Homosexual sergeant fights automatic dismissal from AF

New York Times Service

WASHINGTON Lenny Matlovich joined the Air Force in May 1963. when he was 19. He wanted to make a career of it, as his father had, and he wanted to go to Vietnam.

He went to Vietnam, for three tours. He won a medal for each, including the Purple Heart for wounds suffered in Da Nang. Later he became a technical sergeant, and worked in drug abuse prevention and race relations. He won a medal for this, too.

Then last week, T. Sgt. Leonard Philip Matlovich received a letter from Lt. Col. Charles R. Ritchie, his commander at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., that said: "I am initiating action against you with a view to effecting your discharge from the United States Air Force."

The recommended discharge, the letter said, would be general in other words, less than honorable.

The reason was Sgt. Matlovich's admission to the military and others that he was a homosexual.

The letter was no great surprise. The military bans homosexuals, and a few months back Matlovich decided to challenge the ban.

On March 6, he delivered a letter to his supervising officer stating that he was a homosexual and that he wanted to stay in the Air Forcé.

He considered himself "fully qualified for further military service," he wrote. "My almost 12 years of unblemished service supports this position.

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That letter, to lawyers, was the opening round of a classic test case — a clear-cut challenge by a "perfect" challenger, with no side problems that could derail the case from the main question, as has happened before in other challenges to the ban on homosexuals.

At stake are major, possibly competing, issues and rights the military's interest in having rules it deems necessary to maintaining an armed services system, and the homosexual's constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection of the laws.

Perhaps also at stake is the future of thousands of other service personnel. Leaders of the homosexual rights movement contend that there are many homosexuals in the miltiary.

In the Hampton Roads area, at least, where Matlovich is based, there seem to be hundreds.

The sergeant frequents a large homosexual club in Norfolk on weekends. One after another person there one recent night identified himself or herself as a military person.

Matlovich is entitled to request a hearing before a board of officiers. He plans to do so, and has two lawyers to help his chief counsel, David F. Addlestone of the American Civil Liberties Union's military rights project, and an assigned military lawyer. Capt. Jon Larson Jaenicke, as assistant counsel.

If the board recommends discharge, he plans to fight through the appropriate military channels and then, if need be. through the federal court system "to the Supreme Court," he says.

All branches of the military have long had a policy of

excluding homosexuals and of discharging those who are either homosexual or have had homosexual tendencies.

For years, persons discharged as homosexuals were most often given "undersirable" discharges. Recently, though, probably at least in part because of legal challenges, the military has given more "general" and sometimes "honorable" discharges.

The services have not, however, relaxed the ban.