As midshipmen, they led double lives, quietly endured anti-gay slurs, and feared discovery and expulsion. But yesterday, 31 gay and lesbian graduates of the Naval Academy asked to be recognized, filing a formal application with the college's alumni organization to start a national chapter for homosexual graduates.
The request, delivered pointedly on Veterans Day, appears to be a first for a U.S. military academy. Although a West Point graduate has run an unofficial group for gay and lesbian service academy alumni for 12 years, never before have homosexuals sought official recognition from an academy alumni association, experts said.
It will be weeks before the Naval Academy Alumni Association makes what would be a historic - and controversial - decision on whether to grant the request. The decision will be viewed as a bellwether for how far veterans groups are willing to go in recognizing gays and lesbians in their ranks.
For the academy graduates - from the classes of 1958 to 1996, all no longer on active duty - the effort is as much personal and practical as political. They say that gay and lesbian Annapolis grads share a set of experiences that broader gay or veterans groups cannot easily relate to. They want a place to swap war stories, network and - perhaps most significantly - show homosexual midshipmen that they are not alone.
"I want gay and lesbian midshipmen to know that we have gone before them and that they can do it, too," said Jeff Petrie of San Francisco, a 1989 graduate and Operation Desert Shield veteran who was in Annapolis yesterday to deliver the application. "If there were an alumni chapter when I was a midshipman, I would have known immediately that I was not alone and probably would not have come to the conclusion that I was a terrible person because I was gay."
The group is calling itself USNA Out.
Aaron C. Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the request, if approved, would be a cultural milestone. "While it's politically impossible for the military to acknowledge the presence of openly gay active personnel, recognition of a veterans group would be an important half-step along the way toward integration and away from discrimination," he said.
Belkin said that attitudes toward gays in the military have grown more favorable in recent years. He pointed to opinion surveys and to recent remarks by retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, questioning the military's decade-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
