Equal rights for gay veterans: A work in progress

It was a pleasant day at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1966.

“A beautiful day,” recalls James Patrick Reilly. He then pauses, narrows his eyes, creases his forehead and holds the gaze, his lips slightly parted.

“Another day in paradise.”

His face relaxes into a wry smile.

It was also the last time that Reilly, who grew up in Queens, New York, and had only been in the Navy for three years since he enlisted at 17, stepped aboard a ship.

The Office of Naval Intelligence had found out during an anti-gay witch hunt that Reilly, who had served on various submarines and was stationed in Hawaii at the time, was gay.

“One of my friends, I don’t know who, and I don’t care, was caught in a round-up,” says Reilly. “My name must have come up.”

Reilly obeyed the order: he packed his bags and deposited his belongings at a barracks in Pearl Harbor. He also answered probing questions for three days.

“After a while I was just tired,” he says.

Next, he was shipped off to Treasure Island, a vast stretch of land in the San Francisco Bay built from muck in 1937 and home to a naval facility until 1997, complete with stockades and psychiatric wards for gay sailors.

He soon found himself among 300 gay sailors locked up in a two-story barracks at Treasure Island.

“It was very demeaning. The guards would go, ‘hey ladies!’,” he recalls.

Reilly was given an undesirable discharge from the Navy and was declared a “class II homosexual.”

“They gave me ten dollars and a ticket home. That’s all I got,” recalls Reilly.

He spent the next 18 years trying to reclaim his status.

“Big deal! I came back. I didn’t tell my parents,” says Reilly. “But I was very angry.”

Reilly’s anger found expression soon after he returned home. In 1966, he participated in a talk show at WBAI, moderated by William Baird Searles, who was the drama and literature director at the radio station. Among the panelists was Barbara Gittings, a prominent gay rights advocate. She introduced Reilly to her partner in activism, Frank Kameny, a gay rights pioneer.

A World War II veteran, Kameny helped Reilly, along with others who were given dishonorable discharges for being gay, to get his discharge upgraded to “honorable.”

In 1984, after his discharge was upgraded, Reilly could finally claim the benefits he had long been denied.

Today, Reilly, 69, lives in Astoria, Queens, with his partner of 33 years.

Since World War II, more than 100,000 gay members of the US military received dishonorable or less-than-honorable discharges, said Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, according to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek, February 6, 2014.

In September 2011, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” a Clinton-era law prohibiting gay, lesbian and bisexuals from serving openly in the armed forces, was repealed.

In January 2014, Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced the Restore Honor to Service Members Act. The Act aims to correct the military records of service members discharged for their sexual orientation.