Member-only story
I Had No Way To Help My Gay Sailor
But I had people who could
In 1987 I was in the Navy, stationed at the Navy Recruiting Command Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The year before I had taken over as director of the Information Resources Division, which back then was about a dozen folks, tasked with supporting all the microcomputers in Navy Recruiting Command (NRC) nationwide.
If that seems like mission impossible, you should know that PCs were still very new and somewhat rare, so we were taking care of a couple hundred machines, most used for administrative tasks. However, the Navy had not yet figured out if these things were a fad or the future, so the enlisted sailors working with me were yeomen (admin assistants, more or less), signalmen (the folks who flashed lights and raised signal flags between ships), and anybody else who had a knack for computers, either fixing them or carrying them. Plus an ensign (most junior officer in the Navy) who was very smart and a former enlisted.
Over the course of two years in the job, I had twenty-two enlisted and officers working for me at one time or another. Of those, at least four were certainly or probably gay.
One I knew for sure (my ensign) because she had told me so; two probably because they had tested positive for HTLV-III (as HIV was called back them) and were subsequently…