Life after death

Barry Winchell's mom begs other mothers to not let their gay sons join the military

It's every parent's worst nightmare. Last July, Patricia Kutteles received a telephone call informing her that her 21-year-old son, Pfc. Barry Winchell, had been killed at the Fort Campbell Army base in Kentucky. But for Kutteles, that news was just the beginning of her ordeal. After a delay, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that Winchell had been beaten to death with a baseball bat, in part because the perpetrator believed he was gay.

"When I was told about the motives of the killers," Kutteles said in a telephone interview from her home in Kansas City, Mo., "I was just devastated, but not because they thought Barry was gay. All I could think about was how he had been harassed for months and how his death could have been prevented. I couldn't believe that the Army would just allow the entire name-calling and degradation he was subjected to."

Kutteles may not have known her son's sexual orientation, but fellow servicemen apparently thought they did. On July 5 Pvt. Calvin Glover, enraged that a "faggot" had "kick[ed] [his] ass" during a barracks fight two days earlier, bludgeoned Winchell while he slept on a cot.

Winchell's face was so disfigured that a fellow soldier said it looked as if he had "raccoon eyes." In December Glover, then 18, was sentenced to life in military prison. Spc. Justin Fisher, then 25, was accused of being an accomplice but received a 12 1/2-year sentence on lesser charges in January.

Kutteles has found some solace by transforming her son's death into a crusade against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In a letter to Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Kutteles complained bitterly about what she termed the "blasphemies to the memory of our son." In March Kutteles and her husband, Wally, who was Barry's stepfather, planned to file a wrongful death suit against the Pentagon. Like most legal challenges to the armed services, the suit faces long odds. But the couple hopes it will draw attention to the physical dangers facing gay and lesbian military personnel.

"Talking about what Barry suffered has helped me get through this past eight months," Kutteles says. "When things got tough Barry would always say to me, `Suck it up and drive on,' and that's what I try to do. It's really important to me that the atmosphere changes in the military so no one else has to experience what my son went through."

Despite her steadfast commitment to her crusade, Kutteles is anything but certain about how her son lived his private life. She is reluctant to concede that Winchell was gay. And she struggles to understand his relationship with Calpernia Sarah Addams, a male-to-female preoperative transsexual whom Winchell was dating before his death. "I'm not saying that Barry wasn't gay, only that I didn't know him to be gay," Kutteles says. "He never told me he was gay."

Kutteles says she has spoken to Addams once: "I like her very much, and I know she cared very much about Barry. I can understand that if he was struggling with his sexuality, why, with her femininity, she might have been very comforting to him."

Kutteles's surprise about her son's sexuality stems in part from lessons she tried to impart to him. As a registered psychiatric nurse, she spent years caring for gay kids. "I especially remember one young gay boy whom I worked with," she says. "He came to live at my residential center. Two weeks later his mother sent his belongings and said she never wanted to see him again. He was such a sensitive, loving kid, and it just broke your heart that a parent would treat a child like that. These were boys who were so despised by their families that they had never been tucked in at night."

Kutteles did not leave her sense of empathy at the office. "I know that he knew I would love him no matter who he was," she says of Winchell. "He knew I wouldn't reject him. That's what makes it so hard to understand." When she did notice that Winchell was different from other kids, she attributed it to his learning disabilities. From an early age he suffered from attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. "There was so much going on that perhaps that part of him just got lost," she says.

Winchell's early years were tumultuous for other reasons as well. Following an abusive relationship, Pat and her three sons were left homeless. For two months the family lived in shelters and their car. Life became stable when Pat met Wally Kutteles, when Barry was 5 years old. A Korean War veteran, Wally apparently inspired Barry's interest in the Army. Now Wally Kutteles is involved in what he sees a battle for justice in the memory of the man he considered his son.

In taking on the military brass, Pat Kutteles has joined a lamentably large group of mothers of murdered gay and lesbian sons and daughters. Matthew Shepard's mother, Judy, is the best-known example. But Kutteles has perhaps the most in common with Dorothy Hajdys-Holman, whose son Allen Schindler was stomped to death by a fellow serviceman in an eerily similar incident in 1992. In that case the Navy ignored threats and taunts aimed at Schindler, who feared for his safety. Schindler was so badly beaten that Hajdys-Holman could recognize him only by the tattooed emblem of the USS Midway on his forearm.