Discharge Change Lifts Burdens for Gay Vet

The four-page letter arrived shortly before Christmas last year, eight months after Robert "Bob" Fry had learned that his application to have his other than honorable discharge upgraded to honorable was under review. It had been 55 years since he had been tossed out of the Navy due to his confession that he had engaged in gay sex.

The Department of the Navy's Board for Correction of Naval Records, after reviewing Fry's application, had granted the gay Santa Rosa resident's request. For Fry, 85, the decision resulted in his accessing myriad benefits provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

"This was quite a relief for me," Fry told the Bay Area Reporter. "People don't realize what the military does to you when they throw you out under those circumstances. It just shatters you."

The news boosted Fry's self-worth after decades of feeling ashamed at being drummed out of the armed services for homosexual conduct, which Fry said did not occur during his enlistment. Due to his treatment by the military, Fry suffered bouts of severe depression throughout the years and turned to alcohol to ease his pain.

"When you get a less than honorable discharge, your world ends," said Fry. "You just go day-to-day; I turned to alcohol."

Emilio Gonzalez, 77, a gay man who received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 1964, befriended Fry earlier this year when he heard him speak at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

"At the time we were in the Navy, there were a lot of witch hunts for gay people," recalled Gonzalez, who has been assisting Fry in putting together his personal archives to submit to the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project, which features stories from LGBT vets under the title "Serving in Silence." "You didn't have to be caught doing anything. Someone could just accuse you and then you were interrogated until you confessed."

Those LGBT veterans not given honorable discharges, noted Gonzalez, were barred from receiving VA benefits and could not apply for civilian jobs with the government. Recently, he met a lesbian who was denied a loan because she had a less than honorable discharge from the Army.

"That is the kind of thing we need to erase and needs to be changed," he said.

Fry, who grew up in Hayward, had served in the Navy with distinction during the Korean War and received an honorable discharge in 1954. But finding civilian life hard to adapt to, he re-enlisted four years later and was assigned to the U.S. Naval Station in Kodiak, Alaska.

His military career came to an ignominious end, however, within a year when another sailor, himself caught having sex with a fellow sailor, accused Fry of being gay. Under questioning, Fry at first denied the charges but eventually relented and admitted he had had sex with a man in the past.

His superiors then shipped Fry off to the Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco. After being held at the base for a time, Fry was ousted from the military and given a less than honorable discharge on March 27, 1959.

"When I got back to civilian life my self-esteem was shattered. I ducked into the first bar I could find on Market Street and proceeded to get drunk," recalled Fry in a short, unpublished biography he wrote. "I thought seriously about killing myself, but instead went back to my family home and told them I'd had a nervous breakdown and had been discharged for medical reasons."

He landed a job with a furniture store in the Mission district but his personal life continued to spiral downward. In 1968 he fled to Europe for an extended vacation.

Fry returned to the U.S. the following year, and at a homecoming dinner his friends hosted for him, he met and fell in love with Jim Foster, a conservative banker he would spend the next 31 years with.

After Foster, who suffered from ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, died in 2001, Fry again turned to alcohol and contemplated suicide.

"I felt abandoned and alone and tried to drink myself to death. Grief and low self-esteem overwhelmed me," he wrote in his bio.

He hit bottom when one night, while drunk in Golden Gate Park, he was mugged. A park employee discovered him passed out on the grass and drove him to a nearby bus stop.

His parting words to Fry - "You are in God's hands, now" - struck a chord, and within three months, Fry went to his first 12-step recovery meeting. He sobered up, and in 2008, first turned to Swords to Plowshares, a nonprofit that assists veterans, to begin the process of upgrading his military records.

Yet nothing happened until a postcard arrived in March 2014 from the Navy alerting Fry that his case was under review. Two days before Christmas last year, he received the letter notifying him that his discharge upgrade had been granted.

"That was it, that's the news I've been waiting more than half a century to hear," wrote Fry, who has remained sober the past seven years. "I felt like a boulder had been lifted from my path and I could go on with the rest of my life without the shame of a military record tarnished not by an act of betrayal, but by simply being who God had made me to be."

The repeal of the military's anti-gay "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 2011 made it easier for veterans kicked out for homosexuality to apply to have their discharges upgraded. The Obama administration adopted a policy that such requests should be granted unless there were additional reasons given for why a discharge was not honorable.

According to a recent New York Times article, 80 percent of the nearly 500 requests submitted since 2011 to the Department of Defense received an upgrade. Nonetheless, veterans' advocates say the numbers of LGBT service members asking for their discharges to be reviewed remains low, and the paperwork required can be cumbersome for many.

"That is pretty low compared to the number of people who were kicked out for being gay or accused of being gay, etc. I think a lot of it is people don't know they can apply," said Colleen Corliss, a spokeswoman for Swords to Plowshares in San Francisco. "I think the moral of the story is the military knows they have wronged a lot of people under the policy of DADT, and by and large, unless there was another misconduct issue, they're really approving the military discharge upgrades."

Becca von Behren, a senior staff attorney with the local Swords to Plowshares office, said it doesn't know how many LGBT vets it has helped since it works with a network of 300 pro bono attorneys and doesn't track the types of cases they handle.

"We haven't noticed a ton," she said. "It is not something people are aware of. There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation on who qualifies and who doesn't qualify."

Lesbian retired Naval Commander Zoe Dunning, who lives in San Francisco and was a leader in the fight to overturn DADT, said out veterans often ask her how they can change their discharges.

"I still think it is not widely known that it is available to them. There is no one organization that is leading the effort, period," said Dunning.

She also noted that many "are fearful it is going to be a long bureaucratic process. For some, they may have felt shame about getting that discharge for other than honorable to begin with, so it is hard for them to talk about it."

Attorney Daniel Devoy, director of Golden Gate University School of Law's Veterans' Legal Advocacy Clinic, said his center has worked with two veterans kicked out for homosexuality whose discharge upgrade requests are still pending.

"This law exists and it is possible to change it," said Devoy. "They should seek help right away and get this done."

Fry said he approached the B.A.R. to tell his story publicly in order to encourage other LGBT veterans ejected from the military on homosexuality grounds to apply with the Defense Department to have their records changed.

"I want this to help other people," he said.

In Fry's case, had he sought out help earlier, he likely would have been able to access VA services decades ago based on his original honorable discharge from his first enlistment.

But, "when I was drinking," he said, "no way I could have done this."

Despite how he was treated by the military and the lifetime of pain it caused him, Fry has never lost his love of the Navy.

"I knew I would be a sailor one day. I would have made a career of it if I had not been thrown out," he said.