Status, I guess, and embarrassment for the navy that they allowed someone in the navy for that long. So Hart says that he wanted the records changed, and the navy said no. Hart, who was chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, said, “Well, you have an appropriations bill here for a new aircraft carrier. I’ll schedule hearings when you change the records.” Well, whether that’s true or not, or whether the person in his office just told my dad that to make him feel good, I don’t know. It made a good story.
Anyway, they changed my records, so when the army got my stuff, they said, “Fine, we can take you as long as you can pass the physical.” So I went out and took the physical and the army gynecologist did a pelvic on me and passed me. So I served in the Army Reserves for about six or seven months, and they liked my work and said, “How would you like to work full-time for us as an army technician, civil service?” I said, “I’d love to.” So I filled out the paperwork and I was hired as a GS-7 and went to Psychological Operations as staff training assistant. Later, they wanted to promote me to warrant officer. So then I had to have security clearance, and that created a problem because, of course, fingerprints don’t change, and I’d had top secret before, so I had a full file with the FBI. So anyway, I get a call: “We got your fingerprint card back and it has written across it in red ink ‘Michael Clark.’ What is that?” I said, “Very simple. That’s what my name used to be. It’s all on the card. I went through sex reassignment.”
The colonel said, “I didn’t know about it.” And I said, “Well, the commanding general of the Sixth Army knows about it.” “How could he?” I said, “Because I had lunch with him three weeks ago! Because everyone wanted to meet me. The general asked me, Are you happier?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am.’” Nobody cared, because I was doing a great job. But when Washington found out about it, when the paperwork went through and they began to put two and two together and realized what had happened, then they started asking questions coming down the line, or in the proverbial military terms, it became CYA time: “cover your ass.” They wouldn’t admit to the fact that they knew. So all of a sudden my commander calls me in and says, “Someone is out to get you.” I said, “What do you mean?” and he says, “Well, the Inspector General is coming down, and you’re being charged with subversive activities, prohibited access to classified documents, immoral sexual activity, and fraudulent enlistment.” They had about fourteen charges, and that was the saving grace because they had gone so overboard…. They wanted to discredit me so badly that if it got into the press, the press would simply write me off as a bad apple. But when the press started looking at the record, they said, “Something’s wrong here. No person could be this bad and get this far in their career without being discovered and discharged years ago.”
I met Christine Jorgensen around this time. Long story, but my friend Jude Patton invited me to come with him, and I was in uniform at the time, and when we got into her living room she turned around and looked at me and said, “Do they know?” And I said, “Yeah, the ones that count locally know. I was open with them.” She said, “Your day will come.” So when the colonel announced that I was being charged with all these things, I called Christine and … it was ten o’clock in the morning… and she said, “Do you know what time it is?” I said, “Yeah, it’s ten o’clock,” and she says, “I don’t get up till two in the afternoon. I’m a night person.” Click. So I called back about three and apologized for waking her up and said, “This is Sergeant Clark. Do you remember me?” and she said, “Oh yeah.” I said, “Do you remember what you said to me? ‘Your day will come.’ Well, it has.” She says, “Come on down.” So I drove down and brought all my paperwork. And she looked it over and said, “This is great stuff. Do you mind if I call a friend of mine at the
Sixty-eight during the Tet Offensive. I wasn’t on the ground. I was in naval aviation flying out of Camh Ran Bay, Ton Son Nhut. We were stationed out of Okinawa and we would fly down the coast looking for shipping two or three times a month.
Yeah, sure. Including one SEAL.
Yes, well there is a tendency, I think, within the transgender community to go into the military or very macho roles that will help you conform. I liked scuba diving and I wanted to become a navy diver, but I liked to fly also, so I wound up in aviation. I was very happy to get out [of the service] and I didn’t think that I would miss it, but I did. To this day, I still miss it.
When the army discharged me, I went back to college and I enrolled in a class in career development to find out where my interests lay, and my counselor said, “You’re not going to believe this. Numbers one and two on the list are Catholic nun social worker and Catholic nun teacher.” And I said, “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but that was my dream as a child. I wanted to be a nun.” We were Protestants but we lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood and we lived across the street from the convent. And all throughout my childhood I would go across the street and sit on the steps and talk to the nuns. I loved them.
So then I spent the next ten years looking for a community that would accept me. Because of all the notoriety [from the military case] I would always be up-front with them and say, “This is my past, but I feel called,” and I always got nice letters back saying, “Thank you, but don’t call us and we ‘re not going to call you.” So, finally, I was down at Saint Clements, and a very dear friend of mine said, “Have you ever considered the Franciscans?” In the meantime I had a spiritual director and I told him that I had written to them, and he said, “Well, they probably won’t write back,” but I got a letter back that said, “Why don’t you come visit?” So I drove up and spent a week with them, and I got some interesting lessons when I was there. The first morning, I was walking down the hallway with the mother superior. She came about up to here on me and she was Scottish and about seventy years old—and I referred to her as a nun and she did an about-face and looked up at me and said, “The cloistered are nuns and we are sisters, and don’t you ever forget that.” I said, “Oops.” Then she explained the difference to me.
Then I came back here and talked to my spiritual counselor, and he said, “What do you want to do?” I told him I wanted to close up my business and join the Franciscans. They invited me to come up and spend another week, and I did, but in the end they couldn’t do it [accept her into the community]. It was a small community, and they felt that because of my notoriety, the press would probably come down on us like a ton of bricks.
I told my spiritual director that I had been turned down, and he said, “You don’t need those old ladies anyway. What God is calling you to do is start a new social order for social justice. Write to the Episcopal nuns here and get their instructions on how to start a rule.” So they sent me the book, and I started writing the rule, and soon I had two other women join me and we wrote the rule together. All of a sudden the doors started opening up and we got support, even from the hierarchy. I got a letter from the bishop congratulating me and saying he wanted to come down to the service. Then the press got hold of it, through a woman that I worked with, and the next day it was all over. The bishop renounced me in an article in the
