Michelle Benecke is stepping down as co-director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network ( SLDN ) , an organization she co-founded in 1993. Over those years SLDN has directly assisted more than 2,500 men and women caught in the travesty of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It has won more than 30 improvements in the way the Pentagon carries out its anti-gay policy.
Much of the credit for those successes goes to Benecke, though she is quick to call it a team effort and lavish praise on her colleagues. There is no question that she is attractive, bright, dedicated, but all of those traits are held in check, put to service of the mission, not Benecke herself. She has self-assurance and self-confidence without a trace of arrogance. She is superbly, humanely professional in all of the best senses of the word.
MAKING AN OFFICER
The Army is in Michelle Benecke's blood. Her father was a career man, a master sergeant. She grew up "a military brat" moving from base to base, spending most of her high school years in Germany. An ROTC scholarship paid her way through the University of Virginia where she "struggled for a while" with her sexual orientation, only fully coming to terms with it a few years later.
The U.S. moved to an all-volunteer Army in the 1970s, which opened up opportunities for women. Still, the pace of change was slow, hemmed in by law and tradition when she pinned on her lieutenant's bars in 1983. Benecke chose air defense artillery, as close to front line combat as women were allowed. She was among some of the first women trained in that specialty. Over the next six years she rose to the rank of captain and command of a Hawk anti-aircraft missile battery.
Benecke was headed for law school with Uncle Sam picking up the tab. An officer had some discretion in ignoring the Pentagon's ban on gays in the military, but "as a lawyer working for the commander, I would have to enforce the policy," she said. "I felt a real ethical tension." Her solution was to turn down the agreement and plan to get out of the service.
Things would not be so simple. She was home on leave for her sister's nuptials, "dressed in a frou-frou wedding party gown" and about to step into a limousine to the ceremony when the phone rang. The Army's Criminal Investigations Division ( CID ) had pulled her troops out of their barracks at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, asking is she were a lesbian. There was no evidence, simply the charge that nearly every successful woman in the Army faced at one time or another.
"I asked myself, what would I do if I were straight?" Benecke said. As soon as she got back to base she marched into the commander's office and expressed her outrage. He was equally upset, in part because CID had been doing this without telling him. The investigation was pulled from CID and given to an inquiry officer.
Benecke could find no civilian lawyer to help defend her against the witch-hunt. "I ultimately survived because I knew my legal rights" and had a commander who was fair-minded. The experience crystallized an idea that had been growing in her mind, and would shape her life work for more than a decade.
NEXT BATTLES
Harvard Law School was a bit of a "culture shock" for the daughter of an enlisted man. But she adapted to the new environment. Miriam Ben Shalom's constitutional legal challenge to being discharged from the Army reserves for being a lesbian was wending its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It led Benecke to research the stories of women in the military.
She found that the charge of lesbianism was a common tactic "used to try and hound women out of the military service." Working with fellow law student Kirstin Dodge, they framed it in a broader context of feminism, as an attack against women who were succeeding in non-traditional roles, or who fought sexual harassment. It did not matter if the woman was gay or straight, the charge was hurled to try to discredit her accomplishments.
The pair wrote a seminal article on the subject, "Women in Nontraditional Fields: Casualties of the Armed Forces' War on Homosexuals" that appeared in the 1990 Harvard Women's Law Journal.
That experience deepened Benecke's commitment to the idea of forming a legal aid group dedicated to helping victims of anti-gay witchhunts in the military defend themselves.
So too did the gay bashing of Navy seaman Alan Schindler by a shipmate in Japan in 1992, and the Pentagon's attempts to downplay the murder. Schindler had gone to his commander saying that he felt threatened and unsafe, but nothing had been done to help him.
Gays in the military erupted into a national issue only days after Bill Clinton was sworn in as President in 1993. The gay community reacted by forming the Campaign for Military Service ( CMS ) a coalition to coordinate their efforts on the controversy. Benecke, a freshly minted attorney, served as a consultant to CMS. There she met C. Dixon Osburn, a young graduate of Georgetown University Law Center.
By April it was obvious to all that Clinton had abandoned his attempt to lift the regulatory ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. The "compromise" that was codified into law in July became known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ( DADT ) .
It purported to allow gays to serve in the military, so long as they hid the fact that they were gay.
THE SLDN YEARS
"Dixon and I saw ourselves at a fork in the road," says Benecke. "The door had been cracked open. For the first time law firms and the media" had shown an interest in the persecution that gays and lesbians faced while serving their country. The pair knew that the military was not going to change unless it was watched and unless legal assistance was provided to the men and women caught up in the web of homophobia.
"We knew it was going to be tough and it didn't fit anyone else's mission," she says. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund was supporting legal constitutional challenges to the gay ban. But those were a select few cases, Lambda had neither the resources nor the inclination to provide legal assistance for the many garden variety cases of anti-gay harassment reported on a day-to-day basis.
Benecke and Osburn decided to establish the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network "to lay the foundation to bring about the day to overturn this law [ DADT ] ." In the interim, they "wanted to create a place where people could go if they needed help."
The National Veterans Legal Services Project lent them a tiny room that barely held desks for the two of them and a few file cabinets. There was no seed money, only the checkbooks of the two recent law school grads who had their own bills to pay. They thought they would give themselves three months to set up the organization. But the doors opened only a few weeks later, in August 1993, "on a wing and a prayer." And the phone began ringing "almost from day one."
The duo caught the Pentagon "trying to erase the right to remain silent or ask for an attorney" when under investigation for homosexual conduct. The brass "tried to make a gay exception," says Benecke.
They created an annual report, "Conduct Unbecoming," that documented the rise in anti-gay harassment and expulsions under DADT as carried out by the Clinton administration. Its spring release became a reason for the media to reexamine the failed policy on a yearly basis.
And they helped service members with legal assistance and local referrals whenever the phone rang. Among them was submariner Timothy McVeigh. The Navy tried to expel him based only on screen profile with America Online that they had obtained in violation of their own procedures and federal law. A federal judge slapped the Navy's collective wrist and ordered McVeigh retained. AOL strengthened its confidentiality procedures.
"It is shameful that it took Barry Winchell's murder [ at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in July 1999 ] before military leaders took the issue of stopping anti-gay harassment seriously," says Benecke. But the changes in regulations and implementation made since then have been significant.
Fort Campbell commander Major General Robert Clark asserted that there were no problems of anti-gay harassment at the base, despite testimony to the contrary during the trials of Winchell's murders. Public and political pressure assured that Clark did not get an anticipated promotion. Benecke says, "That sent a message to every general officer" that there would be a price to pay for tolerating anti-gay harassment in their command.
REFLECTIONS
"When I served [ in the Army ] , people were plucked out of the unit, they just disappeared. There were rumors, but they were just gone." Benecke says that for every gay discharge case that went to an administrative hearing or to court, there were hundreds that one never heard about.
Witchhunts were commonplace, in part because "it was easier for CID to rack up numbers" by prosecuting gays than by handling more serious felonies. But now, "service members themselves are more empowered," they are more aware of their rights and how to find assistance when threatened.
The incentives built into the system have changed. "Now the Pentagon knows that if they launch a witchhunt, the press is going to be all over them." The public has become more aware of the abuses of "military justice" and is no longer willing to tolerate them.
When we started, we thought it would take 20 years to overturn DADT, says Benecke. "This IS the military and it is rather impervious to change." So she is delighted and proud that they have accomplished so much in seven years.
A lot of people fear that "with a Bush administration, everything is going to go to hell in a hand-basket. I disagree." Benecke believes that the new administration does not want to deal with DADT, and it knows the best way to do that is to minimize the issues surrounding its implementation.
Bush "could do a lot of good. It would make an impact on people's daily lives if he would reinforce that he expects the military to stop asking, pursuits, and harassment." She expects that the chain of command will understand that "they had darn well better implement it properly and follow the law."
Benecke is ready for a change in her life that involves fewer 12 to 16 hour days. She feels that SLDN is in good hands with co-director Osburn staying on as the sole director of the organization. And he is eager to handle the challenges.
Benecke is going to spend a little time with family and her partner to "mull over the options." One of the questions she has to answer for herself is if she "would be happy practicing law in a more traditional context." In the meantime she is going to "head down south, grab my golf bag and undertake the difficult task of working on my golf swing."
