In 1971 Petty Officer Robert A. Martin Jr. became the first US Servicemember to publicly fight his discharge for being a LGBTQ person. Said journalist Randy Shilts in his 1993 book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the US Military,
In the tens of thousands of hearings since World War II where comparable actions had been taken on the basis of comparable evidence, the matter ended there, with the sailor skulking away in disgrace. Petty Officer Martin, however, went public with what had happened to him and swore to fight for an honorable discharge
Despite the support, he received a general discharge in 1972, but he continued to fight and in 1977 his discharge was upgraded to “honorable”. wrote historian David Eisenbach in his 2006 book Gay Power: An American Revolution,
Martin’s groundbreaking public battle against the Navy kicked off a series of well-publicized challenges to military discharges that harnessed and directed the energy of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.
Despite the words gay, gay , gay being endless thrown about Petty Officer Martin, (who is better known by his nom de guerre Stephen Donaldson and his pen name Donny the Punk) is a famous and important bisexual activist.
Though he did die just short of his 50th birthday (yes from AIDS, in many ways he completely epitomized the “sex and drugs and rock-and-roll” lifestyle of his era with all it’s excesses, pitfalls and it’s joyousness) he had an amazingly full life and quite the wild ride. In 1966 he founded the first LGBTQ Student Group, he was an active member in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) & Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) the groups that sprang to life immediately the day after the Stonewall Riots and most famously in 1972 he helped draft the Quaker Committee of Friends “Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality”, perhaps the earliest public expression of a new bisexual consciousness.
