President Biden, in advance of today’s anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riot and the birth of the gay rights movement (which he’ll be Downtown commemorating at the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center on Christopher St.), correctly pardoned what could be thousands of former service members who were convicted under a military law that had made it a crime to engage in sodomy, which was really just a way to punish service members for being gay.
Yes, once sex between consenting adults was a crime in the military if those adults were the same sex. The culture around acceptance of LGBTQ people in society has moved so quickly that it’s easy to forget — or easy to not be old enough to really remember — just how widespread the legal discrimination was up until not very long ago at all.
In the military, the presence of gays was forbidden entirely until the 1993 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that tolerated gay troops as long as they stayed in the closet. In 2011, being out became permitted as openly gay enlisted personnel and officers were legalized. The change to the military criminalization of sodomy came two years later, in 2013.
Take the case of Army Col. Edward Thomas Ryan, whose obituary was published in the Albany Times Union this month when he died at age 85. At the end of a description about his life and family and military service in Vietnam and after, he wrote: “I must tell you one more thing, I was Gay all my life: thru grade school, thru High School, thru College, thru Life.”
Col. Ryan was forced to keep that aspect of his life a secret for 70 years and doing so while risking his life in combat in service to his nation.
More broadly, society has been evolving. In 2015, the United States Supreme Court blessed same-sex marriage and in 2020 the high court explicitly held that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation is federally prohibited sex discrimination in 2020. There is no federal law directly protecting LGBTQ people’s access to public accommodations and there are at least 18 states that have no specific prohibitions on this type of discrimination.
There is plenty of work left to be done to ensure that we truly leave behind the era of formalized discrimination, and we celebrate Biden’s efforts to keep plugging away. It’s not merely a symbolic move; those convicted under this statute would have received less than honorable discharges, a status that would block access to all manner of veteran benefits in addition to the moral injury. It’s unconscionable that we would have veterans denied access to health, among other things, for their inalienable identities.
Barack Obama should have issued this military pardon years ago, as should have Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t have to wait until his fourth year in office. But at least it is now done.
Col. Ryan’s successors in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are free to be themselves and live openly about who they love. America has come a long way since Stonewall, when Ryan was 30 years old and he met the man who “was the love of my life. We had 25 great years together.”
Ryan also wrote: “I’m sorry for not having the courage to come out as Gay. I was afraid of being ostracized: by Family, Friends, and Co-Workers. Seeing how people like me were treated, I just could not do it. Now that my secret is known, I’ll forever Rest in Peace.”
