Jeffrey McGowan - Major Conflict

We thought we’d simply have a commitment ceremony, until Billiam told Jason about it and convinced him that the time had come to act on his convictions. San Francisco had begun to conduct weddings, and the momentum was building. And the rest, as they say, is history! Billiam and I were the first same-sex couple in New York State to get married, thrusting New Paltz onto the national stage.

For me it was a natural next step. I love Billiam, so why shouldn’t I have the freedom to marry him and to commit myself to the responsibility of that marriage? As for the fact that we are the video clip you see every time the issue appears on television, well, that was just really frightening to go through. The pressure to be dignified and not put your foot in your mouth on your wedding day was nerve-racking. I shudder to think what it must feel like when the scrutiny is negative. Thankfully, once again everything turned out okay.

As a result of this very public act, I have been blessed in countless ways. The first wedding gift we received came, amazingly, from Greg, with whom I’d completely lost touch. I’ve heard from old army buddies and college friends. Every week it seems that people I knew long ago contact me to tell me they support me and that they want me back in their life again. All in all, not bad for a kid from Queens.

If you had told me fifteen years ago that in the late winter of 2004 I would announce I was gay and get married to another man on national television, I would have said you must be smoking crack and would have recommended therapy. Then again, I guess I am living proof that you can teach an old (though not so old, really) dog new tricks.

MAY 2004

It was a brutally hot Sunday, the temperature reaching up past ninety, and Billy and I were walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in linen and seersucker. We were marching along with a few thousand others from Brooklyn to Battery Park in support of same-sex marriage. We would be speaking at the rally in the park later on. The walk over the famous bridge was a first for me, and I savored every minute of it, watching the magnificent skyline sparkle in the bright spring sunlight. Occasionally my vision would be drawn to the lower end of the island, and I’d feel a twinge of pain, that odd absence, looking for the two graceful towers that should have been there but were not, just blue sky opening out to New Jersey, a clean wound now, perhaps, though a wound nonetheless.

What was most striking to me about the march was how young everyone seemed to be. Everywhere I looked, I saw a sea of young faces, smiling and laughing, eager to show the world that their relationships have value and that they’re entitled to the freedom to marry and are prepared for the responsibility it entails.

Later on, after finishing my speech in the park, I was accosted by two kids from Scarsdale, Cindy and John. Both were dressed comfortably in T-shirts and shorts. They told me they were both straight and part of the gay-straight alliance at their high school. I’d heard of such organizations but wasn’t quite sure what they did, so I took the opportunity to pepper both of them with questions. They seemed a little surprised that I was so clueless about the gay-straight alliance phenomenon. I explained to them that I didn’t get the chance to meet many high school kids these days but was grateful that they’d filled me in. Toward the end of the conversation, John said to me, “Mr. McGowan, you’re a hero. We just wanted to thank you for all that you’re doing.”

If they only knew! My life was an example of everything you shouldn’t do, at least when it comes to being true to yourself. In fact, I had spent the last fifteen years doing everything in my power to deny and evade the truth about myself, hardly the stuff heroes are made of. Yet, by an odd twist of fate, I’d been blessed (cursed?) with my own fifteen minutes of minor fame—enough, at least, to have made an impact on these two serious teenagers from Scarsdale.

During the media circus that surrounded our marriage ceremony, reporters frequently asked me if I was now going to become an activist. To me that word conjures up images of ponytailed people in tie-dyed shirts, bearing strident manifestos, an image that is about as far away from the person I am as can be imagined. And so when John said the word hero, and I saw the expression on his face and on Cindy’s face, two earnest children looking up at me in my linen and seersucker, I cringed, feeling entirely unworthy. The truth is, as this book shows, I haven’t spent years of selfless sacrifice in support of the movement, and I have no right to pose as someone who has.

If I have done anything to advance the just cause of equality for gay people, it was by accident, a result of simply finally making the decision to act. Powerful change often comes from the least likely of places. All it takes is one ordinary person doing one extraordinary thing. The civil rights movement is replete with examples of this. Whether it was Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus or Sergeant Leonard Malevitch coming out to his air force commander in 1975, these were simple people who had the guts and the integrity to stand up for what they believed was right. What I’ve done doesn’t even begin to come close to what these people did. I’m not in their league. The point is, we all have a role to play, and we can all make a difference to one degree or another if we only make the decision to act.

Why have I written this book? How have I arrived at this point? These questions can be answered with a few more very simple questions. Why not me? Why not now? What do I have to gain by remaining cautious, hidden? Immersed in the antigay culture of the military for so long, I mistook being reasonable with conformity, with doing my soldier’s best to squeeze myself into a box made for others. I believed being reasonable meant sacrificing personal fulfillment for the sake of my profession, and as a result I spent the best part of my young adulthood as only half a man. Those days are now over.

What it is, finally, is a question of integrity. I came to believe that not only do I have a responsibility to myself to be honest and open about who I am, I have a responsibility to the people around me as well. That is integrity, and without it, I’m nothing. Ironically, I learned that lesson from the army, the very institution that would have excluded me had I been open about my sexuality from the start.

Writing this book has given me the opportunity to come clean about who I am and to provide a glimpse of what it is like to serve our great nation. I am the man I am today because of the military. Everything I’ve achieved, everything I have, I owe to the United States Army.

I hope that this book will spark a conversation about changing the rules that govern the debate surrounding gay people and the services. Today, we serve honorably at all levels of the military, as we have since the dawn of history. We should be able to do so openly. So what should be done? The first step would be to remove the prohibition against homosexuality in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and allow gay men and women to serve openly, as the Canadians, the British, the Australians, the Israelis, and others have already done. I understand that changing the law is much easier than changing the culture. Still, we have seen the successful integration of African Americans and women into the armed services, so there’s little doubt that over time the same kind of integration would work with gay service members. The training used today to educate soldiers about women and minorities would require little change to ensure that gays were included.

The broader culture has embraced gay men and women in unprecedented ways over the last decade or so. We’ve gone prime-time, in fact, with shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy regularly winning the battle for network ratings. The mainstreaming of gay Americans makes it all the more imperative that the military catch up with the culture at large and put an end to a discriminatory policy that seeks to continue to define gay people as second-class citizens and unfit for service. Morale and unit cohesion depend largely on strong leadership and integrity, not on whether the man next to you happens to be gay.