When I left home in June of 1971 I entered the Army and everything in my world had changed. The Army in 1971 was very strict as to how you dressed, how you had your hair, and how you kept yourself. From the time that I entered basic training to my arrival at my duty station in Germany was six long months. Most of the time during training my time was occupied by stuff that was dictated to me by superiors. Once I arrived at my station in Germany it was Christmastime and non ordinary operations the routine so we worked for four hours a day and took the rest the day off.
I was in an area that had 29 Americans total. We were attached to the Belgian Air Force. All of our transportation and support came from the Belgian Air Force. I was without my family and in another country. In Europe they were much more open about a lot of things an I became aware of non-traditional lifestyles. I read about gays in Europe and how open people were. This intrigued me but also repulsed me, I wanted to know more but it was against everything I had been taught.
The next August I came back to Michigan and got married. We had our first child in Germany in April. In September of 1973, I was transferred back to the states to go to electronics school. After six months of training in aviation electronics (avionics), I was sent to Ft Carson Colorado for another six months and then on to Korea. In Korea, one of the major businesses around military bases is ‘ladies of the evening’. For a relatively small fee you could spend the night in a woman’s room. I resisted for several months but finally succumbed to the urge. What people did not know is that once we retired to her room there was no sex. I just put on whatever her makeup was and slept.
While I was in Korea there was a brief stint, about six weeks’ worth, in Southeast Asia. And when I returned to Korea about a week after the fall of Saigon my second child, a daughter was born. I would not get to see her until that September when I came home for a brief leave.
Then I was reassigned back to the United States in early December 1975. I was stationed at Fort Huachuca Arizona. It was in the first month or two that we were there that I was caught by my wife while painting my nails. This would escalate to the point that she would refer to these types of behaviors as, “doing my own thing”.
From that point on things went a little off kilter in the marriage. In February 1976 I had my first gay sexual experience. I reasoned that I was not gay because I did not think of myself that way, and it was against the rules. I had kept telling myself that all of this was just a phase. It was not my lifestyle because my dream – my hope – was to be the perfect family. I wanted the husband, wife, children, picket fence, and a leisurely life. The longer I lived the more I struggled to maintain this façade. All I will say is that sex with a man is very different from sex with a woman. But that is another different story.
Military life was a total change after the gay experience. I began to look at things in a much different light. After my stint in Fort Huachuca, I ended up at Fort Hood Texas. At the time Fort Hood was the largest military installation in the free world. Needless to say there was a very large if not silent gay population. There were at least two gay bars in the town just outside of Fort Hood. I went to one a couple of times and somehow felt uncomfortable there but one of the bartenders and waitresses whatever and I had several Stations about things.
One day I was invited over to a friend’s house where I met his wife and family. His wife was the woman I had talked to at the gay bar and with the utmost of professionalism she never let on to her husband that I’d been there. He, on the other hand, let me know that she was a bartender at a gay bar. Believe it or not there were gay bars in Killeen. I felt awkward acting as if I had just met someone with whom I had had some very personal conversations. This was probably the biggest mental struggle I had ever encountered. I had, in the past of course, known not to say how I really felt about things. But now this was a person whom I met and was now to be included in my internal web of deception. This did not feel right, but I let it go. After eight years it was time for me to live. It was time to leave the military. I was on a collision course that could cause problems. I was not happy in the job I was doing and did not want to continue that. In June of 1979 I reentered civilian life.
In the civilian world, I got a job where I was a field service engineer working for a company that made computers for grocery stores. This required me to sometimes come in at three or four in the morning when activity in the store was at a minimum. I would be met by those people working the graveyard shift and by 5:30-6 o’clock in the morning the bakery and cashiers were coming on the job. These were often women and I would strike up conversations with them and sometimes I was made as not being on the straight and narrow . This led to some interesting conversations.
My job took me from Detroit to Toledo to Columbus, Ohio. In all of the cities the routine remained virtually the same. In Columbus, I was promoted to supervisor and had several field service engineers working for me. Because of my crazy hours – I was out at night or early in the morning and got home in the early afternoon, I was alone in the house since the kids were at school and my wife was at work. This allowed me plenty of time to dress and then undress before anyone came home. After about two years I had an ethical conflict with my boss, who was a we should be billing the customer more and I was arguing that the customer should not be charged for our mistakes. This led to an impasse that was only resolved when as a result of them demoting me/or me quitting . I quit.
I spent the next eight weeks looking for a job. It was probably the most fun summer of my life. Every afternoon, weather permitting, the kids and I would head to the beach. We would be there for a couple of hours and then go home and have dinner. My wife, who got off work at 2 PM most of the time, joined us. So my life was – get up in the morning, look for a job and go swimming. In August of that summer I got hired by an avionics company. In the military I had worked avionics, and loved aviation. I was back where I belonged.
I started out as a bench technician but, because of my prior experiences, I did not need a lot of the basics of avionics. This was an avionics manufacturing company so we had sales people, production people, and the service department where I worked. It was a nice small company. I was like employee number 51. I went to work and became quite popular – not just in my shop, but also throughout the plant. One of the other bench technicians wanted to ‘out’ a coworker but did not want to confront her directly, so he came up with this idea. The idea was to ‘out’ me.
It was not a well-thought-out plan. And I was not really made aware of it in advance. He simply said, “Okay Ron, why don’t you just admit it and come out of the closet?” I was panicked. I didn’t know what to say. I understood almost immediately what he was trying to do, but do I deny or admit? What do I do at this point in time? If I deny, which is what he was expecting me to do, this would induce the lady he wanted to ‘come out’ to talk to me about it. On the other hand, I felt in overwhelming need to not lie and therefore admit the truth. I knew that my desires were not heterosexual and that my understanding of the gender binary meant that I was gay. As I said before I was very naïve. So, after he repeated the question a second time, I finally said, “Yes. I’m gay.” This was shocking to the six or seven people in the shop.
I found out later that the news spread throughout the building almost immediately. Within a day or two everyone was secretly talking about me. Later I heard a story, that I able to confirm, that me being gay was even the discussion in a management meeting. We proceeded on with people knowing that I was gay. In fact, at one point a new hire told me I was part of the new employee briefing, in that whoever was giving the new person a tour of the building, the tour leader would point to me and say, “He’s gay.” So the idea of it being a secret was no longer true, at least for the people at work.
The company then was purchased and our smaller company was merged with a larger corporation. So, we expanded. When we expanded, the service department expanded from five technicians to 13 technicians. We moved into a brand-new building and had to reorganize everything to accommodate the company we were merging with. I became a shop supervisor. I was able to work on any bench, and understood the equipment totally.
Then again, in 1994, our corporation decided to merge us with a part of the company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. During that merger, production and service would move to Grand Rapids, Michigan and engineering would stay in Columbus, Ohio. I was asked to move to Grand Rapids in the capacity of field service/customer service technician for the products being transferred to Grand Rapids.