San Franciscans have Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a classic film of cinematic heights and existential falls, to define their city by the bay. Los Angeles explains its fundamental fatalism about corruption and power through Roman Polanski’s nasty noir Chinatown.

But San Diego—a beautiful place full of people who have thought and fought for their country—has long had to settle for 1986’s Top Gun, a dumb, jingoistic, and misogynistic Tom Cruise vehicle about Naval aviators, as its cinematic signature. Sure, San Diego played other places in acclaimed films from Some Like It Hot to Citizen Kane (the latter filmed in the city’s Balboa Park). But when it comes to playing and expressing itself, San Diego’s stuck with Top Gun and the 2004 comedy Anchorman, about dumb and misogynistic local TV personalities.

The arrival of a Top Gun sequel—after 36 years—certainly doesn’t solve the problem, even if it is a box office hit. This ludicrous film mirrors American decline, while misrepresenting San Diego in the process.

Top Gun: Maverick is premised entirely on an error of fact, pretending that the eponymous school for Navy fighter pilots operates out of the North Island Naval Air Station.

But the real-life Topgun was relocated from San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station to Fallon, Nevada back in 1996, as part of post-Cold War defense consolidation.

It’s not coming back.

Except in the movies—because a vapid and predictable film wants to tap into the magic of San Diego.

Part of that magic lies in the city’s beauty. So, the movie transports audiences not just to the naval base on North Island, but to Point Loma, various parts of Coronado, and Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. And we also get the tourism-bureau-approved privilege of watching Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise sail across the bay.

Another piece of that magic is San Diego’s image as protector of America. San Diego is California’s most American city, a striking contrast to Los Angeles and San Francisco, which see themselves as global metropolises, proudly out of step with the rest of the United States.

While other Californians debate whether to stand for national anthem at all, San Diegans sing the song themselves, often while flying the flag outside their front door. And the longstanding presence of the military provides the city with a deep well of patriotic renewal.

Top Gun: Maverick seeks to mine this well, but ultimately undermines it. When the movie taps into San Diego’s patriotism, it does the city a disservice.

While the original Top Gun was full of memorable, funny one-liners (“I feel the need, the need for speed” and “No points for second place”), the sequel decides to champion the line, “Don’t think—just do.”

The phrase isn’t just clunky. It reads as an indictment of both the film’s idiotic denouement (a Star Wars rip-off, with jets flying through a steep canyon to get off a miracle shot in the climactic moment) and of the United States itself.

“Don’t think” all too perfectly describes a country that thoughtlessly fails to vaccinate or wear masks—and ends up with more than one million people dead from COVID, apparently the highest death tally in the world. “Don’t think” fits an America that responds to gun violence by loosening restrictions on guns, making mass shootings routine. “Don’t think—just do” mirrors the American foreign policy that has kept us at war, in one place or another, for decades.

Pity San Diego, or any place else with a mission of defending such a country. Because so much of the time, to defend America is to defend the indefensible.

Which is why the movie is so unfair to San Diego. While military and aerospace are still highly visible in San Diego, the place is hardly dominated by these industries.

And San Diego actually does quite a lot of thinking.

In the original Top Gun, Cruise’s love interest was a mathematician with a PhD who worked for the Department of Defense; in the sequel, his love interest owns a bar. But San Diego, unlike Cruise’s cinematic partners, has become smarter over the past generation. It’s one of the country’s most educated cities, by measures that combine college degree attainment with the quality of its schools. It’s a leader in inventing new health and medical devices. Its remaining military installations are deeply grounded in science and tech. It’s a force in trade. And it just opened a new trolley line to its leading university, UC San Diego.

The film ignores this context, instead projecting its idiocy onto the city.

That’s too bad. San Diego deserves a cinematic touchstone as smart as it is.

The post <i>Top Gun</i> Is Too Dumb for San Diego appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d hoped to avoid ground combat by enlisting in the Navy, but within nine months of joining, I found myself in Vietnam.

During those long 13 months at war, the one good thing was the circle of friends I made, first as a hospital corpsman in an aid station in the jungle, and then onboard the hospital ship Repose.

The first gay man I met was at the aid station located in Dong Ha near the DMZ. His name was Matt, and we laughed when we found we both loved the movie The Group, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The story of the friendship of a group of Vassar College women who deal together with discrimination, jobs, and men, The Group also had a secret lesbian character who gave us an idea. Matt introduced me to a buddy of his, Joe, and together we bonded like the girls of The Group, and for the same reasons. We added more members who also loved the name—ultimately seven in all—and so we called ourselves “The Group.”

We were noticed, and maybe recognized as gay, but no one bothered us. I know some of our officers knew about us. It didn’t matter. We were in a war zone, and as long as we did our jobs, what the hell?

I had a difficult upbringing. I was born in a field on a farm in California’s Salinas Valley, and my father beat me from the time I was 7 years old. My mother tried to protect me, but one day my father nearly killed me by beating me with a pipe. He left, at my mother’s insistence, abandoning her to raise three children by herself. The last time I saw my father, he said, “I know what you are. I never loved you. I hate you.”

I hated the war, but suddenly because of the Navy, I had a place where I belonged. A family called The Group to share a life with.

Then in mid-December 1969, back stateside and stationed at the Quantico Marine Corp Base, the bottom fell out. I was summoned by the commanding officer of the Marines, who directed me to report to OSI, the Office of Special Investigation. I sat in a small room, where I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, a man dressed in civilian clothes came in and introduced himself as a special agent of the OSI. He said allegations had been made against me.

I knew immediately what this was about. It was my secret, and it’d been found out.

“What allegations?” I asked anyway.

“You being a faggot,” he said.

I’d been turned in by a man called Anonymous. My military career ended even as I was coming to the very end of my enlistment. My year of service in a war zone counted for nothing. My passion for saving the lives of my fellow servicemen counted for less.

The OSI man said he wanted names and ranks of other homos I knew, and that I was going to have to submit to more detailed questioning by other agents.

“You will report back here to my office at 0900 tomorrow. Do you understand?”

A shipmate in Vietnam, David Monarch, had been arrested for being gay and removed from the ship. A very private man who’d kept to himself, he wasn’t part of The Group. But we all found out that he’d been court-martialed and sentenced to prison. Just months before OSI called me in, I’d gotten word that David had died at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I never learned how and why, but in 1960s America, we gay men deserved to die, according to popular thinking. So, who was going to investigate the fate of a queer Black man behind bars?

I was filled with terror at the prospect of dying like David.

I might as well die now, I thought. On my own terms.

Hours before I was supposed to return to the OSI office, I went to the small laboratory, where I worked as a medical technician. The bottles and beakers looked frightening in the thin 2 a.m. light.

Removing a Bunsen burner from the gas valve, I used the attached tubing to fill up a large plastic bag, which I then taped securely around my neck.

I shut my eyes. Was it the war? Was it the harassment for being gay? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated being gay and that I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

As the gas replaced the oxygen in my system, my head started spinning, and I heard squeaky noises inside my skull. But then I realized I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give into them. I pulled the plug on the gas pipe, tore off the bag, and sat up.

After I reported my suicide attempt to the psychiatrist in my clinic, that stopped the legal proceedings in their tracks. Even the U.S. Navy wasn’t so cruel as to deny treatment to someone endangering his life.

I was first treated with strong psychotropic drugs and kept in a padded cell to protect the other patients from the “homosexual.” Later, I was released into the general population but kept on drugs with regular interviews and discussions with a military psychologist, all to treat my homosexuality rather than the PTSD I’d suffered because of the war, which remained undiagnosed. I spent nine weeks in the hospital.

Ultimately, it was decided that I must be discharged. A military medical board promised me a General Discharge under Honorable conditions—but it was qualified. On my Military Separation Paper DD214 were three codes: #265, unsuitability because of a character disorder; #256, admission of being a homosexual, acceptance of discharge in lieu of board action and punishment; and a re-enlistment code of RE4, unsuitable for military service.

This is known as a “bad paper discharge.” Other codes tell stories of drug use/sales, anger/aggression toward others, drunk driving, and any number of crimes or misdeeds. And there are other types of discharges, too, including Dishonorable and Bad Conduct Discharges.

These codes, and your DD214 form, follow you for the rest of your life. Employers can demand to see the form, for government jobs, especially; it indicates your job worthiness. The Veterans Administration will use it to see if you qualify for benefits, such as medical and retirement pay. Some of these General or even Dishonorable designations are the result of PTSD or traumatic brain injury; others are the result of the same mistakes a civilian young person may make, but in the civilian world there’s a chance they’ll forgive and forget these errors of youth. The DD214 is always the same and never changes. The codes give a picture of a person that is as one-dimensional as the ink on the paper.

A bad paper discharge can lead to higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide. For gay and lesbian people, the discharge has designations showing you as a criminal for many decades.

After getting out, I tried for a job at a city agency in Los Angeles. They refused to hire me after seeing the character flaw designation on my DD214. Later, I applied at Pacific Bell Telephone to become a janitor. They didn’t check my discharge; it wasn’t necessary for someone being hired to clean toilets.

On my discharge day, in February 1970, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of a man I loved. Matt had died a hero in my arms, the last week I was in Vietnam. I remembered how we had decided to create a tribe of our own. The other men, Matt said, had their support system all laid out for them. Surrounded by killing, we gay men needed to protect our minds, and strengthen one another.

As I stood at Matt’s headstone, rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks.

I was never religious. But I looked to the sky and hoped there was a God and that my Matt was with Him. I spoke the words I had said that moment when he died: “I wish we could have been lovers. I love you, man. I love you.”

Over the past 50 years, I have had many battles with the PTSD I suffer because of my war experiences, but I have also fought hard for the rights of Matt and other men and women like me.

It was only after I retired, though, that I began to think about correcting the injustice of my own discharge.

In 2016, I was volunteering at the Los Angeles County Department of Veterans Affairs, where I befriended the chief deputy director. She heard my story and helped me use her office’s resources to start my petition for a change to my discharge. It took four years, the help of a young gay psychologist at the VA Hospital and a high-powered legal team, and it changed my life. On June 3, 2019, my DD214 was administratively reissued to show a full and unqualified Honorable Discharge.

I now belong to veterans’ organizations where Afghanistan and Iraq veterans meet. They have struggles from their wars, and I suspect some have bad paper discharges. I show them that they can have a life—a long life—after service. They are my family now, my Group.

The post The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Curiously, the nation’s decision to admit asylum-seekers was not a direct consequence of our Revolutionary idealism. Instead, the extension of political asylum owes much to a naval uprising—on a British ship—in 1797.

On the night of September 22, the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy erupted aboard the frigate HMS Hermione off the western coast of Puerto Rico. Stabbed repeatedly with cutlasses and bayonets, ten officers, including the ship’s sadistic captain, Hugh Pigot, were thrown overboard.

The mutiny thrust upon the administration of President John Adams a set of incendiary issues involving natural rights, American citizenship, and political asylum—a consequence of the purported presence of impressed (i.e. conscripted) American sailors aboard the Hermione and, in turn, the prospect of their extradition to Great Britain after seeking refuge in the United States.

The decade of the 1790s wasn’t necessarily friendly to asylum seekers. Although President George Washington favored a liberal immigration policy, limited to be sure to “white Europeans,” the French Revolution coupled with unrest in Ireland against British occupation contributed to a lapping tide of xenophobia in the early Republic, especially among leading members of the Federalist Party, who viewed England as a lone bastion of civil order in Europe.

Nativist fears crested with congressional passage in 1798 of the Alien Acts, which granted President Adams, as Washington’s successor, the power to deport émigrés without due process of law. Another Alien Act, in a thinly veiled attempt to deter immigration, extended the minimum period of residence from five to 14 years for prospective citizens. A Federalist representative from Massachusetts railed that he did “not wish to invite hoards [sic] of wild Irishmen.”

The mutiny challenged Federalist xenophobia.

In the summer of 1799, Adams ignited a political firestorm by authorizing a federal court in Charleston, South Carolina, to surrender to the British a seaman named Jonathan Robbins—a native son, he claimed, of Danbury, Connecticut, who had been impressed by the Royal Navy. The outrage was fanned in subsequent weeks by news from Jamaica of the sailor’s hanging, not as Jonathan Robbins, a United States citizen, but, the British claimed, as the reputed Irish ringleader Thomas Nash.

Although his true identity remained hotly contested, that did not put an end to the martyrdom of Jonathan Robbins. Mourned by Jeffersonian Republicans as a freedom fighter against British tyranny, the incident proved pivotal to Adams’s bitter loss to Jefferson in the monumental presidential election of 1800. The Robbins crisis also contributed to a dramatic shift in United States immigration policy.

In his first address to Congress, on December 8, 1801, President Jefferson pointedly invoked America’s messianic pledge to afford a haven for persecuted refugees. In stark contrast to the nativism of the Adams years, he demanded, “Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”

For 43 years after the extradition of Robbins, not one person, citizen or alien, would be surrendered by the federal government to another country, including other mutineers from the Hermione. And when the United States finally signed an extradition agreement with Great Britain in 1842 as part of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, “political offenses,” including mutiny, desertion, and treason were exempted from a list of extraditable crimes in order to avoid reviving the “popular clamour” of the Robbins controversy.

In subsequent treaties, political offenses would also remain exempt from extradition, as they would in Congress’ first extradition law (1848). That was the point at which political asylum became the express policy of the United States, a major legislative achievement in helping to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution. And in agreeing to extradition agreements with additional nations, the United States significantly promoted the doctrine of political asylum not only at home but also abroad.

The U.S. has not always lived up to these ideals, or these laws. Too often in recent decades, foreign policy priorities have influenced asylum decisions, with preference openly extended to a handful of nationalities (such as Cubans fleeing the Castro regime). Like other federal tribunals, immigration courts should function as part of the judiciary—not as an extension of the executive. After all, it was Adams’ 1799 authorization that a federal judge extradite Jonathan Robbins that touched off the fierce backlash against his presidency.

This political crisis led to a tradition of political asylum that predates the Statue of Liberty’s famous affirmation that foreign nations send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would take the martyred Jonathan Robbins, and another 50 years, but political asylum’s establishment in 1848 effectively enshrined Tom Paine’s promise in 1776 that America would be a beacon of liberty for victims of oppression and violence.

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