A Soldier’s Mission : For Jose Zuniga, Fighting Army’s Ban on Gays Is His Most Important Battle

SAN FRANCISCO — Last month, Jose M. Zuniga flew home to Texas. It was there he had graduated from high school, sweated through basic training and entered adulthood as a promising young soldier, the latest in a line of family warriors.

But he returned from his trip as something quite different: a newly proclaimed gay man on a defiant crusade. He has been a civilian for two weeks, rushed out of the Army with an honorable discharge after announcing his homosexuality in a highly publicized manner at the end of April.

An earnest 24-year-old with a cowlick and a stack of military honors, Zuniga seeks public honor in what was once his private shame. He wants Dallas and Oklahoma City and Cleveland to know his story, to hear that the shame is not in being a gay soldier, but in having to lie about it.

And so Zuniga has become another plane-hopping enlistee in the uphill battle to overturn the ban on homosexuals in the military, one more gay veteran who believes that his tale can help change some minds, who is trying to salvage dignity and meaning out of a career abruptly halted.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, he traveled to Austin, Dallas and his hometown of San Antonio, speaking to gay and college groups. Last week, he was back in San Francisco, where he had been stationed at the Presidio as a journalist. This week, he is off to Colorado and Oklahoma.

He wants to “blow these arguments out of the water--all these little myths that have been created by the fundamentalists, people who are against lifting the ban.”

“I’ve set it up so I can use my career against them,” he continues with the self-assured air of a young man accustomed to praise. “When they say we can’t serve in combat, I can come back and say: ‘I have,’ and it wasn’t a problem. (When they say) we’re detrimental to morale, I have several awards saying I helped boost morale.”

He is sitting beside a wall covered with Army commendations and certificates, 21 in all, including one naming him the 6th Army’s soldier of the year for 1992 and another, 1992 military print journalist of the year in the Army’s largest major command. There is a combat medical badge for his medic work with Iraqi prisoners in the Gulf War and a snapshot of him at work, dressed in camouflage fatigues.

“This is what my office looked like in the Presidio,” he says, nodding toward the plaques on the wall. Now they are in a small room off the kitchen in a townhouse on the fringes of the Castro district, where he is staying with friends. The room has become his bridge between two worlds, the military one he was booted from and the gay one where he hovers at the edge.

Politically, Zuniga has eagerly plunged into the gay community in his new persona as anti-ban activist. But personally he remains tentative, trying to figure out what it means to be a gay man, where he fits in the gay spectrum. Alongside his public journey of revelation is a private one of self-discovery.

Although he is separated from his wife, he still wears a silver wedding band, nervously fingering it as he talks about how it came to be that on the eve of the April 25 gay rights march in Washington, he stood before the television cameras at a gay political reception and proclaimed that he is a homosexual.

“I couldn’t stand lying about my sexuality anymore,” he says, clad in jeans and a T-shirt celebrating national coming-out day. To lie was to compromise that revered military value, integrity.

“Plus the fact that this is a pivotal moment in our history,” he adds, revealing a certain eagerness to leave his mark. “I felt my story could help make a difference, and I had to make a decision there, too. Am I going to let this opportunity go by and perhaps regret it the rest of my life? Or am I going to attempt to make a difference here?”

The only son of a conservative Latino family that has supplied the Mexican and American armies with several generations of soldiers, Zuniga had diligently pursued a conventional path of achievement. He turned down a nomination to West Point to remain in Texas so he could be near his mother, who was battling stomach cancer.

He majored in journalism at Texas A & M University and enlisted in 1989, after deciding that he could reach his career goal more quickly in the Army than in the civilian world. He wanted to become the Army’s sergeant major of public affairs in the Pentagon, the senior enlisted adviser to the chief of public affairs.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have made it,” he said.

Others also thought he would do well. Take, for example, this glowing description written to Zuniga’s commanding general a few months ago by a high-ranking public affairs officer in the Army: Zuniga, wrote the colonel, “is one of the most poised young NCOs I’ve talked with, not to mention his values, humility, willingness to credit others for his successes. . . . What a terrific plus he is for our Public Affairs family of professionals!”

But something happened to Zuniga’s carefully crafted plans. In 1991, the year his mother died, he realized that he was attracted to an Army buddy. “I started feeling strongly for him and I didn’t understand it.”

He thinks a bit and continues. “I think I understood what it was I was feeling but was trying to deny it . . . based on my upbringing. It sounds terribly stereotypical, but it’s true of most Hispanic families--homosexuality is taboo and it’s evil--and being reared in a Roman Catholic family, it’s an abomination. So all my life, that was my impression of homosexuality.” He pauses. “And I didn’t want to become that.”

He had girlfriends in high school and college. He had told gay jokes, stood silent when gays were harassed. It was just a phase, he told himself, and married a high school friend. Surely, he thought, that would solve his “problem.”

It didn’t. He continued to find himself attracted to men.

Slowly, he began to explore the gay world. When he ventured into his first gay bar in San Antonio, he was so nervous that the bartender asked him if he was all right. He calmed down enough to meet “people who were much like me, conservative. And that made accepting it a lot easier.”

Still, he says, “it took two years, two full years to fully accept who I was. It was painful not only for me, but for my wife. We separated six, seven months ago. Finally we made the decision that it was time to go ahead and go our separate ways, and now we’re undergoing divorce proceedings.”

His wife has been amazingly supportive, Zuniga said. “She called me not too long ago (from Ohio) and was in tears. She said, ‘You know, I’m so proud of you. You stood up for what you thought was right.’ ”

Zuniga’s father--a retired Army officer who used to make his son watch old John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies--has been more remote. Even though he lives in San Antonio, he declined to see his son when Zuniga was in town. But Zuniga hangs onto a two-minute conversation they had in May.

“The last thing he said was ‘I love you.’ ” It was the first time Zuniga can remember his father saying that.

All this emotional tumult and attention comes wrapped in a certain irony. Zuniga, so publicly gay, has never had a gay relationship. Ever the good soldier, he says he has never had sex with a man.

“I’ve feared going through a relationship because in the military, you get punished for that and I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my career.”

On a more personal level, he says he is still taking “Gay 101.”

“I suspect that the whole idea of becoming involved with someone in a homosexual relationship is completely different from that of a heterosexual relationship and that scared me. It still scares me.”

But Zuniga did not need a gay experience to be expelled from the military family. He just needed to say he is a homosexual. Under President Clinton’s interim policy, Zuniga could have been placed on unpaid standby reserve until the issue of the ban is settled in the next few months. He chose discharge instead.

“I just wanted to be out of the closet finally, stop living in fear,” he said. “You’re government property if you’re on standby reserve.”

In the weeks between his return from Washington and his May 20th discharge, Zuniga got a taste of a different Army than the one that had praised and promoted him.

He was moved from a barracks with a communal shower and bathroom to one with a private bathroom. He was assigned to a stockroom to answer phones. Zuniga said a post chaplain lectured him: If society accepts homosexuality, what’s next . . . bestiality? Zuniga’s former neighbors in the Presidio told that him the Army had been asking about his wife (the Army said it was simply checking because Zuniga had never formally signed out of family housing).

Finally, the Army demoted Zuniga from sergeant to specialist. Watching television coverage of the Washington reception, his superiors saw a ribbon on his chest for a medal he had not yet received. He had been recommended for the Meritorious Service Medal, but final approval was pending. It was a matter of integrity, they said, throwing Zuniga’s words back in his face. You don’t wear what you haven’t earned.

Zuniga was stunned. “They took away my rank basically for a trumped up charge,” he said. “It was inconceivable they would do something like that and clearly retaliatory.”

Before he left for Washington, Zuniga said, he called the military personnel office and was told that the award had been approved and posted in his records. “In the military, all you need to put that award on is for it to be posted in your records. So I put it on.”

The award was never posted, according to the Army, which says the demotion had nothing to do with Zuniga’s homosexuality. Sworn statements by the military personnel staff denying that they had spoken to Zuniga were presented at his disciplinary hearing.

“A good four or five of those people said they didn’t even know me,” Zuniga said. “Of those four or five, three of them were good friends. . . . All of a sudden, since my coming out, they didn’t know who I was.”

No longer the golden boy, Zuniga has a tarnished record. The turn of events, he said, came as a shock. But then, he conceded, “it shouldn’t have been because I knew exactly how other gay people are treated in the military. I guess I was a little naive in thinking they’d use kid gloves or something.”

The day after his discharge, Zuniga held a news conference condemning a proposed compromise on the ban. He was beyond the Army’s grasp. And he was not about to shut up. That evening he watched himself on the TV news. How did he look?

“Excellent. I was actually able to smile today. I’m feeling wonderful.”