Inside a lesbian "witch hunt"

A teenager when she joined up, Grossi found herself in a situation common to many young people, gay and straight: She had not yet figured out her sexuality. "Honestly, at the time I didn't know ... about myself. When I actually figured out what I was feeling, I realized that I couldn't actually do anything about it."

Grossi says she did not experiment while she was in the force or engage in any sexual conduct that would have violated the policy -- while she wasn't aware she was a lesbian at 19, she was well aware of "don't ask, don't tell." "Everybody realized when they came in that you couldn't do certain things and that's why they signed that paper. We abided by that." Given the environment at the Defense Language Institute, she says, dating among women was out of the question. And she believes her conduct is more important than her orientation.

The details of the DLI witch hunts are strangely juvenile. The epithets, circular questioning and schoolyard-like taunts evoke a pubescent battle between the sexes. "It's like a high school -- kind of sad, actually," Grossi explains. "The rumors go around and then they just spread and get bigger and bigger. That's how it happened."

First, a rumor surfaced that two women in a certain training flight group had been in a relationship that went sour -- one of the women had apparently given up her seat on a flight, allegedly because her former lover asked her to. The group as a whole became known as "dyke flight" by male colleagues. Grossi was a member of the flight.

Senior Airman David Vigil and Master Sgt. Rodney Hamlet, both superiors, called Grossi into Hamlet's office. They asked her if she knew about a rumor about "the family," and asked if she knew about the "propensity" of student leaders on her flight. When she said she didn't understand, Hamlet replied that there are "certain kinds of people" who like the same kind of people. He asked her if she knew about her fellow airmen's "propensity to like the same kind of people." Then Vigil and Hamlet began to question her more directly, asking if she was involved in "nasty rumors that were flying around the DLI." She said no.

The two enlisted personnel started talking about the rumors openly in a common area where students and officers gathered. Grossi thinks their behavior fed the fire, creating an atmosphere where adolescent teasing became pervasive. In her language class, someone asked about the Serbian word for "rainbow" (which happens to be the gay pride symbol) and another student replied, "Oh, Grossi would know."

Also during class, the report states, fellow student Airman Reyes "would hold his fingers to his nose as if he was smelling them" so Grossi could see, then say to her, "Let me smell your hand so I can see if you did the same thing I did last night." The sexual comments and gestures happened in front of the whole class. Even Grossi's civilian instructor got in on the action. He once asked her if she had "fun ... with her girlfriend. Oh, I mean boyfriend."

Another female airman in Grossi's class reported that a male student called her and another airman "pussy suckers," and asked them, "Why would you want that, when you can have this," pointing to himself.

"They felt free to basically torment us," Grossi says.

Where did the rumors come from? Grossi says she isn't sure, and still doesn't exactly know why she was singled out for questioning. She believes it happened because, weeks before, she had turned down Airman Reyes' request for a date. She says he responded, "Oh, you must be a lesbian."

"Don't ask, don't tell" isn't supposed to work this way. The way the policy is written, superior officers are supposed to wait for a commander to authorize an inquiry before they start an investigation, and investigations based on rumors are supposed to be forbidden.

For her part, Grossi sees no problems with the policy as it was conceived. "The policy in theory is good. The problem is, it's not being abided by. It was our commanders and our senior enlisted personnel who were breaking the rules, and it set an example for everybody below them ... I don't know how the policy would actually work if it was followed."

In its March report, the Pentagon acknowledged a widespread misunderstanding of the policy among active forces. In a survey of more than 70,000 active service members, 57 percent said they had not had training on the gay policy; 46 percent said the policy was ineffective or only slightly effective at preventing anti-gay harassment. Eighty percent said they had heard offensive speech or jokes about homosexuals in the past year.

But 78 percent of those surveyed also said they would feel free to report harassment against gays. And the Pentagon has released the figure that approximately 80 percent of discharges under "don't ask, don't tell" are "self-reported" -- cases in which enlisted people "told." To some observers, this shows that the policy is working just fine.

Next Page: Are there more lesbians than gay men in the military?

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