Gay Veterans Gather To Honor Their Own

His last speech was in the rain in Sacramento, six weeks before he died, and he was hoarse and tired and dying, and he talked about love. A Georgia native who grew up in the military, he had the knack for taking your heart and making it catch for a moment, like the way he announced on national television that he had AIDS. He seemed to make people want to be braver than perhaps they were.

"There are people you meet as a reporter that you come to care about," Charles Gibson, then host of ABC's "Good Morning America," said on-air in 1987 after Matlovich announced he was ill, "and he's one of them. He's a very straightforward, very honest, very patriotic guy. He's fought a lot of battles, and I guess this one he'll lose."

Matlovich died the following year.

So there it was, yesterday afternoon, small crowd, a few of the faithful who wanted to remember gay veterans. "Honoring the Fallen," that was the theme printed on top of the program.

The flags were hoisted on either side of the tombstone. Everyone sang the national anthem. The sunlight fell sideways across the hill and down over the old stones and cenotaphs and obelisks. There were responsive readings. Rankin read from "If You Are Able," an excerpt from a letter home from Vietnam.

If you are able, save for them a place inside you

And save one backward glance when you are leaving . . .

People spoke briefly of the dead and fallen, just their names. Tony Smith, a former Air Force senior airman, talked of the sacrifice of Army Maj. Alan Rogers, whom he identified as a gay veteran who was killed in Iraq and is now buried in Arlington.

There was a moment of silence. The wind came through the cherry tree that spreads over Matlovich's grave. In the summer, in the late afternoons here, you hear clanging and noise from over at the D.C. Jail, you hear lawn mowers.

Yesterday, there was only the castanet clatter of the tree's dying leaves in the breeze. And then there was taps -- da-da-dahn -- its three-note stair step up and back down the scale, and the memories of the dead; things that can be remembered but cannot be regained.