sufficient to fly.

---

Poetry, Part Ten

The Marines weren't for me. It was a supreme challenge, one that I will never forget; but once I realized that I could meet that challenge, I knew that I didn't want to live in tents for my military career. After I left Marine OCS and returned home to South Gate after ten weeks away, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. This was now the summer of 1972, and the draft was fading as a threat as the war was slowly winding down. Also, now that the airlines were mandated to hire men, as well as women, as flight attendants, I even applied to Continental Airlines and TWA at LAX for a job. I wasn't hired, but my straight friend Pat Byrne was.

For a few months anyway, I went back to working at A.U. Morse & Company, the wallpaper warehouse in Los Angeles where I had worked for almost all of my college years--my dad worked there as a salesman and got me the job after high school. I even moved into the office to take orders instead of filling them in the warehouse. But this was a dead end job for me and I knew it. Besides, I had actually enjoyed being in the military, even if not in the Marines. So, I soon applied to attend Coast Guard Officer's Training School. But sitting in an office and gaining weight from not exercising enough after leaving the Marines, and being too concerned about my future at this stage, almost every time I was tested, my blood pressure was too high.

I soon got fired from my office job for taking a couple of days off to relax and get my head together, then collected unemployment for a few months and tried to work on getting my blood pressure down so that I could get into the Coast Guard. I never got accepted because, while the airlines might have been hiring men for jobs that were previously only for women, the military services were now accepting women into their officer schools in far greater numbers. I then got a job as a security guard after the unemployment ran out and worked the swing shift through the spring and early summer.

One door closes and another opens: Out of the blue, literally and figuratively, the Air Force came calling. Whereas my test scores had not been good enough before, they were sufficient to spark interest in me then. I would get a pilot assignment through Air Force Officer's Training School. I passed my physical easily at March Air Force Base, a base I'd visited with my dad when I was a kid back in the 50's and he was in the Air Force Reserves. I was soon bound for OTS in August of 1973. I bought a brand new 1973 Chevrolet Camero for $4,000 after the GM strike was settled, added an 8-Track tape deck in the glove compartment, packed up some of my possessions, leaving my comic book and record collections behind, kissed my mom and South Gate goodbye one early morning, and drove from Southern California for San Antonio, Texas.

I spent my first night on the road at a Holiday Inn in Phoenix, met a cute guy in the Marine Reserves who worked road construction in Arizona and who was staying at the motel and swimming in the pool. We struck up a conversation after I'd complimented him on his diving, enjoyed one another's company, and later met for dinner in the motel restaurant. I kept hoping he'd invite me back to his room; but he had an early morning wake up call, so we parted company and I was off for El Paso, my next stop where I met up with three other guys the following evening who were also driving to OTS from Southern California. I may have had a sense of Deja Vu after we arrived and were soon assigned to our cadet squadrons, but I quickly found that AF OTS was decidedly different:

The Officer Schools

A deep, indelible blue
on the light concrete between
marches to the sun of another day;
a cadence reminding me of a different service,
and a different uniform: starched
but fading green, and rifles of Marines--
arms ordered slung to my indifference
one morning back when I trained again.

---

Poetry, Part Nine

In the late 60's and early 70's, my best friend Michael and I would drive to San Diego on Saturdays or Sundays to get away. For me it was cathartic when we would drive past the Edson Range training facility at Marine Camp Pendleton and the Marine and Navy Recruit Depots in San Diego. We soon even found our way to the Point Loma Military Cemetary. Besides the remarkable view of the city, the cemetary was a poignant reminder of our own mortality.

It was also a stark reminder of the casualties of the war in Vietnam. After every Memorial Day or Veterans Day, flowers would cover many of the graves. Some families and friends would place letters to the dead on the graves. Mike and I were in college then. Perhaps we had just turned twenty, not even old enough to legally drink. Yet this cemetary, or one very much like it in L.A., could be in our future if we were caught up in the war.

Coming up against mortality like that was terrifically sobering. These were young men of our own generation. That had not been true of the war in the beginning. But the conflict had continued, and even widened, throughout the 60's, so that some of the soldiers and airmen, sailors and marines, were now slightly younger than we. As I would feel more than a decade or two later when those of our generation began dying of AIDS, I had a trememdous sense of guilt, as well.

My family--consisting of my mom, my sister, and me--was lower middle class, living in a rented, two bedroom, one bath house in South Gate, CA, a suburb of LA; but I was able to work part time and pay my own way through college in those days. I had a used 1966 Mustang GT convertible that I also paid for myself (mom co-signed on the loan). I didn't drink or smoke or use drugs, and so I remember the '60's well enough. When I finally graduated from college in December of 1971, I owed no money to anyone. But I had to find my own way then, and the military seemed the only alternative while the war was going on.

Point Loma, on the slopes

No one seems to tremble.
No fear for what once was
when all ceased to be soldiers.
I am terrified,
yet even the graves assure me--
we are veterans,
we survived.

---

Poetry, Part Eight

Perhaps partly from my reading of comic books at the time, specifically the Legion of Super Heroes set in the future, I always thought of the Vietnam War in cosmic terms. Also, throughout high school, I checked out from the South Gate High School library, read constantly, and carried around for months, the Time-Life science book: THE UNIVERSE. It was filled with remarkable and colorful images and fantastic notions of black holes and theories about a potentially expanding and contracting universe.

Most of my poetry later in the decade utilized the terminology and those cosmic concepts that had excited my imagination in high school. Perhaps it was also a form of escape from the realities of being drafted and sent off to a war that was using up U.S. forces endlessly in a war that might not end before it was my time to serve.

Reserves

Your silence scorns our uniforms
now that the planets are taken.
Our guns drain whole star clusters
and you have never raised them.
We have launched galaxies at one another,
shredding them in the infinite,
as we bloat the bounds of battle.

There must be some forgotten front
in need of wasting units.

---

Poetry, Part Seven

During the Vietnam War, there were far fewer set-piece battles between U.S. forces and Viet Cong/North Vietnamese forces. Khe Sanh was an exception. Lyndon Johnson did not want that battle to be another Dien Bien Phu, the battle where encircled and trapped French forces were forced to surrender after several months of losses. That battle was the final, significant action before the French were forced to recognize Ho Chi Minh's victory and leave Vietnam. We Americans essentially took over the war after that through the southern half of a now-divided country.

In a way Khe Sanh did become another Dien Bien Phu because that battle was the major diversion that the northern forces used to keep American forces from realizing that the Tet Offensive was about to explode throughout the whole of South Vietnam. While the northern forces were decimated by these almost-suicidal attacks against American positions and bases throughout South Vietnam during Tet, the American public felt that the war, if the enemy could mount such wide-spread attacks, could not be won. That the public had been lied to about the potential for victory in Vietnam all along.

The publicity battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, as a whole, was now lost.

Khe Sanh, In Defense

They did not flee.
The stars could not be reached.
The continents were occupied.
The homeland was controlled.

But alien explorers, excavating,
will generalize their fate,
and unfairly judge--
as foreigners always do.

When the results are released,
the galaxy will carry the globe reluctantly,
constellations may shift away,
and comets will shower it with spittle.

The planet is the naked outcast
when all of its defenses are crushed, or dead.

---

Poetry, Part Six

Back in the 1960's and early 70's, when the Vietnam War was at its height, draft physicals were also at their height. If you passed your draft physical, you were almost always immediately inducted into the U.S. Army and, later, the Marine Corps. Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant gave us one view, though for most potential inductees the experience was not at all amusing. Even one of my favorite rock bands the Byrds sang a very somber Draft Morning.

I would have my own physicals to take in the early 70's after my college deferment was up because I had graduated and Nixon had initiated a draft lottery (my number was an uncomfortable 119--most of those below that number were called up and had to serve, which was why I soon decided to join the Marines as an officer candidate, or eventually the Air Force, also as an officer trainee, after I decided that the Marine Corps was not the branch I wanted to serve in for my entire career).

Several of my friends had draft physicals but were not called up for various physical or even psychological reasons. My best friend at the time, Paul David (Dave) Moore, was so concerned that I picked him up the night before and we drove around, stopping at the famous chapel in Palos Verdes. I tossed a coin into the wishing well and asked the fates to take care of him. The next morning when I dropped him off at the downtown LA induction center, I drove to work and remained concerned about him for the rest of the day. Later, I was surprised when he called me and I learned that he had been rejected. (At the time, I liked to think that my wishing well offering worked a bit of magic.)

The following was the first of many poems I would write in the next few years as I battled my own demons about whether or not to serve in the military and in Vietnam as my college years began to move toward their end even as the War itself dragged on interminably:

Morning, Time to Report for Induction

The sun fires tracers outward,
piercing a new hold.
The weight is pulled up
over the edge of the earth.
With fatigue
the fiery mass sits down.

---

Poetry, Part Five

Last year was the 30th anniversary of my resignation from the Air Force. I had every intention of simply letting the year pass by peacefully. No trip to the Academy to reminisce. No private observance. I wasn't going to get out any memorabilia or reread any poems. Nothing. It was all 30 years before and my life had moved forward. I was over all of it, I told myself, especially since President Obama was likely, now with the support of many military officials, to repeal DADT and allow gays to serve openly, at long last.

As what typically happens in such matters, fate stepped in and decreed something else: A pipe broke in our storage room and, as all of my items in that space were in cardboard boxes, everything that I had saved from my Marine OCS days and Air Force OTS days and Air Force years, including the Academy, was sprayed or soaked. Little had been untouched.

I was forced to painstakingly remove each box, unload all of the varied contents, and separate out every piece of paper, booklet, pamphlet, item, object, whatever, and hope that they dried out and were not totally destroyed or stuck to other items and become fused together. Unfortunately, since I wrote so much of my experiences on paper with the kind of color pens that easily ran when wet, many journal pages and notes and scrawls were completely ruined. Some were only partially damaged. Fate had randomly eliminated some of what I had experienced, some of my memories, while preserving others completely.

I even found a paragraph/poem by Philip Levine that I had written down by hand and that had obviously resonated with me then (and does even more now): "Once, as a boy, I climbed the stairs in a sleeping house and entered a room no one used. I found a trunk filled with post cards and letters from a man who had traveled for years and then came home to die. In the moonlight each one said the same thing: how long the nights were, how cold it was so far away, and how it had to end."

So, whether I had intended to or not, I was forced by a burst pipe to review the distant past and make a bit of sense of it all, all over again. The poetry I wrote in those days was another artifact that certainly needed revisiting:

Camouflage

In homes,
away from public buildings,
in the hills overlooking a chapel,
and hushed behind partitions,
we speak of freedom
and rights
as in tones of voices
heard just before waking.

We are masters when disguised;
trained in codes
as secretly as spies. We subvert
as love is treason here
as no one knows.

---

Poetry, Part Four

While I was teaching at the Academy, after Christmas break, word began to spread that a cadet, Dan Stratford, was discovered to be gay. His friends also came under suspicion because they were his friends. All three of their cadet squadrons were soon tarred with suggestive names such as, "Rebel Eleven, Homo Heaven". Dan's squadron was dubbed, "Queen Fifteen". It was all childish and insensitive and stupid. But these were young men and women, some of whom were also gay, who did not want to be exposed, as well. It was exactly like telling, or laughing at, gay jokes so your co-workers won't suspect that you are gay.

How did the authorities find out Dan was gay, you may wonder? This was a conspiracy between two, straight, Christian cadets in his squadron who did not like him and suspected that he was gay because, when on leave, he went to cities such as Dallas or New York or other such sin capitals that were probably homo havens to these two emotional neanderthals. Most importantly, during the search for proof, the two of them conspired and lied about how they came upon the incriminating evidence that proved Dan was gay.

While he was gone one weekend, they went looking through his personal possessions. This itself was questionable on their part. They later claimed to have been looking for a physics paper. This was, certainly, a lie. For what they found, and what they opened and read, was a personal letter to Dan in an envelope. It later turned out to be from a Canadian attache in Denver who was gay and wrote some things that made it clear he, at least, was gay. By knowing Dan and writing to him, he put Dan under suspicion. Of course, Dan should never have kept the letter among his personal things at the Academy. But cadets should not normally be digging through other cadet's possessions without permission, even if they were actually looking for a physics paper, which obviously does not look anything like a personal letter in a stamped envelope.

The fact that they lied, conspired together to lie, and that their lie, while transparent, was not as easily proved, should still have brought an immediate investigation, and subsequent expulsion, of these two cadets because their statements were a clear violation of the Academy honor code. But since they found evidence that another cadet might be gay, there was a bigger fish to fry than two lying, though straight, cadets.

Years later, after I had moved to Denver, I was put in touch with the late Randy Shilts, who had written the wildly successful 80's AIDS investigation and expose, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON. He was in the process of writing a book about gays and the military, a book that was to be called, CONDUCT UNBECOMING. He was interviewing as many gays whom he could find who had been forced to resign. We spoke several times on the phone. I was briefly mentioned in chapter 34, page 327, though not by name but as the instructor who had been cashiered, while Dan's experience was specifically detailed in pages 326-7.

I wrote the following poem for Dan, not knowing, of course, that something very similar would soon happen to me. The title of the poem is the French motto for Squadron Fifteen, meaning "to the utmost". Dan died of AIDS in 1995. His partner, who had helped him during the investigation and with whom he lived in Denver from 1979, Dick Tuttle, died in 1989, of AIDS. Dan's one cadet friend George Gordy also died of AIDS in 1989.

"PLUS OULTRE" (Spring 1979)

For Dan Stratford

Backed against the eastern slope
to revive the one remaining fear,
we cast him outward,
at once graduated and then expelled,
with no hope of resurrection.
Where bound decisions
always bind us to misjudgment.
Washing with the past
without compassion;
absolving ourselves in precedent,
in committee.
Secretly unable to swerve
from practicing precision.
No courage to tolerate now
what will be accepted
in the months when we debated,
when we cared.
So we turn now in farewell,
knowing when we'll each forget.

Who were those before?
Who after?

Ignoring strength;
advancing no one.

---

Poetry, Part Three

I wrote three volumes of poetry before I stopped: SONS OF MEN, COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE, and NO SECOND SAIL. Volume One was primarily about my thoughts on the Vietnam War and mortality. Volume Two was mostly about my years in Minot and my thoughts about nuclear war and mortality. Volume Three was about my time at the Academy and the aftermath of my forced resignation. There was some overlap, to be sure.

When I was stationed at Minot AFB, I lived in the Bachelor Officer's Quarters (BOQ). I knew two officers then who claimed to be bisexual and with whom I had sex a few times over my four-year assignment. I was also friends with three pilots from the 5th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the Spittin' Kittens. Roger, Tom, and Larry flew aged, twin-seater T-33 aircraft as targets for the squadron's aged F-106 Delta Dart interceptors. Arguably, the F-106's were the most beautiful fighter aircraft ever designed, the T-33's the most ungainly looking.

We were all stationed there at the height of the Cold War. We never knew for certain if any of our training exercises or active duty alerts might result in our going to total war. It all seemed unthinkable. But it was never an impossibility. We were young and in our prime of life, our 20's. Those years and our youth never to come again.

In 1978, I left Minot for Colorado. Roger, Tom, and Larry also left in the years soon thereafter. In the early 80's, while Roger was stationed in England, Tom was training to fly the F-15. One day I picked up the Colorado Springs paper and read that Tom had been killed in a training accident over Arizona.

Tom also loved the song by Simon and Garfunkel, The Only Living Boy in New York.

Eager To Fly

Thomas Worthington Brundige, IV
F-15 pilot and our friend

Fall is the wary promises
winter wearily disappoints.

And though we
are also temporarily assigned,
his flight surely grieves us
as our own.

He ejected into what we train
might be survival, might be safety;

escape is only a chance,

and a possible intercept,
so he kept ascending.

What matter the expense,
technology fails us,
and when it eludes,
we are all victims.

Like an Academy falcon
flown too far,
he exceeds that obscure horizon
where eyes and instruments cannot go.

But the mind succeeds after what is taken;
we land what the great blue stole;
as often as we want when we journey,
our time together and Tom enfold.

---

Poetry, Part Two

The year I taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, 1978-9, was their 25th anniversary of existence. Not at the current location, though. They first began operation at Buckley Field in Denver until the new campus was completed near Colorado Springs later in the 1950's.

The English Department decided to do something special with the cadet creative writing publication, ICARUS, to commemorate the anniversary. The cover included four different, previous covers of ICARUS. Inside the issue, volume XIV, from 1979, they allowed me, one of four moderator/editors, to include a poem that I had written about the Academy when I visited the campus for interviews in 1977, while I was still stationed at Minot AFB. I was a bit surprised that they used my poem because it wasn't entirely complimentary, but this was all before my exposure and the subsequent investigation.

The Academy

I remember the trees...
Pines in their natural formation
randomly cover the hills at noon.
We visitors are about the lunch procession:
Cadets marching to a mid-day meal.
We each observe;
and I have my impressions
but hold them in suspense,
matching my integrity with these surroundings.
The steel cathedral rising to the skies
points with the evergreens close behind.
Yet neither competes now with this parade.
I must choose my words as wisely.
True to thoughts and fairly
I see this formation of youth pivot
in a movement that must come to no meaning
in time, with practice.
Men and women emerge,
contrasting even as trees grow to these hills.
All to leave this merging as one mass.
Pushed, at last, to different duties,
and a similar discipline.

I am always nudged by sadness
by such a place as this.
Resentful that I can neither confront nor conform.

I forget how it was for me when I marched.
As they will forget.
As we must remember.

---

Poetry, Part One

From the late 1960's until the early 1980's, I wrote poetry. I also kept a journal. My East Los Angeles Junior College (they were not called Community Colleges then) English instructor Miss Nancy King encouraged me to write poetry and to keep a journal. Perhaps she knew that they could each keep me company during the lean times of my years ahead. The following was my first organized poem. I wrote it after reading Dante's INFERNO for class, inspired by the Terza rima rhyme scheme. Miss King helped by lopping off some of the opening lines and a few lines at the end that were unnecessary. In the college creative writing book, MILESTONE, it received honorable mention in the Spring of 1969:

Tourist Trap

Now only tourists poke
around the ruins just for fun,
taking souvenirs away. No one spoke

of girls throwing wilted lives toward the sun,
while more boys went to war although some returned
in boxes, parts, and pieces.

They explored, exploded, and ignored atrocities
while crawling around on their feet
building weapons, so don't waste your pities

on them. They starved for the food they could not eat.

Obviously, the then-interminable Vietnam War was going on. I also remembered scenes of young women joyously throwing flowers upon departing soldiers in World War I. Someday, our war would be over and, likely, be a distant memory and even, as with previous wars, a place where people went to pay homage or to recall where they had served.

---

I Have Regrets, Part Three

When I was forced to endure the humiliation of being fingerprinted and investigated and eventually forced to resign from the Air Force and the Academy in the summer and fall of 1979, I experienced some situations that surprised me and others that deeply disappointed me, as you might expect.

One day, when I was required to visit Harmon Hall, the administration building, I decided to walk across the Terrazzo level from the academic building. I got no more than a few yards across when several former students noticed me, saluted, and stopped to talk. Soon, others joined them and there was a crowd. When some were forced to leave, others took their places. Most knew what had happened and were, I suppose, showing their support. Eventually, I had to leave to make my appointment. When I got to Harmon Hall and spoke with the officer with whom I was required to meet and told him what had happened, he said, "I hope the commandant [of cadets] didn't see that."

Soon after all of this occurred, someone higher up in rank decided that I should not be sitting in the English Department each day that I was required to come in. I suppose they felt that they were somehow showing support for my situation and so I was transferred to Harmon Hall on an editing project, just to get me out of sight and out of mind. I used to drink milk in those days and bought some from a vending machine in the building. I lifted the carton to my lips and drank deeply. It was badly spoiled and I nearly gagged. That felt like one more humiliation on top of so many others.

On my last day in the Air Force, I was finally allowed to remove all of my possessions from my former office, all of my books and other personal property that the OSI had sifted through for more evidence of my perversion. These items had been boxed and set aside. Nobody helped me, but I had already gotten used to being shunned by my former colleagues because they had good reason to keep their distance. (A few of them had taken me to lunch at the golf course cafeteria, to show their support, soon after the OSI appeared with their accusations and proof in the department on that fateful day. Across the dining room this noon time, I noticed the same two OSI agents having lunch and mentioned it to the others. That was the last time I ate there with any of my former colleagues. I had been banned from eating in the cafeteria in the academic building since cadets occassionally ate there, so I would have to get into my car and drive to the golf course to eat lunch every day. I didn't want to get the others in trouble or have them be accused of being gay since the military often covered someone under a dark cloud of suspicion for merely "associating with known homosexuals".)

On one of my last trips up the elevator from the parking garage below, the elevator stopped between floors and the door opened only slightly--not enough for me to even think of trying to get out. I could see people's feet walking past and that was about it. Even trapped for a few minutes (it eventually continued its lift upwards and then fully opened), I kept thinking that the building itself didn't want to see me go. But I eventually took the last box out, said goodbye to a few of the others, including the secretaries who seemed saddened by my departure, and I left without any ceremony and drove home.

It had been on my 30th birthday, a Sunday, September 23rd, 1979, that one of my military attorneys called to say that my forced resignation had been approved. I supposed that happened that way because fate wanted me always to remember the significant phone call and that day and date forever.

When I first arrived at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota in January 1974, I needed an alarm clock and bought one at the base exchange my first week there. I used that clock to wake up for the next four years at Minot until I left in June of 1978, for my Air Force Academy assignment. I took it to Colorado Springs and used it there until my forced resignation was approved on October 12, 1979. Less than one week later, I awoke in the middle of the night and heard that clock laboring to keep time, whining and throwing an electric fit. Needing sleep, I got up and unplugged it. The next morning, hoping that those rude noises were a temporary glitch, I tried plugging it back in. It was dead. I liked to think that it had performed its mission while I was in the Air Force and since my Air Force career was over, it had no further need to function properly.

I still have that clock among my possessions as a souvenir of those terrible times. So anyone who sifts through my things, tossing out what they deem useless, or should they wonder why I kept this non-functioning alarm clock, they'll know why. If they do decide to toss it out then, they will at least be aware of its significance. It won't be like Rosebud in CITIZEN KANE and go to the raging furnace without a second thought.

More than two years later, not long before his graduation, I saw one of my former students at a retail store on Academy Blvd. He was with his girlfriend and told me they were planning to get married soon. Tragically, a few years later, I discovered that he had been killed in a plane crash. His name was on a memorial plaque affixed to a boulder off of the main, paved path between the Goldwater Visitor's Center and the Academy chapel. (Ironically, it was Goldwater, a retired military officer and former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate in 1964, not long before he died who wrote an editorial, supporting the right of gays to serve openly in the military.) Don certainly knew what had happened to me, but it didn't seem to matter to him as we spoke and then wished one another well when we had to leave.

Along with my roommate at the time, Gary, I went back to the Academy in June of 1982, for the graduation of those who had been my students in the academic year of 1978-9. I remembered them all, those many who had persevered and completed their four years. Except for Don, I don't believe there were any others who had died while on active duty. In 2002, they would have been eligible for retirement. Again, I don't know how many of them stayed in the Air Force long enough to retire, but the numbers are typically high for Academy graduates. They were 17 or 18 years old when I was their instructor. I was 28-29, not that much older.

It was a long time ago. And we were all so much younger then. The first day I walked into my first classroom to begin teaching I don't even recall. But I do remember several of my students, and several of the moments in those nine classrooms where I taught in the fall and spring and the one summer makeup class, as well, before my military career ended.

And I remember the lyric from the Air Force song that they always sing at graduation. It seemed to apply to me especially: "We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey! Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force!"

---

I Have Regrets, Part Two

I never entirely abandoned my search for a teaching job once I moved from Colorado Springs in 1991.

In 1992, I believe, I was between my second and third assignments at IBM (not knowing that I was going to be hired for a different project after six weeks away). I began applying for several different jobs during my time of unemployment. One propect would have been at Hewlett Packard, just a few yards west, across an open field, from where I had worked through most of the 1980's, at Kaman Corporation, on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs. I still owned my house there and would simply have moved back in, perhaps to the delight of my cat, Schnozz. But, again, as with the Pikes Peak Community College (PPCC) teaching assignment, I was second to a younger woman whom they hired instead.

An even more unlikely prospect was back at the Air Force Academy itself. I have written about this before, but they were mandated to hire several civilian instructors to augment their previously all-military faculty. I knew this was not going to happen, given my previous history. But I was better prepared to teach, after having been a part time college instructor at PPCC, and having been a technical writer and editor from 1980 until then. I had also gone back to college in 1988-9, to get a secondary certification to teach English. But with 100 applicants to choose from, I was not hired, and I was certainly not surprised.

At the same time, there was an English Department opening at the Community College of Denver. I was among 20 preliminary finalists, and we all met at the college one afternoon. The department chair was a man, but most of the preliminary finalists were, again, younger women. They chose seven finalists from among us. Curiously, I was not one of them, even given my extensive, and recent, teaching experience. When the names were released, I believe that all of them were women. I had experienced something similar when I was fresh out of teacher certification in Colorado Springs. The high school where I had an interview for an opening had all of the current faculty meet with me for the interview. The head of the English Department was a man. However, all of the other teachers were women, mostly older women. I was not hired even though I would have taught the very students who had been my students during my student-teaching at the feeder middle school.

Just last year, I learned of one opening each at two Denver-area community colleges. Not only had I been a technical writer and editor in the work force for nearly 30 years at that point, had that teaching experience from 1978 until 1991, and had the student teaching experience in English, I now had published ten novels, in addition to three volumes of poetry I had written from the late 1960's until the early 1980's. However, from one job prospect, after sending in a lengthy resume and curriculum vitae, as well as transcripts, I heard nothing. From the other, I received a negative response, telling me that the finalists whom they selected more completely fit their needs. A generic reply if ever I heard one.

I wondered if I was not a finalist because of my age, and/or the fact that I had not been in the classroom for 18 years, though I did include the fact that I always trained the new hires at my current IBM assignment. Having direct work place experience as a writer and editor, as well as being a published author, in addition to my years in the classroom, I figured the applicant whom they finally did choose must have been one, incredible teacher. (I suspect, as with PPCC in the late 80's, they probably chose a person whom they knew and who had been a part time teacher for them as I had been for PPCC. Why choose a man in his late 50's who had been out of the classroom for 18 years, whom you do not know? Besides, I had been in the military. With all the returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought that might be a plus. However, for those from the post-Vietnam era, it could just as easily be a negative.)

For that same Denver-area community college the previous year, I had applied for a part time teaching position in history. But I was, again, not selected. I wasn't even able to get my foot in the door so that they would know me personally the next time a full-time position came open.

Elsewhere around the country, because of budget cuts, teachers at all levels are being laid off. I suspect that many are attempting to find jobs in other states like Colorado where there is at least limited hiring. It's a bad time to be out of work or to be trying to find a job teaching, I suppose.

At 60, with retirement looming in the next decade, I think back and realize that, instead of attempting to join one branch of the service or another in the early 70's, I ought to have stayed in college, gotten my Master's Degree, and then began an earnest effort to be hired at one of the many community colleges that were established or opening in Southern California in the 1970's, when education was expanding.

I would have had a safe, secure job all of these years. Of course, I never would have experienced the Marine Corps and the Air Force. Would never have lived in Minot, North Dakota, and been a missile combat crew commander. Would never have lived in Colorado nor taught at the Air Force Academy. Would not have been forced to resign for being gay. Would not have had any of the many experiences I have had or met all of those whom I did meet all along the way and who have remained friends to this day.

And, most important, perhaps, I would certainly not have written and published the Rainbow Arc of Fire series of novels.

---

I Have Regrets, Part One

Something about reaching the age of 60 has made me reflect all over again about the path that my life has taken since I was forced to resign from the Air Force and teaching at the Academy in Colorado Springs.

If my life's journey were a stream, I feel as if I have gotten caught in one of those edges of the stream where the water flows in a circle, off from the main current. It essentially stagnates. Perhaps it is merely gathering strength before moving onward or forward. Or perhaps this is merely a pause in the continued and downward path to mortality.

Sadly, though not morosely, this is a time of one's life when a person realizes how many of one's contemporaries are gone or going fast. Many of those icons, or simply those whom one remembers from before, TV and film stars and personalities, wind up in the obituaries. And you realize that many of them are not much older than you are, especially when only a decade or two separates you from the age that they are when they die.

This is also a time in which one realizes one's mistakes from the past that have severely impacted where one is right now. Frankly, this is not where I thought I would be. Or, rather, and more specifically, this is not where I intended or hoped to be.

I have a job but, working for IBM as a consultant, it's not all that secure, and certainly not for the next decade, especially when I have worked there for the past two decades, since 1991. Unfortunately, I am one of those who did not plan for his retirement. I used the retirement money I'd earned from teaching part time from 1980 until 1991, to publish volumes two and three of Rainbow Arc of Fire back in the late 1990's. Any number of financial advisors would have told me that $17,000 of teacher-retirement pay should not have been touched, and certainly not have been used to pay for self-publishing two more volumes of a series that had not showed the first volume to have any legs.

I was still in my 40's at the time I used those funds; and 60 years old seemed far away, and retirement at 65 or 67 or 70 a long, long way off. But now retirement is less than five, seven or, more likely, ten years away.

Besides the fact that my pay was cut by 20 percent over a year ago, on January 1st 2009, and won't be restored any time soon, and that my job is not at all secure, my medical benefits have also been eroded over the past several years. What's left would not cover any kind of significant injury or illness. So, while in the early 2000's, I might have felt a bit more secure regarding my overall financial situation, now it's gotten much more unstable and likely to get even worse. (I know many people are in worse shape than I right now.)

Where did I go wrong besides spending my retirement pay foolishly and prematurely on my books? And where did I imagine myself, ideally, at this time in my life?

Teaching, actually.

I had always imagined myself as a teacher. When Spock tells Kirk in Star Trek II that being a Starship captain was his first, best destiny, I knew whereof he spoke. Teaching was my first, best destiny. At the Academy in the beginning, of course. Then in evening classes for Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. After nearly nine years of teaching part time, the college had an opening in the English Department. But I came in second. They hired a woman whom they knew better. She had been teaching part time on the main campus while I had been teaching at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base. Frankly, and not at all bitterly from my perspective, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would get the job. I was told that she had taught a few more English classes than I had, so she was hired instead of me.

What they failed to take into account were the nine English classes I had taught full time at the Air Force Academy from 1978-9. What they also refused to count were the dozens of humanities and communications and history classes I has also taught for Pikes Peak College at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base in the previous few years.

As I said, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would be hired instead. I still have no problem with their hiring her and not me. As I said, they knew her (they never came over to Fort Carson to see me teach, BTW), they must have liked her and favored her, and they clearly wanted to hire her as a permanent colleague. My only problem was that their selection criteria was so obviously rigged as to be rather silly. Had they come to me and told me that they wanted to hire her instead, regardless of the reason, I would have had no issue with that decision.

The problem was that by not hiring me--and the fact that there were no other openings in any other department at Pike Peak Community College while I lived and worked in Colorado Springs from 1980 until 1991--I had no other choice but to move to Denver when the IBM job was offered to me. My further mistake was not to realize that the teaching situation at Pikes Peak would not always remain so static. After I had moved, the population of the region almost doubled over the rest of the decade. I didn't realize that the college itself grew substantially. They even opened a northern campus not far from the Air Force Academy, just across the freeway.

Had I paid attention to what was happening, had I not become so wrapped up with writing and then publishing Rainbow Arc of Fire, I would have been aware that there were likely several openings in all academic departments for which I might have been considered and hired, given all those years of teaching so many classes for the college.

I would have had a permanent teaching position with a much more stable salary and benefits. I would not have had all of these regrets anyway.

---

"Nudidity makes me breathe funny."

That quote is from Radar O'Reilly on M*A*S*H.

Of course, servicemen and women are required to get naked for physicals, mainly. I myself had a draft physical during the Vietnam War era. It was all rather humiliating because the doctors were rude and unconcerned about us human cattle passing through. One used his stethoscope, noted that my heart was racing (no, it was not because of all the other naked men around me), and bluntly demanded to know, "What are you nervous about?" "The whole thing," I replied.

What was fascinating was that not too many weeks later, I took a physical for the Marine Corps in the same building on Wilshire Blvd. in Southern California. The doctors were polite and deferential because I was now a volunteer. I breezed along while the potential draftees, seeing different doctors and following a different color-coded line on the floor, were treated the same indifferent and crude way that I had been treated before. I also had a physical later for the Coast Guard and another for the Air Force, so I was getting used to stripping down for the government and the several branches of the military. At Marine Officers Candidate School, we also used communal bathrooms and showers and toilets, with nary a bit of privacy. We camped out in the woods, stopping along our forced marches to urinate as a group, and slept in tents in pairs. After we returned from each march, our platoon commander was required to make sure our feet were OK--a Marine Corps, like the army, does travel on its feet. We'd sit there on our footlockers, in various stages of undress, and await the inspection--we failed to give a hang at that point if we were nekked or not. However, after the first inspection, the sensitive lieutenant requested, through the platoon sergeant, that we cover up our hairy genitals for the next foot perusal.

Today, thanks to the Internet and porn and personal Web sites and several sites designed to help anyone meet Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now, nudity is prevalent. Even in comic books, you find more flesh, even in regular comic books that are not intentionally graphic or feature otherwise "adult" content.

Frankly, my dear prudes, we seem no longer to give a damn. At least not like we used to. If the government or any other agency or group cares to, they can find many of us citizens showing off what used to be referred to as our "privates". That term really no longer applies, does it?

I still remember a comic book from the past decade in which Kyle Raynor, who for a time was the primary Green Lantern before Hal Jordan re-assumed the role, was running down a hall in his apartment in his birthday suit. The only object that covered his privates was a towel that the artist had drawn in the air for strategic reasons. But Kyle was otherwise depicted in the all-together. That image would never have passed the comic book sensors or editors in the 60's and earlier.

But by the 70's, even Cosmic Boy's uniform had dispensed with some of the light pink fabric and his naked chest was shown instead. (Silly me, I thought it was still his uniform rather than his flesh.) Women characters began to feature "tit windows" like the one you can see Redwood/Jane wearing on the column along the left of this blog, making their breasts and cleavage more prominent.

There really is very little privacy left in any of our lives now, am I not correct? Not for anyone in or out of the government, it seems. Our preferences and proclivities--of all kinds--are revealed everywhere. Our lives, or at least significant facts about our individual lives, are also detailed in several places and blogs and profiles and Web sites all over the Internet, many voluntarily provided by ourselves. Even if each of us did not want to expose our personal details and formerly private parts to the world, someone else may do that for us by posting photos or videos of us sans clothing--if such images exist, they will eventually find their way onto the Internet.

Many more of us are not even bothered by all of this personal exposure, regardless of what others think. It's almost become like hiding in plain sight. If you place a few fully revealing shots of yourself here and there on the Internet, some may make that fact publicly known, and there could be some adverse reaction. However, if you make it perfectly clear that you are not at all bothered by your own body as it appears au naturel, then it doesn't really matter much, does it?

I suppose that some readers or viewers were still bothered by Dr. Manhattan in the comic book and then the movie of the WATCHMEN. At this point, why does anyone bother to still be bothered by nudity? In comic books, in movies, or especially on the Internet? It's everywhere, and I, for one, have certainly gotten used to it, even quite comfortable with it, frankly.

---

Weddings in comics and RAoF

There were two comics that I still remember well from the 60's that featured weddings. The first was when two pairs of legionnaires got married in Adventure Comics #337. The cover said it all. They were walking between two rows of their teammates who were holding up wands, and each newly married couple was smiling. Of course, getting married meant they all had to resign from the Legion because of the code against married legionnaires. It all seems rather quaint now, and the marriages were fake anyway. The Legion had learned about a potential threat, and so they pretended to marry and leave the Legion in order to outwit their foe.

The second comic book marriage was the summer Fantastic Four annual, featuring The Wedding of Sue and Reed. Their foes all used the event to attack the team and their friends. It was quite a donnybrook because so many villains showed up to ruin the blessed event.

Obviously, being a gay teenager, I could only tangentially relate to those two comic book events. It would have been inconceivable that two men (or two women) would, or could, ever get married. Not that I saw my life as being that of a permanent bachelor, though that was always a possibility.

When the cadet whom I had met while teaching at the Air Force Academy was forced to resign, he moved in with his much older boyfriend at the time and, for a few years anyway, they lived happily ever after. Dick died in 1989 of AIDS (though he said he had liver cancer). Dan, the former cadet, died in 1995, just before all of the drug cocktails appeared that helped so many survive for many more years or indefinitely.

Had the two not died, they may not have married one another even if it were legal. Dan was about to leave Dick before Dick got sick; and he was going to move to California and in with another man who lived in San Francisco. Eventually, after Dick died, Dan did move to the coast.

But the two had lived together for most of the 80's, and that inspired me more than ever that two men could live with one another happily, whether legally married or not. Besides, gays being able to legally serve in the military was still a far more important issue for me because I still had hope, back then, that I might be able to serve again, finish out my career, and then retire.

When the Gay Marriage issue became much more significant, I was convinced that it needed to be approached skillfully and especially cautiously. Americans were not easily going to accept gays getting legally married, most significantly by calling it "marriage". Calling it a "domestic partnership" instead certainly would help ease the transition, or even "civil union" might also work. But publicly calling our relationships marriages, while demanding that straights give us full equality, at the same time insisting that we were married just like they were, was not going to happen any time soon. I believed that years ago when I wrote my own gay "wedding" book, HARMONY OF SPHERES. And I still believe that is true all these years later.

By demanding the whole thing, we are not going to get much of anything. And what we most need, what we fully require, are the legal protections that marriages/partnerships/unions provide, regardless of what we, or society, calls our couplings. So while we are able to legally marry in a few states, primarily in New England, we cannot even have legal domestic partnerships or civil unions in many, many other states. If marriage initiatives go before state legislatures or congress, we have no chance for sufficient support for passage. If such initiatives end up on state ballots, we have even less chance for passage, as we saw in Maine and California. Even the currently constituted U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to give us marriage any time soon. I think that's sad and unfortunate, but it appears to be true.

So, the all-or-nothing, no-compromise faction has failed us overall. Just as they failed us back when we at least got "Don't Ask; don't tell" instead of nothing. Civil rights, unfortunately, almost never come all at once, even when they are legally granted. Groups have almost always had to settle for half measures and baby steps. And even when full equality is finally granted, it still must evolve in the practical world even though it might have been fully accepted in the theoretical world.

Sadly, while I may applaud the efforts of those who want to marry like the legionnaires or Sue and Reed did in comic books in the 60's, unless we all want to move to Vermont, I don't see us getting anything like that elsewhere unless we are willing to accept terminology such as domestic partnerships or civil unions first. We may very well get to serve openly in the military in the next couple of years--and I was beginning to believe that I may never see that happen in my lifetime. And I am totally convinced, though perhaps not in my lifetime, that we will see marriage eventually. Just not in most of the nation. And not now.

---

Ethnicity, Gender, and other issues in comics and RAoF

The major comic book companies were not only extremely tardy in representing gays in comics, they were relatively slow in representing other racial and ethnic individuals or groups in comics. And, given the era back then, they were relatively sexist and perhaps didn't often realize that they were.

Marvel introduced the Black Panther in the 60's, and DC followed along. Even the Legion would have an African-American member late in the decade.

Ironically, within the Legion there was already a green legionnaire (Brainiac 5), an orange legionnaire (Chameleon Boy), and eventually a blue legionnaire (Shadow Lass). While the Legion had a girl from the beginning (Saturn Girl), she was immediately outnumbered by the boys, Lightning Lad and Cosmic Boy and, very quickly, Super Boy was asked to join the team.* Eventually, there would be Triplicate Girl, Shrinking Violet, Phantom Girl, and Light Lass; but there was correspondingly also Sun Boy, Invisible Kid, Colossal Boy, Star Boy, Bouncing Boy, Element Lad, and Mon-El in the earliest Legion after they were a regular feature in Adventure Comics from #300 forward.

So the ratio of male to female team members was always a bit unbalanced toward the male teammates. (They did try to recruit Supergirl in the third Legion tale in Action Comics #267, but red kryptonite aged her appearance and the Legion had an age restriction: if you were over 18--or apparently if you only temporarily looked over 18--you could not join this teen-aged team.)

In a nod toward future equality of the membership regarding gender, however, the rules were changed so that while previously the team constitution only allowed adding one new member a year, it now allowed one new boy and one new girl per year. Supergirl obviously beat out Shrinking Violet in Action Comics #276. (Sun Boy and Bouncing Boy were shown as the two boys who were attempting to join the Legion, along with Brainiac 5--though, as I mention in the footnote below, a green-skinned boy was depicted as already in the Legion when Superboy joined earlier--though I am now told that this was a change made during the reprints and not when the original comic was created. Regardless, continuity was often hit and miss in early comics; and the editorial, writing, and artistic staffs weren't particularly diligent in keeping errors such as these to a minimum.)

The writer and editor got themselves into hot water with many fans (especially female readers) with Adventure Comics #309 by having Brainiac 5 say, "We'll draw lots for the job...excluding Saturn Girl. Because it's too risky a mission for a girl!" They were forced to rectify this sexist mistake by AC #319 when Brainiac 5 says, "...But...it's too dangerous for a girl! I must eliminate you, Saturn Girl." She indignantly replies, "I was selected by fair chance and I claim my right to go."

When I got around to creating my own adult team, the Rainbow Arc of Fire, it formed slowly. First with Greg, then with Paul as the initial two members--a duo rather than a team, really. Eventually, William and Joseph and Marina and Joan were added. So the gender imbalance between male and female members would continue, just as it had with the Legion. Soon, Dino and Michael and Cleo and Jane joined. Parity was finally achieved with the addition of Liquide and Mercuria (though Liquide has her own unique quality that makes full equality rather tricky).

I also handled ethnicity similarly (though not with a green, orange, or blue-skinned member). Joan and Greg were Hispanic, or at least had some Hispanic heritage in their background, though this was not emphasized (the Legion could get away with alien and alien-skinned members in the early and mid-60's--but those comics would have had a tough time selling in certain parts of the country then if their "unique" members were depicted as black or Hispanic or Asian instead of orange, green, or blue). But for RAoF it would not be until Liquide and Mercuria joined the Rainbow Arc of Fire that there would be teammates who appeared to be a woman with Asian features or one with African-American features--though, again, each had her own unique qualities that were done to emphasize the ethnic imbalances that had existed in the early and mid-60's.

Did DC deliberately try to have an ethnically diverse Legion by making them differently (though alien) colored even if they knew they would not be able to have African-American or Hispanic or Asian legionnaires until much later in the decade? I don't know for certain, but it seems possible. Did the staff give Element Lad an obviously pink and white uniform and later show him as still single when he was an adult legionnaire because someone along the line wanted to hint toward him possibly being gay? I seriously doubt that, but I suppose some readers could fantasize that he might be gay--and at least the possibility remained to make him so. In the 2000's, for one Legion (there have been several over the years), Invisible Kid obviously had feelings for Brainiac 5; but that was undone by a new Legion which appeared more recently when that other Legion was shelved.

* An interior scene of the early Legion clubhouse did show the backs of heads of four more legionnaires, three of whom were girls; but we were not shown whom they were. A later panel in the first Legion comic also showed an unidentifiable young man in the foreground and another who could only have been a green-skinned Brainiac 5 along with a second unidentifiable boy member standing behind Brainiac 5.

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The Million Dollar Comic that Got Away

Back in the mid-60's, I came across Adventure Comics #290 at a junk yard in South Gate, California, the town where I lived and attended 9Th grade through college graduation. This particular issue featured the Legion of Super-Heroes before they became a staple in Adventure Comics from #300 forward. I immediately recognized them from the earlier Superman comic book, The Death of Superman imaginary tale, so I snapped up that copy for probably a nickle.

Not long after, I noticed that our corner grocery store (not exactly on the corner but close to it and about two short blocks away from our house on Cypress Street in South Gate--this was before supermarkets became more prevalent) carried a bin of used comic books. The cover prices were typically 10 cents or 12 cents but, being used, sold for less. There, I discovered a whole slew of Adventure Comics featuring the Legion because they were now a regular feature (#290 had obviously been out more than a year earlier).

I began to hunt down all of the Legion comics I could find. I even discovered that the corner drug store (which actually was on the corner of Long Beach Blvd., across the street from the market) carried new comics and I snapped up a new copy of Adventure Comics #311 in which Polar Boy and the Legion of Substitute Heroes declares war on the Legion.

After many weeks and months of this modest buying spree, I had every Legion comic except Adventure Comics #305. (I was also missing a Justice League first parter of their very first JLA-JSA crossover event.) I was told by a friend that in Huntington Park, the town just north of South Gate, on East Florence Avenue, near the corner of Seville Avenue was a used books and magazine store that also carried used comic books.

But I was also told that if the owner had copies of each of these prized comics, they would not be cheap. I learned as much when I was told that they would be fifty cents a piece. I was told to write down the title and issue number of each comic I wanted and to return in a couple of days so that the owner could visit his stock in the back of the store and retrieve them for me.

Just to put this in perspective, my first job at the South Gate Rod & Gun Club as a trap boy paid the princely sum of $1.25 per hour, and I worked there on Saturdays and Sundays through my senior year of high school. So you can see that even handing over $1.00 for two comics was an expensive proposition for me, but I just had to have those two issues and forked over the money and was handed the two comics.

Before I departed, the store owner casually mentioned to me that he had a copy of Action Comics #1, and that he would let me have it for $75.00. I may have noticeably blanched at such a fantastic sum of money; but I was certainly tempted by the offer, regardless of the price.

However, it was not something I could justify, not to myself, nor especially to my mom, who never could understand how I would fork over even a few pennies for used or new comic books (I never told her about the two comics for $1.00).

Needless to say, I never found a way to come up with $75.00. And, for decades ever after, each time I have heard of some wild auction in which a copy of that comic has sold for thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and now, just this past week, $1,000,000.00 dollars, I keep thinking of that opportunity that slipped past me approximately 45 years ago.

Certainly, I might have lost it along the way, or sold it for much less at some point. However, I did manage to retain my Legion comics collection for all those years, selling it for nearly $2,000.00 before I bought my condo in Denver, Colorado, in 1997, using that money, and the money I got from selling off my record album collection as a down payment for my condo.

Anyway, it's been a nice story to tell over the years whenever I hear that someone has paid such a fantastic sum of money for an old comic book that I could have had for what now seems like peanuts. And I always wonder whatever happened to that copy that could have been mine. Who bought it? Did they manage to preserve it all these years and sell it, as did this particular owner, for a huge sum of money somewhere along the way?

OK, I promise next post to discuss the Rainbow Arc of Fire issues that I mentioned with my last post.

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Gays In Comics

As I have said, I read comics for most of the 1960's and all of the 2000's. There was NO WAY gays were going to be featured in comics in the '60's. Such topics were not discussed in polite society, so gay characters were not going to exist in comic books. Cops routinely harassed and arrested patrons of gay bars in major cities in those days. The Stonewall Riots were very late in the decade.

However, the 2000's are another story. But the number of gay characters is still somewhat minimal (even if you only believe that gays comprise five percent of the population): Northstar, Apollo and Midnighter, The Rawhide Kid (mostly done for the silliness factor), Hulkling and Wiccan, Batwoman and, recently, Rictor and Shatterstar, and a few others over the years, some of whom were retconned back to straight.

There are those in the industry who don't like the fact that once-straight characters are turned gay (as if that doesn't ever happen in real life). And there are even gay comics fans who have expressed their distaste for the fact that, when a character is gay, his or her sexuality becomes the dominant issue--that sexuality can even detract from the quality of the comic itself and the super heroics therein. (I don't get this argument at all but no matter.)

Certainly, the Comic's Code contributed to the lack of gay characters in comics for so many decades. But I was never much concerned with why there were no gay characters in comics.

There were none when I was growing up, so my response was to not have straight super-heroes in the Rainbow Arc of Fire. If we could be excluded from their mainstream, then I would exclude them from my mainstream. It was not so much revenge as fair play and balance. Oh, I could include a straight character as a villain (just as movies often portrayed a lesbian or gay man as the villain in a film).

The Rainbow Arc of Fire was my super-hero universe, just like DC and Marvel created their own super-hero universes decades ago. Just like they waited for years to include GLBT characters, I waited for years to introduce straight heroes into the Rainbow Arc of Fire universe.

Superheroes are typically positive role models. For a gay kid growing up, I suppose I had to take comfort in the notion that many superheroes had secret identities, just as I had my secret gay identity that I kept hidden from the world. The Legion of Super-heroes, my favorite teen team, was in the future. One would have anticipated that the LSH would not have to preclude the introduction of gay characters, but even Star Trek didn't much address these kinds of issues for years and years. Don't Ask; Don't Tell existed even for the Legion of the future. If a legionnaire were gay, we were not going to be told about it, not with the morays of the '60's guiding the production of comics, even about superhero teams in the distant future.

Next post: ethnicity, dating, kissing, and marriage in Rainbow Arc of Fire.

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Violence In Rainbow Arc of Fire

Where do I stand on violence in my own stories and series?

If a story required violence of some sort, I did not shirk from going there and writing that. Not to give away too much, but in the second book, AUTUMN SAGA, there was plenty of violence. A beheading, a strangulation, several vicious attacks are defined in detail. But the reader has to decide what ultimately happened. One reader/reviewer on amazon got it all wrong, unfortunately.

In the Legion story when Lightning Lad was killed by the freeze ray, he did blow up Zaryan's Earth-invasion ship in space. Since he was dying and Saturn Girl then attempted to get him back down to Earth before he died, I don't really see how Zaryan and his minions in the destroyed ship managed to escape being killed when their ship blew up in space. The vacuum and the cold would have killed any human being in about a minute or less. (I guess the fluids in your body turn to gas. You also suffocate and freeze.)

However, even with the Legion code of not killing, this incident was glossed over by the writer, editor, and artist. All we know is that the invasion of Earth was stopped by LL's actions. No word was mentioned about what happened to the vast invasion force (in the single invasion ship?--even that part was not handled very well).

In a later Legion tale, when every single Legionnaire but one is killed by the Doll Man, no Legionnaire kills him even though they all die. I am afraid that my own characters would not allow themselves to be killed off without punishing their attackers. And, of course, the Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes do face a deadly invasion fleet in space, and they do know that if any of these invaders lands on Earth, humans will be killed. So, what do you think would be their response?

Realistically, I don't believe you can have stories, and invasions, on this scale and *not* have anyone in the invasion fleet not be killed. It would be far, far too difficult in the dangerous and even deadly realm of space to destroy invading ships and not kill the invaders within those ships.

The Rainbow Arc of Fire heroes certainly would not take a life needlessly or unnecessarily, but I never felt I would ever saddle them with a no-kill code. This isn't like a Death Penalty provision in the legal code. When an individual hero, or a team of heroes, is fighting powerful enemies to the death, I don't think it would be realistic to expect them not to kill those who are trying to kill them. And how many more Earthlings would die when you restrictively attempt to stop invaders from landing and killing the human inhabitants of the planet?

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Violence In Comics, Part Two

The first super-hero comic story I ever read was "Lex Luthor, Hero." But it will always be known to me by the title of the third part, "The Death of Superman". The story appeared in SUPERMAN #149 in November of 1961. The copy I read was missing its cover, and I don't even know how my step-brother managed to acquire a copy of the comic.

Yes, it was deemed an "imaginary tale", and I have it as part of a trade paperback, DC's GREATEST IMAGINARY STORIES. But that does not matter. Imaginary or not, it read like a real story. It felt like a real story, despite the disclaimer at the end, "The chances are a million to one that it will never happen." Later, of course, as part of a really BIG EVENT, Superman was killed off--for the time being back in the 80's.

When a significant comic book character is killed off, even if temporarily, it's an important event. And the comic book companies take full advantage of that event to publicize it and especially to sell more comics. Marvel took advantage not that long ago by killing off Captain America (Steve Rogers). But nobody believed it was for good, especially not with another Captain America feature film in the offing.

In the imaginary death of Superman, Lex uses green Kryptonite rays to kill him. There's certainly no blood and there's no gore, but Superman does turn green and eventually dies. And to this pre-teen at the time, it was a violent death and it was a prolonged death, even if it was imaginary. (Perhaps the cover made it clear that the tale was imaginary from the start, but remember that the copy I read did not have a cover, so I took it as real up until the very end and the disclaimer.) And the creators took full advantage by killing off Superman and then showing a huge funeral event after his death, with famous and not-so-famous characters walking past his glass coffin from all over the universe as well as from the future (the first Legionnaires Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, and Saturn Girl, my initial exposure to these fabulous teens from the future).

Not long after Superman was killed this way, Lightning Lad was killed off by a freeze ray from Zaryan the Conqueror in ADVENTURE COMICS#304. Of course, in AC #312, he was brought back to life, even if another had to sacrifice his life to revive him. The revolving door between life and death was now in full swing.

So, very early on in my own comic book reading, key characters were violently killed, even if the blood and gore were not depicted, and even if their deaths were eventually undone in one way or another. And, I might also add, President Kennedy was assassinated not long after the imaginary death of Superman, though his untimely death could not be undone. Real violence would become a significant part of rest of the decade with civil rights murders, civil mass murders, violent reactions to protests, violent protests, the war in Vietnam, and further political assassinations. One could not easily avoid the inherent blood and gore in real life.

Because comic books were still primarily the entertainment of choice of pre-teens and teenagers, blood and gore would stay banished for some years to come. Bloody violence might wash across the movie screens after BONNIE & CLYDE, but comic books would remain relatively blood and gore free for a few years anyway.

So, what to make of the violent, bloody death of Ares in SIEGE #2?

Frankly, I didn't much give a damn. It may have been quite visceral. But it is on the printed page, and all I could think of was that it reminded me of that plastic model kit that used to be available, also back in the 60's, The Visible Man. His body was clear, but his insides, if you painted them correctly, were quite colorful and realistic. Which is all to say that I have seen the insides of people before (even the faked guts spilling out that was depicted in the movie CATCH 22).

And the problem is that, no matter how graphic, the comic book companies have hedged their bets from almost the very beginning by either not REALLY killing off the character, or bringing back, no matter how impossibly, any famously "dead" character.

If Bendis and Company wanted to kill off Ares graphically, to prove that he was really, truly, totally dead, it doesn't actually work. Any future writer can resurrect Ares and it won't have mattered how graphically his death was once depicted. Hippolyta was killed off very graphically in the OUR WORLDS AT WAR series from DC several years ago. But like the Barry Allen Flash and Supergirl being killed in CRISIS, everyone can eventually make it back to life. So any depiction of comic book character deaths, no matter how violent or graphic, is simply an exercise and little more. (Wolverine gets hacked up and burned off and he still has the ability to reconstitute himself--and that has been shown more graphically than was Ares dismemberment.)

As I have implied, of all the deaths of all the heroes over all the years, none impacted me as much as my first, The Death of Superman, or the senseless killing of the little kitten, tossed against a wall in BAST. Everything else may be interesting in its own way, but it does not impact me at all. The deaths may be realistic, but those killed off can be, and are, resurrected almost all the time. As others have proclaimed, it's a turnstile or revolving door to the underworld and, therefore, has no real or lasting impact. Unfortunately.

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Violence in Comics

Welcome! All of the previous posts about the RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE series are still available along the column on the left. But I have decided to write posts as often as I am able about various subjects that may be reflected in the series itself or relate to topics that I have addressed in the series in one way or another, primarily or tangentially..

The following is my take on an on-going issue that comic books, which influenced my writing, have always faced since they were viewed, more so in the past than now, as a medium primarily for children and young people, Violence in Comics:

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I must admit that I am currently way, way behind in my comics reading. Not just weeks, perhaps, but months. It may be one of those temporary periods of personal malaise. Between Marvel Comics' DARK REIGN and DC Comics' BLACKEST NIGHT, was it all becoming too bleak, too unremittingly morose for me to take at this stage of my life? It may also have become one of those situations where, once I got behind, the task of catching up has become, in and of itself, a chore that has taxed my desire to read so many comics all at once. (BTW, I still keep buying my weekly comics, to the delight of my comic store guy, Ray. It's just that I buy them and leave them in the bag I brought them home in. Thereafter, the bags of comics pile up around my already snug condo.).

Now, the one advantage of reading these many series of comics titles in order is that I have a better chance of understanding what is happening with the titles I still do read (from Marvel: NEW AVENGERS, X-FACTOR, MIGHTY AVENGERS, and a few others now and then; from DC: GREEN LANTERN, FLASH, SUPERGIRL, JSA, JLA, and a few others now and then). And now Marvel has begun the special event SIEGE, and I am not even caught up with the preceding DARK REIGN--though the two events are related and SIEGE directly follows events in DARK REIGN..

I am much the same way with TV series I follow: I wait until the series seasons appear on DVD (and now, more than before, on beautiful Blu-ray), and I watch the entire new season episodes all at once: HEROES, SMALLVILLE, THE SIMPSONS, TORCHWOOD, FRINGE. I am a member of a gay online comic discussion group, the gayleague.com, and it was during an early issue of SEIGE that the group discussed at length the issue of violence in comics had come up yet again. One character, already unbalanced to say the least, has violently, and I have learned, graphically, killed another character (an inherently violent individual himself)..

How much violence is too much violence? How graphic is too graphic? Decades ago, when I first began reading comics widely and pleasurably, even subscribing to a number of titles, especially the Legion of Super-Heroes in ADVENTURE COMICS, where a character killing another character began the focal point of the specific issue. Star Boy, when faced with his own murder, kills his would-be assassin before he himself is killed. For the Legion, killing was against their carefully crafted code. Star Boy was tried, found guilty, and expelled from the Legion. Most fans were upset that Star Boy had been expelled, me among them. Around that same time, an episode of the E.G. Marshall TV show, the Defenders, found an abused housewife on trial for murdering her husband, a mean, nasty monster. I stopped watching the series when she was found guilty of murder rather than being let off for having acted in self-defense. College came along and my record album collection began to take precedence, and I stopped collecting and reading comics, except for the occasional Legion comic now and then..

Flash forward to 2000 or so, and after I found the GLA once again, having lost the Web site before that, and I began to contemplate two more RAINBOW ARC OF FIRE volumes that would definitely require that I read comic books once more to catch up. I was advisted to read CRISIS and SANDMAN and STARMAN and PROMETHEA and several other titles to catch up then. But even though, throughout the decade, I was reading many titles and trade paperbacks, I still never felt that I had caught up or ever would catch up. I had missed almost the entire 70's, 80's, and 90's; and that would leave me with a serious handicap I might never overcome..

By the end of the decade of the 2000's, comics had become more and more dominated by these BIG EVENTS such as AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED and INFINITE CRISIS and SECRET INVASION and then these newest, DARK REIGN and BLACKEST NIGHT. One BIG EVENT after another began to wear on me and eventually caused me to find myself with stacks of comics piling up, and I was where I currently am now. But in one minor comic, BAST, I saw something that made me stop reading that title and even returning that issue to the comic store in protest. A violent character took a little kitten and through it against a wall. The kitten's death was graphically depicted, and I was thoroughly repulsed. The writer and artist and editor had crossed the line as far as I was concerned. But how would I respond to this latest, violent event in comics, the death depicted in SIEGE? Tune in tomorrow, because I promise that I will have caught up with all the current issues of Marvel's latest event, SIEGE, and I will relate my thoughts.

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