Learning About Leonard

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From a Slate article on 2005's most notable cultural happenings, author Sarah Shulman writes this about her choice, Brokeback Mountain:

"The two fundamental dynamics of homosexual life—heterosexual cruelty and gay resistence—have had a hard time making it to the screen. Without them, gay representation has mostly been built around a number of distortions: 1) The noble queer who rises unscathed to redemptive human triumph, thereby proving that homophobia isn't really so bad. 2) The pathological, self-hating gay man who is that way inherently, not as a consequence of someone else's cruelty, and 3) The self-oppressed alone homosexual who needs a heroic straight person to rescue him.

Brokeback opened the door to a far more complex look at how homophobia destroys people's lives, the consequences of cruelty on gay people's emotional stability, and how familial homophobia is the place where much of this is enforced. Where the movie fell short was in the acknowledgement of gay subculture and rebellion. It seems unlikely to me that Jack Twist would have missed the existence of the gay revolution. All he had to do was turn on the television or go to church to hear about Anita Bryant and Gay Liberation in Dade County, or stumble onto the Gay Rodeo circuit, or go to a dentist's office to see Leonard Matlovich on the cover of Time magazine."

I'd never heard of Leonard Matlovich, being somewhat shamefully ignorant of a lot of gay history, so I looked him up. He was a Air Force hero in Vietnam, was awarded the Purple heart and the Bronze Star, and was the first, way back in 1975, to challenge the military's ban on homosexuals. He was told by a fellow officer that "You can't have a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and suck cock." Charming.

Anyway, Leonard was discharged from the military, fought the findings, and became the first openly gay man to be on the cover of Time. He won his case in a lower court but in the end he took a monetary settlement instead of fighting the appeal to the Supreme Court, unconvinced he could win with the conservative court. He died of AIDS in 1988, and his tombstone reads "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one."

Here endeth your daily history lesson.