Navy Taboo on Gays Keeps Those With Deadly HIV Silent

Clearly 3,200 sailors did not get infected with the AIDS virus by visiting prostitutes during port calls.

But few will admit it.

Because the Pentagon prohibits homosexuality and intravenous drug use--two means of transmitting the AIDS virus--few sailors are honest with officials about how they were infected. And Navy doctors realize this falsehood.

“It’s an accepted fact that individuals are not willing to share their experiences because of the military environment and the possible implications, even though we make every effort to protect their confidentiality,” said Dr. Walter Karney, the Navy’s HIV program director.

While many civilian AIDS patients go through a process of reconciliation, telling their families the truth about their sexual orientation, Navy personnel cling to what’s left of their careers and maintain the party line--they contracted the virus from a prostitute.

“You just hide the G-issue, the gay issue,” one sailor says. “It’s not expressed, it’s not part of your Navy life.”

Sometimes, their cover stories become elaborate tapestries of lies upon lies. They marry women. They date men but tell their colleagues about their girlfriends. They speak with familiarity of heterosexual-oriented bars that they have never seen.

“Heck, I have verbally hit every heterosexual bar in P.B. (Pacific Beach),” said Gary, a 28-year-old hospital corpsman who joined the Navy eight years ago.

Currently, there are about 850 active-duty sailors who are infected with the virus that causes AIDS. A total of 3,200 have tested positive since 1986.

For Gary and other infected sailors, the devastating news about their diagnosis is only worsened by the realization that, to maintain their health benefits, they must never divulge how they contracted the virus. And their heterosexuality is, some say, a grand charade that has taken on increased importance with their diagnosis.

“I feel more pressure now to put on a front, to say I’m dating a girl,” said Keith, a 30-year-old electrician who joined the Navy 10 years ago. “I feel bad that I have to lie.”

For this story, most sailors who acknowledged being gay asked that they be identified only by their first names since they could otherwise be discharged. A number of heterosexual sailors also asked to remain unnamed, fearing backlash from those who regard the infection as a stigma. Still others allowed the use of their names as long as their sexual orientation was omitted.

While an infected person in the civilian world can hold his job without informing his employer for as long as he is healthy, Navy personnel have no such privacy. In 1986 and again in 1988, the Navy conducted service-wide tests during regularly held physical exams looking for those who carry the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, a deadly disease with no known cure. Personnel are also tested when they attend sexually transmitted disease clinics or prenatal care programs.

Those who test positive are informed by their supervising officer or a medical officer. Still reeling from what some regard as a death sentence, they are immediately packed up and removed from ships or distant commands.

It is a double blow, they say.

“It was total rejection. It was like ‘Get off the boat,’ ” Petty Officer 1st Class Dave Lenker said. “Not only are you HIV positive but you are just totally shunned.”

For Lenker and many others, the Navy is their family and the only way of life they have ever known. Lenker, 35, has been in the Navy 18 years. He had worked hard for years to reach a long-treasured goal of becoming a hospital corpsman aboard a ship.

He held that position six months before his supervisor told him that he tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.

“I saw my whole career like a piece of glass breaking into millions of pieces,” said Lenker, a Florida native whose virus was diagnosed in 1986 and dispatched from the Long Beach-based amphibious transport ship Ogden.

Others, like Gary, say the Navy has invaded their privacy.

“You feel violated because they have their nose in your business,” said Gary, a Washington-native. “Here, your boss will know; in the civilian community, their bosses never need to know. If I was a civilian, I would still be working my job now.”

About 900 sailors and retired Navy personnel are treated at San Diego’s Navy Hospital, which tends the largest share--or 40%-- of the Navy’s HIV-infected patients. Many of the predominantly male patients left ships or remote commands so they could be close to the hospital.

According to Navy regulations, HIV-positive personnel must be assigned to a unit that will not be deployed and is within 300 miles of one of four designated treatment facilities: San Diego, Oakland, Bethesda, Md. or Portsmouth, Va.

For the sailors who are reassigned to the San Diego-area, it’s often a wrenching blow. Their careers are derailed. Instantly losing their colleagues, they are thrust into a dizzying new world of injections, medications, examinations, and paralyzing fear. They receive new assignments, new duties. They live knowing they may die. And initially, few believe they will live more than one or two years.

Not all the patients at the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park are gay. Some, like one 38-year-old chief petty officer at North Island Naval Air Station, are, in fact, heterosexual. But even when they are heterosexual and even if they did contract the disease from a prostitute in Africa--few people believe it.

This sailor, who joined the Navy almost 20 years ago, learned that he was infected after he had sex with three prostitutes during a liberty call in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1983. In the months after that fateful port call, he found himself waking at night drenched in sweat.

Though night sweats are a symptom of an infected patient, the sailor--like others at the time--knew little about acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

When he learned in June, 1986, that he tested positive for HIV, he had never heard of it. Escorted off his amphibious assault ship, the walk across the bow seemed to stretch for miles.

“It was the pits. The bottom. The rock bottom,” he said. And as he walked thinking about how he would tell his wife and two children, he heard jeers and calls from his co-workers.

“Fag!” they taunted. “He’s got AIDS!”

Shipped abruptly home to his family in San Diego, he told his wife that he had been unfaithful and had contracted gonorrhea, a disease that experts now believe may make individuals more susceptible to the AIDS virus. Then he announced that he was infected--a disclosure that put a lasting chill on their marriage.

He waited until last month to tell his two teen-age children about his health status.

“Every time I go to bed at night, I am thinking this virus is running around my body,” he said. “I don’t want to die, I want to see my children grow up. I want to live. I want to see my grandchildren. I want to be a grandfather.”

Rich, a 34-year-old hospital corpsman, and others found that it was easy to conceal their homosexuality from officials.

Rich, whose virus was diagnosed two years ago, now takes AZT, a medication tailored for AIDS and HIV-infected patients. A beeper rings every four hours to remind him to take his pills--a telltale sign in the gay community. But Rich tells his co-workers that he’s swallowing a new type of vitamin.

“You don’t have to say a damn word about anything,” said Rich, who had been assigned to Treasure Island. “When I am in uniform or on base, I am 100% military. To this day, I’ve never told anybody.”

Though Rich didn’t tell his colleagues, he and other infected personnel quickly realized that the news of their medical status seemed to inevitably leak out. Shortly after his condition was diagnosed, Rich offered to shake hands with two new junior-ranking personnel members. When they declined his outstretched hand, Rich felt the blood drain from his face. He realized that they knew what is supposed to be a tightly guarded secret.

Rich was lucky. He was able to find the woman in his command who was informing others about his condition. When he complained to his supervisor, she was reprimanded. And the whispering stopped.

Today, he tries to stay in good physical shape, exercising regularly. He no longer eats junk food. He takes vitamins. Even so, he worries that the virus will invade his immune system with increasing strength.

When the blood T-cell count of HIV-infected patients plummets below 400, it shows that the virus has begun to wreak havoc with their immune system. Usually, the patients are then medically discharged from the Navy. Rich’s blood T-cell count is 280. It is the third time it has been well below the discharge point. But Rich is fighting to stay in the Navy.

“I know one of these days I am going to kick off,” Rich said, “but who knows which one?”