The Masculine Marine

Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine Corps

Steven Zeeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781560249825
• eBook ISBN: 9781136591730
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This exciting book was listed as #1 on The Advocate's (ital) bestseller list for December 1996! In The Masculine Marine, author Steven Zeeland records, for the first time ever, what active-duty Marines have to say about what it means to be a man, to be a Marine, and to desire other men. As the foremost surviving icon of traditional masculinity, Marines are often considered the opposite of "gay." Yet in contemporary gay culture, Marines are stereotyped as likely to play the passive role in sexual encounters with other men. By vividly illustrating some of the startling ways in which gay and Marine attributes can coincide, The Masculine Marine uncovers the wild sexual contradictions built into military hypermasculinity. From ordinary grunts to a major who flies a combat jet, Zeeland's Marine interviewees provide thoughtful and articulate insight into aspects of this rarely documented culture, including:

• homoerotic bonding among Marines
• how gay Marines reconcile their sexual identity with the ethos of "hard" Marine supermasculinity
• how some Marines eroticize the pain and humiliation of Marine Corps boot camp
• Marines in all-male pornography
• male attitudes toward women in the Marine Corps
• hazing and institutional violence These Marines talk candidly about what motivated them to join the United States'most elite fighting force, and they reveal how becoming Marines has shaped their sexual and gender identities. For the student of gay or military studies or anyone sexually intrigued by men in uniform, The Masculine Marine must reading. Visit Steven Zeeland at his home page: http://www.stevenzeeland.com

Corporal Alex: Marine Biology

“And Alex? What kind of an animal would he be?”

Seaman Anthony and I were enjoying a cocktail in celebration of my completion of the manuscript for Sailors and Sexual Identity, a book in which he would feature as the first interviewee. Possibly we had already had several drinks when I commented that, in the bar that night, there seemed to be an inordinate number of faces belonging to humans but extremely resembling other kinds of animals. There was a beautiful horse-faced woman who looked like that actress in Almodovar movies and a Navy SEAL who, due to some imagined slight of mine, hurled me a resentful gibbon sneer. Anthony volunteered that, growing up, he had sometimes been likened to a turtle. I confessed to an awareness of my avian qualities.

And Alex? Anthony smiled wickedly. “Alex looks like a baby seal—just about to be clubbed.”

The sobriquet stuck. When Spy magazine ran a photo of a weepy Brigitte Bardot embracing a seal pup on an ice floe, I reenacted the shot for my Christmas cards, Bardot-ing Alex atop a snowy eastern San Diego County mountain. Probably, Anthony saw Alex more as a cowbird, I thought—any of various blackbirds who lay their eggs in the nests of other birds: Alex’s own animal metaphor for his recent usurpation of Anthony’s role in my life. Although I had palled around with Anthony for a year, with Alex it was different.

I have previously described the circumstances of our first meeting, occasioned by Anthony, who discovered the newly gay 21-year-old Wisconsonian of trailer park origins in a (he said) “convenience store.” Sick with jealousy, I begged Anthony to tell me that Alex had a small penis. “I’m sorry,” he answered, laughing, “I can’t tell you that.” Alex responded to my inevitable overture by making clear that his taste was for large, muscular men, but offered that he was attracted to me “intellectually.” Offended, I explained that, after a year of playing solicitous avuncular confessor to young sailors, I had no such vacancy. Alex continued to call me, and, finding him not only cute, but also quirky, intelligent, and amusing, I condescended to provide him with guidance and encouragement, and one night he surprised me by climbing into my bed.

Anthony left for an overseas assignment. Alex became my special companion.

Ours was, and still is, an unusual alliance. We discontinued having (sort of) sex after a bizarre misunderstanding in an L.A. sex club involving a bottled water dispenser filled with hydrogen peroxide and a living, two-headed rabbit toted by some creepy Venice Beach type. Instead, we honed an uncanny telepathic understanding. Alarmingly, we started speaking in synch. Often our simultaneous pronouncements were predictable enough—the kind of thing that typically happens when people spend lots of time together. But sometimes they were more surprising. Once, on a drive in the country, commenting on some reposing bovines, I said “Big cows.” Alex said “Little cows.” Turning our faces together, in Bergmanesque fashion, we droned: “All the cows”—and shuddered together: “Where did that come from?”

Alex The first picture I ever had of Marines … It was a misconception of mine. When I was little I wanted to be a marine biologist. And—I was an intelligent little boy, but I obviously misunderstood. I told my grandmother, “I could go into the Marines and get training for marine biology.” She laughed and said, “Oh, you don’t want to go in the Marines. They don’t teach you anything about marine biology, they just teach you how to kill people.” And I thought, “Oh, I guess I don’t want to do that.” Then later came the pictures that you get from history classes and TV shows … I was never a big war movie buff. I never watched—it’s kind of even still a sacrilege; people look down on me at my unit because I never watched The Dirty Dozen, Bridge Over the River Kwai, or any of the old John Wayne war movies. I continually garble all the Marine facts. The history part didn’t really interest me that much.

So the conception that I had was that Marines go out and kill people. But there was also … that mystique. There was honor and tradition. That was inherent in people’s recognition of Marines. When you think Marine, what do you think? You think, pride. They’re the modern day Knights of the Round Table. Well, [laughs] that was my conception of them before I joined.

Zeeland Were there TV commercials you saw like that?

A Oh yeah. There was also a very well-produced video. And I was all ready to go after that. It looked like it was very hard work, and they advertised travel, which was one of my top priorities because I wanted to leave Wisconsin. And then they showed you scenes from boot camp. They didn’t really glamorize it although they left some significant parts out.

Z How was the reality of boot camp different from the video?

A Um, actually, I look back now, and the time that I did in boot camp and my basic schooling was my favorite time in the Marine Corps.…

You had no personal freedom, you had practically everything stripped from you; they told you where to go, what to do, how much to eat. But it wasn’t that hard for me. There was only one time that I cried. It was about a week into training, and it was at night, and—I was eighteen. This was the first time I had been away from everybody I knew for a long period of time. And I had gotten a letter from my mom. They had me go up in front of class and open it. And it had, like, comics and all that in there—I guess stuff to cheer me up or something. And they took it. They let me have the letter, but they took all the comics and threw ’em in the trash. At the time it was kind of devastating, but I look back on it now and it was actually kind of liberating, because—It might sound kind of cheesy, but it was a time when I guess I felt I was taking a step from a boy to a man. That night I cried, but when I woke up the next morning I was like, “I’m not gonna let this place get to me.”

And it wasn’t really all that hard. It was pretty much just a mind game. I’d been through enough already in my life where they would have to do a whole shitload more to break me than that. There’s a lot of other people that took it a lot harder; we had a few unbalanced characters there, and it was obviously taking a strain on their sanity. People were begging to get out and it was a horrible experience for them, and those are the ones who ultimately gave all of themselves away, let the drill instructors strip their entire identity straight down to the bone and rebuild them. I allowed the drill instructors to break down my individuality only to a certain point. I may have given them the illusion that I was broken down further, but deep inside I kept a kernel of my original self. I learned techniques, like being able to go inside my head. [Laughs.] I have many safe havens established in my head.

Z What was the point of making you open up the letter from your mom and destroying the comics?

A Well, they said that they were looking for contraband. But I doubt that, because it was just a letter. And if my mom was gonna smuggle me pot—I wouldn’t put it past my mom—but they piss test you and all that. When you go into boot camp, you have no remnants of your former life. You go there with clothes and they take those away and put ’em in a box, and basically the only thing that you have is the stuff that they give you. So I think, that early in training, they didn’t want you to have any kind of symbols that you could latch onto that identified you with your family or your former life.

Z You’re not a big guy. Did you have any problems making it through boot camp physically?

A [Laughs.] When we had our first initial physical fitness test, I couldn’t do pull-ups. I failed my PFT because of that. Not because of lack of physical strength—well, that was pretty much it. I didn’t have the upper body strength. Running and sit-ups I had no problem with, just the pull-ups. Later on, my drill instructor showed me that physical strength isn’t always required to do certain things. This was kind of a big revelation because it broke down misconceptions I had, growing up, that if you’re not physically strong you’re somehow inferior. He taught me what they call “kipping.” It’s a technique of getting your body in motion so that you can easily just use the momentum to get yourself up over the bar. I got the technique down really well, and the more we trained, the better and better I got, and I haven’t had any physical problems since.

Z What was your build compared to the other recruits?

A We had almost eighty other recruits. I was pretty much in the middle. Most everybody had a bigger chest and bigger arms than me, but not too many people had bigger legs than me.

Z You went to boot camp here in San Diego at MCRD, which I told you I overheard some sailors in the head at NTC [Naval Training Center] refer to as the cradle of “Hollywood Marines.” They were saying that “real” Marines go to Parris Island.

A Well, sailors can’t really talk, can they? It’s all a farce. The whole boot camp thing is just another Marine Corps melodrama to make a situation out to be something more than it is. It doesn’t matter which boot camp you went to. Each one has its own difficulties. If you went to Parris Island you had sand fleas. If you went to San Diego you had … well, good weather. But you also have mountains here that they don’t have in Parris Island. And when you’re doing a hike, and you climb hundreds of feet and the slope is so steep that you can practically reach forward an arm’s length and touch the ground in front of you, standing straight up, with a full load on your back—it’s difficult. And sometimes I probably would have traded the mountains for sand fleas.

Z Was there some image of yourself you thought you could fulfill by enlisting in the Marine Corps?

A At the time I joined I was hanging around my aunt a lot, and she was, and still is, on this New Age spirituality kick. I was following her self-improvement techniques. That’s what actually kind of motivated me to go in because I realized that I lacked physical strength, and I lacked discipline.

Z How masculine did you consider yourself at the time?

A [Pause.] I didn’t think of myself as feminine. I was just … a kid. I wasn’t thinking about masculinity or femininity.

Z Did you play any sports?

A No. I was into the mental kick. I was in the science club. The science olympiad was the closest thing I ever did to a sport.

Z And you played the cello.

A Yeah. And the bass.

Z The other guys never gave you a hard time?

A About playing the cello? The only reason why they gave me grief was because of the size comparison. They’d ridicule me because they’d see me walking home—I must’ve been five-four, with this bass that towered over me. And I’d have it on my back.

Z Okay. So you didn’t join the Marine Corps out of any sense of deficient masculinity.

A I won’t say that I didn’t, but that was mostly just a supporting reason. It was in the back of my mind … I guess at that time I considered it part of the self-improvement.

Z You have told me how, between the ages of eight and sixteen, you were sexually abused by a cousin six years older, who, with physical force and threats, would force you to let him brutally penetrate you, weekly, for eight years.

A [Nods.] It caused a lot of problems in my life. During the abuse, and after the abuse stopped, I was very moody, increasingly spastic. Which I still show remnants of today, in m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Masculine Marine: Homoeroticism in the U.S. Marine Corps
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: Penetrating Marine Machismo
• Corporal Keith: The Devil Dog Yell
• Lance Corporal Ted: The Absent-Father Tattoo
• Corporal Alex: Marine Biology
• First Lieutenant Frank: Parris Island Is Burning
• Captain Eric: Marines Like To Be Looked At
• Sergeant Wood and Corporal Marie: Gay and Straight Are Identical
• Major Luke: Isolated Pain
• Corporal Jack: Smell of Masculine Marine
• Corporal Alex (Coda): A Parable
• Reference Notes