Leonard Matlovich on the cover of Time magazine
A medal for war, a discharge for love: how a sergeant challenged the US military in 1975.
On 8 September 1975, an issue of "Time" magazine appeared on news-stands that unsettled many readers. On the cover stood a young man in the uniform of the US Air Force, his name tag reading Matlovich. Above it in large letters: "I Am a Homosexual". For the first time, the gay movement had made it onto the cover of a major American news magazine.
Leonard Matlovich was thirty-one at the time, a Technical Sergeant with twelve years of service. Three tours in Vietnam, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart. A model soldier, then, conservative and religious, and in his younger years an avowed racist. That was exactly why the activist Frank Kameny had approached him. Kameny had long been looking for a test case against the ban on serving as a homosexual.
At the beginning of March 1975, Matlovich personally handed his commanding officer a letter in which he came out. The officer was Black. Matlovich told him he hoped for a precedent like Brown v. Board of Education, which had struck down racial segregation in schools in 1954. He later said he owed everything he was today to Black Americans. Their struggle had shown him that laws and attitudes can be changed.
The Air Force offered to let him stay if he signed a pledge never to have sex with a man again. He refused and was discharged in October. Five years later a federal judge ordered his reinstatement. Matlovich expected the military to find a new reason soon and instead accepted a settlement.
He died of AIDS in 1988 at the age of forty-four. He had designed his gravestone himself, as a memorial to all gay veterans. His name is not on it. Instead it bears the sentence: "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."