Matlovich Comes Out: Time Cover Changes Military

Leonard Matlovich had a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and three tours in Vietnam. He did not hide any of that when he sat for the Time magazine cover photo in September 1975. Uniform pressed, ribbons in place. Hiding was exactly what he had decided to stop doing. The cover line read: "I Am a Homosexual." Matlovich had been a decorated Air Force technical sergeant who, by every conventional military measure, was an exemplary serviceman. He had earned outstanding performance evaluations, volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam, and been wounded by a landmine. When he came out to his commanding officer in a formal letter in March 1975, he forced the military to confront its ban on gay service members in the person of a war hero rather than the stereotypes the policy relied upon. The Air Force discharged him anyway, classifying it as a general discharge. Matlovich fought the decision in federal court, and in 1980 a judge ordered his reinstatement with back pay. The Air Force offered him a settlement of $160,000 rather than allow him to return to duty, and Matlovich accepted. His case did not change military policy immediately, but it established a legal precedent and a public narrative that advocates would build upon for decades. The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of 1993 was an intermediate step, and its repeal in 2011 finally allowed open service. Matlovich died of complications from AIDS on June 22, 1988, at forty-four. His tombstone in Congressional Cemetery in Washington reads: "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."