Freedom to Differ. Diane Helene Miller
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answering the innumerable questions of a first-time author, and her belief in the book and its possibilities. I also express my appreciation to copy editor Joanna Lee Mullins, whose remarkable attention to detail greatly enhanced the book’s readability and consistency. I am grateful to Mary Newcombe, one of Grethe Cammermeyer’s lawyers, for providing me with transcripts and other documents I could not find elsewhere and for patiently explaining some of the legal intricacies of the case. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the two courageous women whose stories stand at the heart of this book. Roberta Achtenberg and Grethe Cammermeyer inspire us all with their courage to be who they are, openly and proudly. In standing up for themselves and their own beliefs, they set a standard of integrity to which we can all aspire.
I am indebted to several readers who generously volunteered their time to read and comment on drafts of this manuscript. Among these are J. A. Bergerson, Marsha Black, Celeste Condit, Pam Lannutti, Anne Layton, and Tricia Lootens. I am also deeply grateful for the insights, ideas, and phenomenal editing of a friend who, sadly, must remain unnamed here. Her work as a public school teacher and the well-being of her children forces her to remain anonymous, lest she endanger the people and the livelihood she cherishes. Her contributions to the clarity of my thought and my writing in this book are immeasurable. With her quiet pride, she stands as a reminder both of the very real dangers that continue to confront gays and lesbians every day and of the tremendous but often hidden contributions that anonymous members of our communities make to our cause. I thank her with all my heart. I hope that someday her anonymity will no longer be necessary.
I am incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a family of friends who are, blessedly, too numerous to name but who I trust will know who they are. First and foremost, I thank the members of the Athens Area Lesbian Social Group for their encouragement, support, generosity, humor, and love. This book is in so many ways a tribute to you all. For friendship over the years, I am grateful to Kelly Bender, J. A. Bergerson, Sammie Foss, Elizabeth Holman, Chris Kesler, Caroline Carriker, Julie Chapman, Jeff Hebert, Donna Stachowiak, and David Tuttle. I am so thankful to share my life with my adored and (intermittently) faithful cat companion, Butterscotch, who is a constant source of joy to me. Finally, I express my gratitude and love to Anne Layton, whose encouragement, support, patience, and understanding sustained me throughout the writing of this book. Her love reminds me, day after day, of the reasons we must continue to struggle for full liberation, and of why we ultimately must triumph.
PREFACE
I am the child from down the street.
Now I’ve grown into someone you might never meet.
—Tret Fure, “Something Blue”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a well-known scholar in the field of gay and lesbian studies, opened her book Tendencies by writing, “I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents” (1993, 1). The statistics on suicide among gay and lesbian teens are dramatic and horrifying.1 They are also far too close to home to have a purely academic ring to them. Only a few years ago, these statistics touched my own university community when a lesbian undergraduate committed suicide, apparently for reasons connected with the oppression she faced or expected to face due to her sexual orientation. In her memory, her family endowed a lecture series at the university to bring in speakers in the field of gay and lesbian studies. They hoped that educating young lesbians and gay men would help them find alternatives to a final escape from a society that makes them feel rejected and unwanted.
This book is not about suicide, nor about adolescence, so perhaps the relevance of this preface will not immediately be apparent. Yet Sedgwick’s observation, the life of the young woman who committed suicide in my own community, and the subsequent actions of her family bring home the motivation and the impulse for this kind of work with a clarity and an urgency that no theoretical justification can capture. Obviously, there are academic motives for undertaking such a study. Yet there is also something more: a faith that language plays a central role in shaping our internal and external worlds; a belief that scholarly pursuits are intimately connected to the achievement of social change; and a hope that the visibility of the written word has the potential to reach people within and beyond academia in a way that appeals to more than detached intellectual interest, a way that actualizes “humanistic” study in its profoundest sense.
Any inquiry into issues of gay or lesbian representations must be circumscribed by the recognition of real lives in peril, by the urgency of achieving social change that ensures the safety of those lives and makes them livable. Human beings are constantly subject to powerful, if constructed, categories, and those categories have concrete consequences that affect happiness, health, opportunity, safety, even life and death. In reality, most of these outcomes remain untouched by even the most dazzling of our theoretical insights. There are obvious limitations to approaching social change through academic means, undeniable drawbacks to the slow timetable and the indirect effects of scholarly pursuits. Arguably, such writing may never save an adolescent life, may never arrive in time, may never reach those whose lives we dream of changing. The specter of adolescent suicide, and of other physical and emotional violence inflicted on lesbians and gay men by themselves and others, is a constant reminder of how many lives have been and remain beyond our reach.
Yet there are also possibilities here, opportunities for reaching out in the hope that our work will mean something to someone, with the belief that it can make a difference. Scholarship of this sort, like the inauguration of a lecture series, is not simply a memorial to what has been, not only a means of recognizing what is past. It is also a statement of hope, a belief that despite the tragedies we have not been able to prevent, there are some that perhaps we can. It is, above all, a commitment to creating another kind of future. In a sense, this may be what all of us—as scholars, writers, and simply human beings—in our highest aspirations seek to achieve.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
—Adrienne Rich (1979, 199)
PROLOGUE
In the winter of 1993, shortly after his inauguration, President Bill Clinton nominated longtime supporter Roberta Achtenberg for the position of assistant director of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Achtenberg, an openly lesbian lawyer and lesbian rights advocate, had served on the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco from 1991 to 1993. Her selection to a position in the president’s cabinet required the approval of the Senate, making her the first openly gay or lesbian nominee ever to face the Senate confirmation process. Because she made no secret of her sexual orientation, Achtenberg and her supporters anticipated some resistance to her candidacy from conservative senators. However, the battle began sooner and more brutally than expected, with Senator Jesse Helms’s statement to the Washington Post that the Senate should refuse to confirm “a damn lesbian.” Many of Helms’s colleagues condemned his outright bigotry, yet the issue of Achtenberg’s sexual orientation became a key point of attack for her mostly Republican opponents.
Colonel Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer had been a highly respected nurse in the United States National Guard for twenty-seven years when she began preparing to apply for the War College to enable her to compete for the position of chief nurse of the National Guard in 1989. During the routine questioning required for top secret security clearance, Cammermeyer revealed that she was a lesbian. As a result of the military board hearing that followed, and despite a flawless record of service, in 1992 she was not only refused the promotion but was also separated from the