Category: Reflections

A Decade and One Year

After the “Witch Hunt” of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a Decade of Pride

by Deb Sinness, The War Horse
June 23, 2021

Before the “don’t ask, don’t tell” act were the “witch hunt” days of the military, where lives and careers were ruined by hints and suspicions. Gays lived deeply closeted lives, and I didn’t know a single gay person.

In 1976, Camp Pendleton, California, was my first duty station as a newly trained military police Marine. I was a 21-year-old private first class a long way from my small-town North Dakota roots.

Deb Sinness’s Marine Corps boot camp photo. Photo courtesy of the author.

One Sunday evening, I gathered uniforms to iron to get ready for the coming week. After I was set up in the female barracks ironing room, a Marine ambled into the room.

“Hey Copper, can I iron your shirt for you?”

I’d seen Bishop around the day room, and, according to the barracks scuttlebutt, the Marine Corps was booting her out for being gay.

“Um, no thanks, I’ve got it.”

Bishop didn’t take the hint. She found a molded plastic chair and plopped herself in it directly across from me. Bishop had short dark hair and wore a white T-shirt with green sateen uniform trousers. She shifted her position in the chair to a slouch, her eyes sizing me up. I felt uncomfortable in the heat of her glare.

“Sooo … I know a lot of cops, and a lot of them are gay. Are you?”

Bishop’s bold question shocked me. I was sexually naïve, didn’t date in high school, and rarely did after graduating. I thought my crummy luck with boys had to do with the scarlet letter I felt emblazoned on my forehead for having a mentally ill mother and divorced parents. Being gay wasn’t something that ever occurred to me.

In first grade, I had neighborhood sisters who taught me to pleasure myself and them, but I never had a crush on a girl and definitely didn’t think about dating them. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, there were disparaging whispers and jokes about certain people’s behaviors or mannerisms, but since I didn’t know anyone who was gay, same-sex relationships weren’t anything I could relate to.

Bishop’s question flustered me because I already felt “different.” What did she see in me that made her ask that question? It seemed inconceivable.

Sinness playing keyboard in a lesbian band called Sandy Mulligan and the Gypsies. Photo by Christine Cabrera, courtesy of the author.

 “Not me,” I mumbled, my face flushed. “Straight as an arrow.”

Though there was a hint of doubt in my sexually inexperienced mind, I made a mental note that if getting booted from the Marine Corps and being ostracized from everyone you knew was the price for being gay, I sure as hell was not about to pay it.

I ignored Bishop and focused on doing the best damn ironing job I could. She finally got bored watching me and walked away.

I never saw her again.

After that unsettling exchange, I resisted making close friends of female Marines, never quite knowing what their agenda might be.

After my four-year tour, I folded my uniforms, stored them in my seabag, and stowed my military memories in the bottom drawer of my psyche. I followed the traditional path of marriage to two different men for a total of 31 years.

Every time my small inner voice gave a nudge to the rainbow side of life, my socialized, conservative side said, “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re happily married.”

After coming out, the author trained for and ran the 2015 40th Marine Corps Marathon to celebrate her 60th birthday.
Photo by Annie Sutherland, courtesy of the author.

When I turned 50, I began to reconnect with my military roots. I found a Marine I went through MP school with on the Together We Served website, and we arranged to have dinner together when I was in town. At the initial meeting, the years fell away and we were old Marine buddies sparring over whose boot camp platoon was better.

After a few visits over a three-year period, I tried to ignore the lurch my stomach made when I thought about my MP friend. What are you being weird about? You’re a married woman. It’s nothing.

After a May 2011 visit, I felt a jolt of attraction with a visceral shift in my body that I had never felt for a man. Suddenly everything seemed to come into sharper focus and make sense: It was about me and how I wanted to spend the rest of my life, not her. She was the catalyst.

I had a job with benefits. I’d started over before. I could do it again.

Two and a half weeks after returning from that trip, on the eve of my 27th wedding anniversary with my second husband, I left the marital home and moved into my daughter’s basement to start a new life. I wasn’t sure if I was making the biggest mistake of my life, but I knew leaving my marriage was the path of integrity.

As a military veteran, I came out as a competent, confident woman. I stepped into my new life knowing it would be an adjustment, but I made no apologies. If someone asked me tough questions about why I came out so late in life or about my former marriages, I didn’t shirk from awkward answers. I was proud of who I was, what I had accomplished, and who I was becoming.

Just four months later, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” act died on Sept. 20, 2011, ending the ban on gays serving in the military. With my mother’s mental illness, I had a lot to work through in my life and did not have the moral courage to come out sooner. That I came out the year “don’t ask, don’t tell” ended seemed like perfect synchronicity. It would take another six years to begin coming out of the “having a mentally ill mother” closet.

Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service.

The Power of Dreams & Intentions

It’s almost time to open up the time capsule I buried with my family on the precipice of the 21st Century. When I broached the subject of opening it with my daughter, we talked about all the ways our lives have changed in the 20 years since we carefully packed it with things we wanted to remember. Our lives today look nothing like what we imagined when we sat in our off-grid California cabin and wrote letters to our future selves.

Photo at the center of the vision board I did 10 years ago

A vision board, on the other hand, is not the same as a time capsule. I first learned about vision boards in the early 1980s while taking a Women in Management course during my undergraduate years at California State University, Fullerton. We were to clip images and words from magazines that we were attracted to and bring them to class along with scissors, glue, and posterboard.

On vision board day, the professor instructed us to turn our posterboards over and write “My life in five years, <date>.”  At the time, I was 27, divorced, going to school on the GI bill, and renting an apartment near campus. Interesting, I’ll play along, I thought while arranging the items I brought in.

I looked through more magazines to fill in the hopes and dreams I had for myself. I pictured myself with: a challenging career; married to a handsome man with a son, a daughter, a cat, and dog; and a beautiful home in the suburbs with a new car in the garage and a grand piano in the living room. I remember thinking it was a fun exercise, but I couldn’t imagine much use for it.

One day while cleaning more than six years later, I saw the vision board tucked behind my credenza. I pulled it out to my amazement, with the exception of a son and a dog, everything on that vision board had come true! Was it luck? Or was it the power of intention I had set in motion years earlier? I’ve created other vision boards over the years that have been equally as powerful…and I still have that grand piano.

My daughter recently asked if I wanted to create another time capsule with this new year, new decade. I’m hesitant. I’ll be 84 in another 20 years, so I may not be around when it’s time to open. But I’m definitely planning to do another vision board and this time, with a focus on my dreams and intentions for retiring from my day job. Who knows when that will happen…but I want to leave nothing to chance.

Never underestimate the power of dreams and intentions.

Late Bloomers and Other Tales

rich-karlgaard-late-bloomers-book2Last week I listened to Srinivas Rao interview Rich Karlgaard on the The Unmistakable Creative podcast about Rich’s new book Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. Rich and I grew up in the same hometown, we graduated high school one year apart, and my step-brother ran track with him. Listening to Rich talk about his dad and growing up in Bismarck, North Dakota brought back a lot of memories.

I’ve always identified as a late bloomer, so Rich’s message really resonated with me. Whether it was getting my Bachelor’s degree when I was nearly 30, running a marathon at 60, or writing the memoir I’m currently working on, I’ve always bushwacked my own path.

This month it’s been a challenge getting back to my memoir after writing fiction for NaNoWriMo. To get in the mood, this weekend I dug out old journals trying to mine some of that material. I came across a writing assignent I had submitted on November 23, 1999 in response to a writing prompt called the Book of Life by Eldonna Edwards, who was teaching an online writing class. (This was written a little more than a month before we buried the time capsule mentioned in my previous post.)

LateBloomer

Our assignment was to imagine our lives as a book, picturing who would play our characters in a movie, then writing the chapter headings relating to the story. This is what I wrote:

The book of my life would be creative nonfiction. A well-crafted piece of work with dashes of poetic verse, sprinkled liberally with humor, the story would open on the Dakota plains. If made into a movie, my parents would be played by an earnest Ben Affleck and a troubled Claire Danes. My traumatized teen would be played by Drew Barrymore (remember, this is 1999), up through my searching 20s, where the story would move to Southern California. I would be played in mid-life and later years by Meryl Streep. My husband would be played by Kevin Costner and my daughter would play herself.

Title: Late Bloomer, A Coming of Age Tale

    1. Fun, Frolic, and Carefree Days
    2. The Isolated Early Years
    3. Teen Turmoil
    4. Searching for Answers Outside Myself
    5. Military Missions and a Failed Marriage
    6. Believing in Myself
    7. The Wonders of a Blind Date
    8. Life is Good at 30
    9. A Decade of Family Fun
    10. Hope, Dreams, and Unexpected Emptiness
    11. Life Sucks at 40
    12. Climbing Out of the Pit
    13. Moving and Other Chaotic Choices
    14. The Phoenix Rises
    15. Timeless Mother – The Crone Years

I have no recollection of this assignment and others written during that email class, but I’m glad I kept them (and thank you Eldonna!). When I wrote this, I was at the beginning of Chapter 13…and seven months later I would move to Michigan with my family where other chaotic choices ensued.

Late Bloomers. It’s a way of life.

Blessed are the late bloomers, who believe in themselves, follow their intuition, and trust that the journey of life will take them where they need to be.

And Now…the Rest of the Story

img_3332I had driven my Subaru Outback to DC for marathon weekend, but after covering nearly 32 miles on race day, I was in no shape to drive home. We had planned for that by throwing a mattress in the back of the Outback, just in case. After an Epsom salt bath and a hearty breakfast the next morning, we packed up and headed for home.

While Annie drove, I looked through the photos she had taken during the weekend and read Facebook congratulations from family and friends. I reflected on how her dreams of an arctic adventure had inspired me to reignite my dream of running the Marine Corps Marathon. I thought about all the miles Annie had covered on her bike during my long early morning training runs. While passing through Pennsylvania, I wrote this post on Facebook.

img_3331

Yeah, I’m that person who proposed to her girl on social media. Then I read her the post. While she was driving.

Before she said yes, she asked whether I was still oxygen deprived or had low blood sugar. I assured her I had my wits about me and was quite serious…and a little over seven months later, we tied the knot.

A lot has happened in the four years since that epic marathon day: we got married, sold a house, bought a house, added another fur kid to the family, I received a promotion in my day job, learned to play the cello, and became a published author.

To the runners of the 44th Marine Corps Marathon being held tomorrow in Washington, DC, good luck and in the words of marathoner Bart Yasso, “Never limit where running can take you.”

 

 

From the Training Trail: Progress and Protests

Marriage equality passed on June 26, 2015. In the days that followed, Facebook lit up with rainbows in celebration and American flags in protest.

The following week, I thought about the progress and the protests during my 11 mile training run and wrote this:

With all the Facebook hoopla over profile rainbows & flags, I’d just like to say this:

I’m proud of all my Marine & other military brothers and sisters who defend our great nation & who at some point wrote a blank check to Uncle Sam for an amount up to and including our Lives.

I’m proud of all my LGBTQ brothers and sisters who long faced hate & discrimination on the path to marriage equality…and now no longer feel like second class citizens.

I’m proud of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists & nonbelievers who look past doctrine & dogma and see the sacred beauty in each and every one of us…there is more that unites us than separates us.

In the four years since that training run, those words have never been more true.