Why do the U.S. armed forces require gay service members to disguise their identity and to lie if asked about their sexual orientation? Margarethe Cammermeyer's "Serving in Silence" and Jose Zuniga's "Soldier of the Year" offer powerful accounts of the authors' attempts to prevail over anti-gay hostility in the military.
In 1989 Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer inadvertently stalled her 26-year professional climb when she responded "I am a lesbian" in an interview for a security clearance. Unfamiliar with the policies activated by her answer, she wrongly assumed this admission would not damage her top-flight career. Jose Zuniga, a highly decorated young sergeant, came out at an elaborate public ceremony during the early months of the Clinton administration. He hoped his exemplary record would underscore the absurdity of expelling him, but he was discharged nevertheless.
Ms. Cammermeyer, 52, provides a plain but haunting memoir that illuminates the heroic dedication she brought to her roles as an officer, a nurse, and the mother of four sons. After a long and arduous marriage, choosing a female life-partner brought her a peace of mind she saw no reason to deny. Why, she asks, was her acknowledgment of her orientation repellent to the institution she had brilliantly served for almost 30 years?
Mr. Zuniga, 25, is a more restless thinker. His vibrant book also questions why stating he was gay led to being fired from the Army. But at the same time, he embarks on a wrenchingly subversive exploration of why notions of sexual orientation are necessary at all.
While both authors take issue with the military's social codes, neither is very skeptical of its overall mission or particular objectives. Mr. Zuniga is attuned to cruelty and misogyny in basic training and to homoeroticism "fostered and denied in the same breath" in Army routine; but he goes off to the Persian Gulf war intent on fulfilling his "filial duty." As an Army nurse who treated both Americans and Vietnamese, Ms. Cammermeyer saw the worst of the Vietnam War; but she didn't start to harbor doubts about that conflict until almost 20 years later.
It is the authors' desire not to be severed from the armed forces that provides much of their stories' emotional power. Ms. Cammermeyer describes how military life was uniquely able to satisfy the demands of her value system. As a child in Norway during World War II, she saw her family anguished by Nazi occupation, and then restored to normalcy by American liberation. Shortly afterward, the Cammermeyers immigrated to the United States. The author grew up certain that "No other country in the world had ever done as much to ensure freedom and justice, and the instrument of that achievement was the American military."
Her discharge -- repealed at the time of her writing -- thus constituted an attack on her ability to live by her beliefs in support of the institution she valued most. It also punished her for developing as a human being. "Serving in Silence" exposes the pettiness of the military's attempt to divide and conquer Ms. Cammermeyer by pitting her professional commitment against her awakened sense of self.
For Ms. Cammermeyer, homosexuality is a stopping place; for Mr. Zuniga, it is more a point of emotional departure. At the outset of his coming-of-age account, he is an unworldly Mexican-American youth from a staunchly conservative military family. As his father wants, he commits to the Army, collecting accolades for his achievements and a slew of unanswered personal questions. Although he faces these questions, answers elude him. He puts on the mantle of gay identity only to consider taking it off. He falls in love, first with a man and then with a woman.
In the second half of his book, these relationships are lightly sketched in lyrical counterpoint to his fierce analysis of the eventual betrayal of gay soldiers by the Clinton administration. The objects of Mr. Zuniga's affections, Dave and Laurie, are two young San Francisco attorneys who are married to each other. They later become his housemates. Mr. Zuniga explains that the basis of their friendships is the belief that emotional receptivity is more important than fixed notions of personal identity.
The author's media-wise paramours help him arrange a five-month public relations blitz in support of lifting the military's anti-gay ban, with his coming out as the kickoff event. Although we get the feeling that Mr. Zuniga enjoys telling off the president in public, he is clearly committed to changing the status quo. Ms. Cammermeyer reports that each year 1,400 trained military personnel are discharged due to allegations of non-heterosexuality. Reflecting on the barbaric heterosexual assault at the 1991 Tailhook convention, both writers wonder what it is that military homophobia protects.
Mr. Zuniga closes his narrative from his three-person household in the wake of his speaking tour. He is resting and trying to restore himself with Prozac, or, as he calls it, vitamin P. In the past few months, his mother has died, and he has been rejected by both his father and the Army. He has lost swatches of his life he will never get back. To this reader, though, he seems tired and shaken, but not exactly depressed. "I believe that if the most beautiful love story I have ever lived should ever end, I will never love again with such intensity nor be loved with equal devotion."
Ms. Mackay is a writer who lives in Baltimore.
Title: "Serving in Silence"
Author: Margarethe Cammermeyer, with Chris Fisher
Publisher: Viking
Length, price: 308 pages, $22.95
Title: "Soldier of the Year: The Story of a Gay American Patriot"
Author: Jose Zuniga
Publisher: Pocket Books
Length, price: 321 pages, $22