One thing his friend says that he misses is the weekly brunches when the straight men went to gay bars in San Diego for brunch," Reinhart said. Recently, Reinhart met up with a former shipmate who is straight. There were three or four openly gay people on my ship." "At quarters, I freely talked about what I did the night before. Looking back on Navy days, "I was blessed," Reinhart said. "To my wonderful surprise," said Reinhart, "the operations officer said, 'Nice try. He continued, "So I packed my sea bag, put it on my rack, went up the see the operations officer, and turned myself in for being gay, knowing once I did that, he would put me off the ship." "The friends who knewit was wearing on them, keeping the secret for me." "But before we left on a second six-month tour, I knew that I didn't want to deploy and not be comfortable," Reinhart said. For his first six-month deployment, they kept his secret. Initially, Reinhart told only a few close friends that he was gay. Shipboard on the Cowpens, however, tells an entirely different story of gay life in the Navy. All we need you to do is tell us you are not gay. We will take you off this command immediately. There's never been an incident about you or this issue. "They have no proof on you," he recalled lawyers saying: "You have prior service. In Hawaii, however, military lawyers "were furious over how the case was handled," Reinhart said, telling him: "It was botched from day one." They locked me up in medical because they thought I would commit suicide, which I never was going to do." The Coast Guard pulled his top-secret clearance.ĭuring a seven-day transit to Hawaii "was the first time I ever feared for my life," Reinhart said. Reinhart's executive officer "couldn't believe that I had such a positive experience in the Navy," he said. "And they went back and talked about the great night they had with Josh and Lee at the gay bar. How did Reinhart's firing come about? "We took some female crew members out to a gay bar in Portland, Ore.," he explained, referring to a shipmate who was gay. Instead he was sent back again to San Diego, this time for service on a Coast Guard ship but was discharged under "don't ask, don't tell" for being gay. Reinhart opted for the latter, hoping to get orders to Key West, Fla. "I was almost 30, and the only branches that would take me back were the Navy and Coast Guard." The events of 911, however, prompted the sailor to re-enlist in 2002. However, after four years of service, Reinhart returned to Chicago and civilian life. And I was asked to be on the admiral's staff, as well as cook, who was also gay." Consequently, "Our captain made admiral coming out of that mission.
"Our ship was the lead ship in the 1998 missile strike against Afghanistan," Reinhart said. The commanding officer and I never had a discussion about it, but he obviously knew." His two years on the Cowpens were "the greatest time of my life," said Reinhart recently during a telephone interview. There, he was an openly gay operations specialist. Cowpens ( CG-63 ), a guided missile cruiser. Lee Reinhart, a veteran of both the Navy and Coast Guard, is well aware of the insidious and arbitrary nature of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The Navy handed him an honorable discharge, while the Coast Guard fired him for being gay under the soon-to-be-repealed federal law and military policy.ĭuring the mid-1990s, Reinhart served in the Navy aboard the U.S.S. Be part of the team.This article shared 4610 times since Wed Sep 14, 2011
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