Catching up with Margarethe Cammermeyer on 10th anniversary of marriage equality in WA

Editor’s note: “Love, Equally,” an exhibit celebrating the 10th anniversary of marriage equality in Washington, will open on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2023, at the State Capitol in Olympia. A book with the same title, which documents the history of the fight for LGBTQ civil rights, also will be available that day, at sos.wa.gov/store. The following is an edited excerpt from the chapter on Col. Margarethe “Grethe” Cammermeyer, the decorated Vietnam veteran discharged from the Army in 1992 after she revealed she is a lesbian.

WHEN ARMY COL. Margarethe Cammermeyer, a decorated Vietnam veteran, applied for a top-secret clearance in 1989 in hopes of becoming a general, her honest response to an obligatory question about sexual orientation changed the course of her already-eventful life.

“I am a lesbian,” the 47-year-old chief nurse of the Washington State National Guard said, a small clutch in her throat.  

With one question and that one four-word answer, a routine interview became an interrogation, and the military Cammermeyer had served for 26 years became her adversary.  

The National Guard began military discharge proceedings. In 1992, Cammermeyer was honorably discharged. She filed a lawsuit against the decision.  

And with that, Cammermeyer, a recipient of the Bronze Star as a combat-hospital nurse, and a mother of four, became the highest-ranking officer to challenge the Pentagon’s position that homosexuality was “incompatible” with military service. The military’s Cold War stance that gay service members posed security risks had morphed in the 1980s to a declaration that they were detrimental to “unit cohesion.” 

“This is the same argument used in every other discriminatory regulation that the military has had,” Cammermeyer says. “It was used with women in the military, and it was used with Blacks in the military. It’s almost the identical wording.”

Over the next few years, as Cammermeyer fought for reinstatement, she was surprised to find herself “one of the most famous lesbians in America,” she says — Glenn Close portrayed her in an award-winning TV movie, and Cammermeyer was in high demand nationwide for speeches and rallies. 

Victorious in federal court in 1994, Cammermeyer returned to duty and continued her newfound role as an activist, helping repeal the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which declared that LGBTQ service members could stay in the trenches as long as they didn’t reveal their sexual orientation. Yet, between 1993 and 2011, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed, more than 13,000 gays and lesbians had been forced out of the military. 

During the ceremony revoking the policy, Cammermeyer was asked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. “Patriotic Americans in uniform will no longer have to lie about who they are in order to serve the country they love,” President Barack Obama said. LGBTQ service members previously discharged were offered reenlistment. 

Today, Cammermeyer, 80; her spouse, Diane Divelbess; and their two rescue dogs live on Whidbey Island. Cammermeyer, who earned a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Washington in 1991, serves on Whidbey’s hospital commission. Inducted into the Washington State Nurses’ Association Hall of Fame in 2014, the former candidate for Congress uses her website as a platform to address current affairs. She writes inspirational songs and plays the guitar. With 11 grandkids, she says, she’s troubled by the state of the world, “hypocrisy and hate-mongering,” the safety of schoolchildren across America, Vladimir Putin’s lethal impunity and a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.  

If Americans who oppose bigotry are not vigilant, Cammermeyer says, hard-won gay rights victories could be reversed. 

GRETHE (PRONOUNCED “GRETA”) Cammermeyer was born in Nazi-occupied Norway in 1942. Her parents were part of the underground war, sheltering resistance forces. Her grandfathers were physicians. Her father was a brilliant neuropathologist, her mother a bright, resilient former nurse. Cammermeyer’s childhood goal was to become a doctor.  

Cammermeyer says her father refrained from hugging her brothers, believing such intimacy could make them gay. Her mother believed homosexuality was a mental illness. “The chains of prejudice are made of ignorance and fear,” Cammermeyer says. 

Her family moved to America in 1951. Cammermeyer and her kid brothers ended up in five different schools, struggling to learn English. She enrolled at the University of Maryland at 17, believing herself “too tall, too shy and too Norwegian” to fit in. She floundered in premed.  

With lousy grades and no scholarship, she reluctantly decided to pursue a degree in nursing. In many ways, she says, it’s “the crummiest job in the world,” replete with “blood, barf and bodily fluids,” and subservient to doctors. With time, she would come to see nursing as “the most important job in the world.” Nurses on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic personified the perseverance she learned in Vietnam, she says. “Finally, when healing is no longer possible, you’re the eyes that say goodbye.” 

In 1961, a few months after becoming a U.S. citizen, Cammermeyer told her parents she was applying for the Army’s Student Nurse Program. They were not encouraging. American friends had told them the only women who joined the American military were lesbians, “whores” or husband hunters. Cammermeyer remembers “completely rejecting” the idea she might be gay. Sexually naive at 19, she was anything but promiscuous. And she had no interest in marriage. She set out to become an exemplary soldier. 

AT AN ARMY post in Germany in 1964, Cammermeyer went on a blind date with a 6-foot-6 lieutenant from an armor battalion. In high heels, she could nearly look Harvey Hawken in the eye. “I think he was as shocked as I to meet someone so tall,” she remembers. Eight months later, when he proposed, she vacillated before saying yes, realizing she’d be sacrificing her career, hopes and dreams for the role of wife and, likely before long, mother. The military’s rule then was that female soldiers with children under 16 would be discharged. “If the Army had wanted you to have a baby,” the saying went, “it would have issued you one.” 

Her tour of duty in Vietnam — from February 1967 to May 1968 — coincided with a rapid buildup of U.S. forces and the highest casualties of the war. When the North Vietnamese staged their surprise Tet Offensive, mortar and artillery shells fell near the hospital compound. On the medical ward, Cammermeyer cared for sick teenagers caught up in a war she says “none of us really understood.” Sixty-one percent of the casualties were younger than 21.  

Later, Cammermeyer became head nurse for the hospital’s neurosurgical unit, learning profound lessons about advances in battlefield medicine — and hope, in “the flicker of an eyelid, or the squeeze of a hand from a young man who had been motionless before,” she wrote in “Serving in Silence,” her 1994 autobiography. 

Cammermeyer’s husband decided to leave the military to attend graduate school in forestry at the University of Washington, in his home state. As they made plans to build a dream home in Maple Valley, she was pregnant with the first of their children and was forced to take a temporary assignment before leaving the Army in the fall of 1968. Four years later, when the policy changed, she joined the Army Reserves and became nursing supervisor at the 50th General Hospital out of Fort Lawton in Seattle. 

Next came graduate school at the UW School of Nursing. All the while, she was juggling her role as mom to three young boys — and, in 1976, a fourth. Her husband became a State Patrol trooper. Slowly, subtly at first, the marriage began to unravel. As the stress metastasized, Cammermeyer says, she grew suicidal. A psychotherapist urged her to look back on her life for clues to her despair. Cammermeyer confessed that as a teenager, she had felt different from her peers and wondered whether she might be gay. Looking back now, she says, her resistance to seeing herself as homosexual was partly denial, and partly despair at the state of her marriage. 

When a judge awarded her estranged spouse primary custody of their sons, Cammermeyer was devastated. Her decision to move alone to California was an attempt to insert more distance between her and her ex, she says, though she felt as if she was abandoning her children. Cammermeyer became a neuro-oncology specialist at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco and transferred to an Army Reserve hospital there. By 1985, as a lieutenant colonel, she was chief nurse of the 352nd Evacuation Hospital at Oakland. Among 34,000 Veterans Administration nurses nationwide, she was chosen VA National Nurse of the Year. 

Awards and promotions couldn’t offset how much she missed her sons, and she accepted a job as a night-duty staff nurse at the American Lake VA Medical Center in Tacoma. Before long, she was regaining confidence and ambition. In 1987, she was readmitted to the UW’s Ph.D. program in nursing. A year later, she became chief nurse of the Washington National Guard, back on track to achieve her goal of becoming a general. 

IN 1988, CAMMERMEYER MET Divelbess, a widely exhibited painter and printmaker. Mutual friends engineered their meeting at a Fourth of July event. Cammermeyer was impressed by how easily Diane interacted with her sons. She had never met a better listener. Divelbess was “the last, connecting piece” of the puzzle of Cammermeyer’s identity, she says: She was in love with another woman. 

A year later, she was in trouble for telling the truth. 

When the interviewer asked about her sexual orientation, Cammermeyer says, she never considering lying, though the thought that her military career might be over flashed through her mind. “And yet, I still continued not to believe it, because I had a good military record,” she told reporters in 1991. “This was me telling a security clearance investigator the truth. And how could that possibly be used against me by the people I had served for so many years?”  

On July 15, 1991, two years after that initial interview, a four-member board of high-ranking Army and National Guard officers met to review her case. “I truly believe that you are one of the great Americans, Margarethe,” said the board’s president, Col. Patsy Thompson. “I’ve admired all that you’ve done for the Army National Guard.” (Thompson came out as a lesbian 22 years later and apologized to Cammermeyer, asking for her forgiveness. It was immediately granted.) 

Following her honorable discharge, Cammermeyer declared immediately that she would appeal the decision through the federal courts. And she became an activist.  

Cammermeyer met Bill Clinton in the summer of 1992 during a campaign stop in Seattle. If elected president, he promised to overturn the military’s ban on gay service members. 

Cammermeyer was busy writing her autobiography with help from Chris Fisher, an award-winning Seattle writer. Fisher immediately grasped that Cammermeyer’s story could inspire millions of others, and when Barbra Streisand wanted to produce it as a made-for-television movie, Cammermeyer finally consented. Streisand told her gay rights were “the most important social issue of the decade.” 

Clinton, meantime, had discovered the Pentagon was a more formidable adversary than he had imagined. When he rolled out “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 1993, the new president declared, “Under this policy, a person can say, ‘I am a homosexual.’ ” The very next day, Defense Secretary Les Aspin told reporters the Commander in Chief had misspoken. “People are not allowed under this regulation to say, ‘I am gay,’ ” Aspin said.

Clinton insisted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a new twist on serving in silence, was “a substantial advance.” Cammermeyer viewed it as better-than-nothing incrementalism, perhaps “the beginning of an exoneration.” But she was frustrated, too. “We should scream in outrage at still being classified as second-class citizens,” she said. 

On June 1, 1994, U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly ordered the National Guard to reinstate Col. Cammermeyer. “The rationales offered by the government to justify its exclusion of homosexual service members are grounded solely in prejudice,” he said. The Justice Department said it was weighing an appeal. The bigger fight was far from over, but Zilly’s ruling — the latest in a succession of similar legal victories for LGBTQ service members nationwide — was definitive.  

Cammermeyer returned to the Washington State National Guard. When she retired from active duty in 1997, she redoubled her campaign to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Another Washingtonian played a key role: Air Force Maj. Margaret “Margie” Witt, a decorated operating room nurse from Tacoma, who was suspended from duty in 2004 for being a lesbian. She fought back with a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the policy, and in 2008, she won a key decision in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2010, momentum for change undeniable, the U.S. Senate overturned the policy on a 65-31 vote.  

DESPITE THE POSITIVE response to her book and the televised movie, Cammermeyer’s speeches sometimes led to protests. When she spoke at an Olympia High School assembly in 1995 — at the invitation of the Student Activist Club — 50 students boycotted. A hundred others had been kept home by parents upset that the school board would not cancel the event. 

Cammermeyer returned two weeks later for a rally in support of two students assaulted on the school grounds by teenagers from a nearby town. One of the victims was 17-year-old Bill Clayton, an openly bisexual Olympia High School junior who had advocated for Cammermeyer’s appearance at the assembly. To cope with an earlier assault, Clayton had just completed two years of therapy. “For this to happen threw him … into a severe depression,” his mother, Gabrielle Clayton, told The Olympian newspaper. The youth took his own life a month later, a few days after being released from a Seattle hospital.  

“It was just a terrible time,” Cammermeyer remembers. “My appearance at the school generated such an uproar that you would have thought I was going to pollute the world — a military nurse. Then came the heartbreak of losing Bill Clayton. … I had reached out to him at the hospital by phone and told him I was there for him.” 

Cammermeyer decided to run for Congress in 1998. Her opponent in the 2nd Congressional District north of Seattle was two-term Congressman Jack Metcalf, a politician long opposed to gay civil rights. Endorsed by The Seattle Times as a “compelling” candidate, Cammermeyer easily won the Democratic primary. Metcalf sent 47,000 conservatives a letter asking for donations if they shared “values like honoring the traditional family structure.” By September, sharp blowback had prompted Metcalf to declare Cammermeyer “a smart, honorable” person with an “exemplary” military record. They signed what amounted to a nonaggression pact, promising there would be no personal attacks. He kept his word. 

Metcalf won a third term with 55% of the vote. “Homophobia was an issue, of course,” Cammermeyer says. (A year earlier, nearly 60% of Washington voters had rejected an initiative banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.) “I also didn’t have 40 years of political savvy, entrenched fundraising and his union support. Yet I lost by essentially five percentage points. Pretty good for a beginner. But I had the wisdom not to run again, because what you learn is what political campaigning is really all about. It’s about money — raising funds to get your propaganda out there — not so much about the issues. Complacency is what concerns me now. We need change agents! I tell people to become informed. Vote. Run for public office. Live your truth.” 

Cammermeyer says two dates six years apart prove that change agents can shift the tectonic plates of social history in record time. On July 26, 2006, the Washington Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision that the Legislature’s 1998 Defense of Marriage Act was constitutional. And on Nov. 6, 2012, nearly 54% percent of Washington voters endorsed same-sex marriage. Opponents had attempted to overturn a legislative mandate signed into law by Gov. Christine Gregoire. The vote on Referendum 74 reflected the divide between conservative counties east of the Cascades, as well as many rural counties on the west side. Marriage equality was backed by 67% of King County voters, yet overall by only 10 of the state’s 39 counties.  

The first legal same-sex marriages in Washington took place on Dec. 9, 2012. Cammermeyer and Divelbess invited nine other couples to be married at their home that night by the mayor of Coupeville.

These days, it’s backsliding that worries her.

“Today, we are at a stage of going around in a circle,” she says. “They said Roe v. Wade was ‘settled law.’ Is marriage equality their next target? Once you’ve dispensed with precedent, all bets are off.”