Correction Appended
Calpernia Sarah Addams has just rebuffed two handsome men (and a not-so-handsome one) who offered her compliments as she hurried across Union Street in Nashville. ''Libertine gentlemen,'' she says, with a sideways slice of her green eyes. Short braids dangling on her shoulders make her look like Dorothy Gale, only taller. ''We have a certain decorum here in the South, so I just said thank you and turned away,'' she explains. Still, she can't help being buoyed by their attentions. ''I know I don't look my best. I've just been through so much lately.''
One morning last fall, thick in the worst of it, Addams twisted her hair in a chignon, smoothed on a simple gray suit and made the hourlong trip from Nashville to the Fort Campbell Army base on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. There, two soldiers would stand accused in the murder of the only man she has openly loved in her 29 years. Barry Winchell, a 21-year-old private first class, died in what the base command at first labeled a ''physical altercation,'' a common fight. It became clear Winchell was killed for being gay.
His death and the ensuing trials have become the most celebrated indictment of Congress's policy on gays in the military, known as ''don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't harass.'' Even the president called ''this last brutal beating death'' proof that the measure he signed into law in 1993 to protect lesbian and gay soldiers is a clear failure. Of 71,570 soldiers surveyed, 80 percent said they have witnessed derogatory remarks being made against gays, according to a report released March 24.
Addams, among the first to arrive at the base, did not enter the small courtroom, which was reserved for lawyers and immediate family. She didn't feel comfortable declaring a place there. Instead she took a seat in the media room across the street, where a reporter asked if she could identify the dead soldier's boyfriend. Addams drew in her breath and nearly whispered her reluctant response, knowing full well it would thrust her into the complicated heart of this national drama.
''That's me.''
The fact is that Winchell, killed for being gay, wasn't gay, at least not in the traditional Harvey Fierstein sense of the word. Barry Winchell, who had only ever dated biological women before, was in love with a pre-operative transsexual -- a transgendered woman,'' as Addams prefers it -- part male and part female, a gentle being without a clear portfolio in the black-and-white realm of the sexes. In fact, as in the film ''Boys Don't Cry,'' whose doomed transgendered character generated an Academy Award this year, almost every element of the Winchell case falls into the gray in-between. The biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, in her new book, ''Sexing the Body,'' says that this state of being ''either/or, neither/both'' is increasingly common.
But the more that Winchell, like Matthew Shepard before him, has been held up as a martyr for gay equality, the less room there has been for explaining such sloppy complications. ''A lot of people just don't get that this woman -- tall, lovely, beautiful -- has male parts,'' explains Kathi Westcott, a staff attorney for Servicemembers' Legal Defense Network (S.L.D.N.), the gay soldiers' group based in Washington. ''It was a difficult connection to make for people, even in the gay community.''
Westcott swept into Tennessee days after the killing determined to investigate Winchell's murder and expose the antigay sentiment that persists in the military. She and Rhonda White, co-director of the Nashville-based Lesbian and Gay Coalition for Justice, paid Addams a visit and made a proposal. ''For the sake of clarity,'' White recalls Westcott saying to Addams, they should tell reporters she is a he. ''Barry was dating an anatomical male,'' White says. ''How can you say he was gay-bashed if he was dating a woman, you know?''
Addams, a nightclub performer, agreed -- I was really worried I would lend some sort of Jerry Springer element to this awful crime,'' she says -- even though she found it ''devastating'' to be called a man, after her long journey away from manhood. In news accounts, she was Winchell's ''boyfriend'' or his ''cross-dressing friend,'' always he and him. Each qualification carried the story away from its truth. By superimposing a rigid grid of sexual identity over the lives of Calpernia Addams and Barry Winchell, the activists effectively severed the soldier from the love for which he died.
''Each of these little words was erasing my existence,'' she says. ''It was like our relationship -- the basis of our relationship -- was all a dream.''
