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LEILA FADEL, HOST:
It's Friday. Time for StoryCorps. Air Force veteran Jeri Dilno realized she was a lesbian at a very young age. When she decided to enlist in the military in the late 1950s, LGBTQ people were banned from serving openly. At StoryCorps, she recalled why she took that chance.
JERI DILNO: I was born into a military family. My father was in the Navy. And I can remember when we first got a television set, they would play "The Star-Spangled Banner," and I would stand up at attention. So when I turned 21, I signed up to be in the Air Force. That was 1958, and I knew the perils were there. They would inspect your room without notice. In fact, at the time, my brother was about 13, and he used to write to me in a code, like young boys will do. And I can still remember this lieutenant being very excited when he found that I had a sheet that delineated what the code was. And he was quite disappointed when he found out that it was not the lesbian code.
It's hard to explain the pressure of a witch hunt. I can remember one of the women attempted suicide, and she left a long note naming everybody she could think of that might be a lesbian. But she was not successful in her suicide attempt. And when she woke up in the hospital, the investigators were sitting beside her bed, asking her detailed questions about the rest of us. So about nine of us came under investigation right away.
During those few months, a friend of mine and I decided one night to go to the drive-in movie. Now, we were just pals. We weren't in any relationship or anything. We were followed, and I saw somebody at the drive-in theater writing down my license plate. The next morning, I was ordered to appear at the commander's office, and the woman I had gone to the movies with was also told to report. Then they lined us up, and they had four or five women between us, and they asked the gentleman who had taken down my license plate to pick out who he saw the night before. Well, they picked out the two of us. They supposedly watched my friend and I necking in the car at the drive-in - which we were not doing - and they came back with a decision that I was a homosexual. They gave me an undesirable discharge. I could not get my severance pay. I couldn't keep my uniform. I was not allowed to ever go on a military base again for the rest of my life. I always carried that stigma of that discharge.
I still feel very patriotic when I hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" or I see the flag go by. And I do feel like the time I was in there, I did serve my country. But the regret is that I didn't get to stay.
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FADEL: That's Air Force veteran Jeri Dilno speaking with her friend, Andrea Villa, in San Diego, California. Jeri eventually got her discharge changed so she could access veterans' benefits. She died last February at age 87.
(SOUNDBITE OF WRITESPARK, ALEX MUNK AND MATTHEW JAMES ROBINSON'S "HOPEFUL REFLECTION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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