Chapter
4:
E-commerce links for
hardcopy of book containing this chapter (DADT 1997).
Narrative summary link
for this chapter
See Consolidated footnotes, including notes added
since original publication. Also contains links to "military ban"
litigation documents at other sites (especially Stanford law school).
See Section_01
Honor Bound
See Section_02
From the Pentagon Lawn over which McNamara Had Proctored
See Section_03
Senator Sam Nunn Wears Scratchy Woolens before Breakfast
See Section_04
It Takes More than the Stroke of a Pen
See Section_05 The
See Section_06 Whose
Inauguration Is This, Anyway?
See Section_07
billclinton's (sic) Early Spring
See Section_08
Walkin' in the Sunshine
See Section_09
Basic Training II: My Own Submarine "Familiarization"
See Section_10
Live and Let Live
See Section 11
An "Honorable Compromise"
See Section 12
The "New" Policy with "Gay" Defines in
See Section 13
Even If It's Constitutional, That Doesn't Make It Good
See Section 14
Conclusions
Honor
Bound
One cool night in September 1992, I rode Metro into town, to Lambda Rising book store off of Washington’s Dupont Circle, to attend the book signing party for former Naval Academy Midshipman Joe Steffan's Honor Bound.[1]
In the spring of 1987, while I was in the middle of a difficult systems implementation at work in Dallas, I had noticed an inside page newspaper story about Steffan’s summary expulsion from Annapolis, a few weeks before graduation, because he had “said he is gay.” Steffan should have graduated near the top of his class. He had immediately resumed his life, finishing college at a civilian state school and paying his way by working for a midwestern software company.
I remember pausing when I saw the story. In 1984, a Dallas TV station had reported about a female soldier at Fort Rucker, Ala. who was discharged because the Army disapproved of her “home life”; she had gotten legally married to a transsexual who had just become a man through sexual reassignment surgery, but the Army had said, “That’s homosexual.” In 1986, I had been passing through Sherman, Texas when I stopped at a shopping mall where the Texas National Guard was sponsoring an exhibition. I climbed up on a tank and peered inside, when a recruiter actually approached me about joining up! “I don’t think you want me,” I said.
Sometime in 1990, I picked up a copy of the Ninth Street Center’s “memoirs” and found curious references to the military: Paul Rosenfels had once suggested to Dean that Dean join the Army to work out his “anger”; for Paul, the “Ban” on homosexuals was not to be taken seriously. Another Center student would report on his forced hospitalization in a military psychiatric hospital during the Vietnam War.[2] But until the Gulf War, my attitude now was, the military belonged to “lifers.”
In July 1991, an Army soldier stationed at Walter Reed had accompanied me on a weekend Adventuring motel-camping trip through the Appalachian strip-mining country. He got to talking about Army medical researcher Redfield’s AIDS work, and then commented, “after all, they’re getting ready to be forced to take gays. We’ve just had another war, and wars always change everything.” Other companions on that weekend commented that he was just living dangerously, just as we dropped him off at his quarters on Georgia Avenue.
I had met one Army officer, who had retired after twenty years of relatively open service. He claimed that the Army, compared to other services, had always been relatively “liberal.” In Richmond, at a Virginians-for-Justice party, I met a Navy petty officer who had just retired after twenty years and had maintained a monogamous relationship the whole time; during their first year, his partner (“roommate”) had been quizzed by naval investigators but they had been left alone ever since. Several other gay ex-officers, of whom some had worked in sensitive areas like intelligence, military justice and public affairs, told me they had left quietly after their contracts expired rather than continue careers that, at best, required double lives.
But I had still paid little attention earlier in 1992 when Keith Meinhold and Tracy Thorne both went "public" on national television. I actually missed their appearances and read about them in The Washington Blade. But I still saw the military as alien to modern notions of gay “self-actualization” and as a place for people who couldn’t make it in the “real world.” The gay campiness of much of my own time in the military had migrated deep into my mind’s “vaulted storage,” almost my subconscious. The election was still about the "economy," and the hatred of the "religious right," so menacing at Pat Buchanan's Nazi-like speech at the Republican convention in Houston in August. Outside of a low-profile Military Freedom Project,[3] nobody was thinking about gays in the military, even though candidate Bill Clinton had once indicated to a group at Harvard he would lift the ban if elected and had written to the Human Rights Campaign Fund, “I believe patriotic Americans should have the right to serve the country as a member of the armed forces without regard to sexual or affectional orientation.”
Air Force Captain Greg Greeley had marched (not in uniform) in the 1992 Washington, D.C. Gay Pride Parade on his last scheduled day of “active duty,” but while on separation leave. The Air Force tried to retain and investigate him for possible sodomy charges, but let him leave after embarrassing press coverage and the threat of lawsuits. Even so, this incident was quickly forgotten.
The obvious concern in 1992 was the
statewide initiatives in Colorado and Oregon.
The Colorado Amendment 2 would prohibit localities from passing laws
protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination; the Oregon initiative was
much worse, threatening to have the state officially declare homosexuality a “dangerous”
and “perverse” lifestyle and ultimately begging to bring military-style
witch-hunts into many civilian professions, as had been attempted in Texas in
1983. I had sometimes pondered life in
Germany in the 1930’s with all its right-wing “manifest destiny,” communicated
to the public by the government’s misuse of the stirring music of Beethoven
(the Ninth Symphony is a paramount statement of our western civilization’s
commitment to freedom and brotherhood) and Wagner; I would imagine how I could have
gotten caught up in the fantasy of
“Aryan” male icons. Ironically, right-wing groups such as the Oregon
Citizens’ Alliance have tried to justify their proposed official condemnation
of homosexuality by reference to the historical supposition that a few figures
in early Nazi Germany (notably Roehm)[4]
[5]
had been gay, and that even a major figure in the American neo-Nazi movement is
homosexual. However, these observations are mere outliers; Nazis turned on
people with apparent homosexual inclinations and thoughts with vindictive
ferocity.[6]
Even as the Allies found the concentration camps as Germany surrendered, they
kept those “bent’ men with “pink triangles” imprisoned, as homosexuals were
despised as criminals even in free societies.
However reassuring the facts, the
I got there too late to hear Steffan’s short speech. His hands looking scrubbed like a surgeon’s, he did autograph my book with a scrawl as I asked about Oregon Measure 9. “I’m going out there next week,” he answered, softly but with confidence. “If it passes, it certainly will be unconstitutional.”
I walked over to Boss Shepherd's on 17th
Street for dinner, and started reading.
Riveted and unable to put the book down, I continued reading and
page-turning on the Metro home, and by
What makes Steffan's book really work is the detailed narrative of daily life at the Naval Academy, and how the military discipline brings out all the ideals¾honor, dedication, teamwork, excellence¾that are so necessary for a modern civilization to work.[7] We see the raucous first day of Plebe Summer with the notorious near head-shaves to make everyone start out the same, as fungible members of a warrior-culture team.[8] We trace his life through the four years as he excels in most of his studies and military leadership, and becomes increasingly active in the Academy choirs, singing the National Anthem at the Army-Navy game twice, and receiving a leadership award from Vice-President Bush. We get a feel for the daily life of a service academy cadet, which starts out as 100% regimentation but gradually loosens and offers young people opportunities for worldwide adventure inconceivable to most Americans. We see the inside of a submarine, on summer cruise, where midshipmen memorize every technical detail of the boat, where sailors hot-bunk for three months in a windowless environment, wear out personal cassette tapes as if they were dusty phonograph records, and entertain themselves with proficiency at my own royal game - blitz chess. Service academies encourage everyone to learn this paradigm of battle in intramurals, so the middies were not patzers. The Naval Academy is a tremendous opportunity for the right young person.
Joe refers so several favorite musical opuses, particularly Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, which he sees as a paradigm of truthfulness to self and overcoming self-oppression projected onto others.[9] Early in Plebe summer, an nearly catastrophic hazing session gives Steffan the first hint that his country’s military and government institutions, however well intended, are far from perfect in execution.[10] What becomes so striking throughout the book’s “development section” (to borrow the terminology of classical music’s sonata-allegro form) is the fundamental paradox of career military service: through service to country, and fitting in as a replaceable member of a team, one embarks on a new adventure, to (as Walt Whitman would put it) “the unknown region” and to discover a new self.[11] At their best, military service academies, because of the depth of friendships and bonding, seem capable of starting (but not finishing) sustained personal growth, almost of the kind Paul Rosenfels had defined in the 1970’s. Dean Hannotte, in the Ninth Street Center talk groups, had sometimes spoken of a process of enlistment, where one dedicates himself wholly, if temporarily, to some peer group’s goals and takes a psychological rest ¾ as if regimentation could actually reduce stress! ¾ and then gets born again. Rosenfels had also sometimes commented that gays were not wanted in the suddenly all-volunteer services because gays (he thought) were more likely to question authority.
The narrative of Steffan’s coming-out to himself, including one night crying alone along the Severn River seawall and his gradual “telling” of Academy chaplains and close friends in the Naval Academy Choir, moved me. I had become a bit driven by rather compulsive workplace games. Now, earlier days of my own adolescent idealism, and how it had crashed, came back to me.
Steffan’s account of how his discrete “telling” got back to the Academy is not complete. From Randy Shilts,[12] we learn that one of the plebes, after leaving the Academy, told a girlfriend back in Kentucky, and she in turn told her father, who knew someone with ties to the Academy. The Academy started an investigation which common sense and simple justice tells us should never have been pursued. Once a choir classmate told him of the Naval Investigative Service probes, Steffan, however, took the initiative and challenged the Academy brass immediately. He seemed motivated not by inquiry but by a desire to maintain personal control over his own life.
Soon, an investigating officer asked Steffan, “Are you a homosexual?” This phrase, subtended by the double quotes, names a chapter in the book. Steffan responded with a defiant, “Yes, Sir, I am!” because, by his own account, the Honor Code required that he never lie. He had burned his bridges in one instant, and cried. He could stand proud of his own personal sexual values.
At William and Mary, I had been ejected from the “race” in the first lap. Steffan was thrown out just as he approached the finish line, a few weeks before graduation. His experience seemed even more humiliating after the initial moment of standing tall. I have never broken down and cried about mine. The experience, as was mine, would be hard on his family for a time.[13] For both of us, it had been talk, not sex.
Later, Steffan relates the beginning of his litigation with the Navy, and the trial of his lawsuit in federal district court, where federal judge Oliver Gasch refers to him as a “homo” and hostile Navy “defense” attorney appallingly asks Joe to “name names.” The judge, in denying Steffan’s petition, makes up a new “reason” to justify the ban, to prevent an increase in the incidence of AIDS in the military![14]
Whoa!, I said to myself, as I finished the book. Gasch was trying to take us back to the mid-1980’s, when homophobes had tried to get the whole gay male community into quarantine.
Recently, an acquaintance told me of her son’s interest in applying to the Naval Academy. I lent her Steffan’s book as the best read around to give an insider’s look of what four years of midshipmanship might really be like.
Throughout October 1992, I was still skeptical that the military ban would become a major issue. I certainly knew about Clinton’s promise, but I believed he might not win. During the Presidential campaign and debates the issue hardly came up; everybody was preoccupied with corporate downsizings, plant closings, mergers, and layoffs. After Buchanan’s debacle in Houston at the Republican Convention (in which Buchanan talked of “cultural war” with the gays and lesbians and “cross dressers” whom the Democrats allegedly embraced), nobody wanted to talk about homosexuality. Republicans found Clinton’s draft dodging and alleged anti-Vietnam protests overseas far more titillating.[15] Perot had once said, rather indifferently, that letting gays in the military “wasn’t realistic.” Now, the threat of the Oregon referendum seemed much more important. But one Saturday morning, I was spotting at a Bally’s gym in northern Virginia with a buddy from D.C. Front Runners, and I was on the way to see the Navy caper film Under Siege. We talked a little about Steffan’s book, and for it once suddenly hit me that this Ban was one big slander: to insinuate that men that I would have loved are “morally” or psychologically unfit to serve their country, now insulted me directly. What could have happened in twenty-plus years, since my time in the service, when everyone had looked the other way?
That October, a sailor, Allen Schindler, was brutally murdered, gradually stomped beyond recognition in a men’s room by a homophobic fellow sailor high on steroids, while both were on liberty in Japan. (The Navy, surprised by public pressure, has kept his killer in prison.) Gay activists appropriately pointed out that the murder was a sign of hostile attitudes towards gays in many commands, particularly those far overseas. Still, the military issue seemed buried by everything else. I spent a good part of one weekend that month volunteering to “guard” the AIDS quilt at night during its display on the Mall in Washington.
From
the Pentagon Lawn Over Which McNamara Had Proctored
In late 1980, during the closing days of the Carter administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Graham Claytor took it upon himself to “fix” or harden the military ban, which had apparently been undermined by all the “exceptions” allowed, particularly in the Air Force. Claytor, as far as we know, just saw military service now as a voluntary opportunity that simply need not be available to homosexuals. The new Right was just making too much noise. Maybe Carter could condescend to consider letting civilian gays have some security clearances (as a consolation prize), but for men in uniform, he had to show the surprisingly conservative voters he would hold the Marginot line.
Just before Reagan's inauguration, Claytor promulgated the now-infamous Department of Defense (DOD) Enclosure 1332.14, a directive regarding enlisted personnel separations, beginning with the unequivocal sentence, "Homosexuality is incompatible with military service." (The complete text appears in Appendix 1). In 1985, Enclosure 1332.20 provided a similar policy for commissioned officers. The rationale, flagrantly worded as the policy text, was the objection of heterosexuals to the mere “presence” of persons “known” to be homosexual, regardless of the merit of heterosexuals’ fears of roving eyes, ogles, and stares. Shortly thereafter, a similar regulation was issued for officers, which stated that a member shall be removed from the military if "the member has stated that he/she is a homosexual or bisexual, unless there is a further finding that the member is not a homosexual or bisexual." Various portions of the Armed Services, such as the service academies and ROTC programs, quickly updated their regulations specifically requiring the separation of all personnel who ever had identified themselves as gay, or who had ever attempted "to marry a member of the same biological sex."
On paper, there were two major changes in this 1982 policy,[16] which would become known as the Old Policy.
(1) The were no "exceptions" to the "no gays" policy. The only time a servicemember who had stated his homosexuality could be retained would be when the member was trying to get out of his military commitment. This change was apparently made to make the Ban more defensible in court, and specifically to answer Judge Giselle's opinion in the Matlovitch case.
(2) When there were no provable violations of military law (particularly, when the military could not actually prove that the servicemember had engaged in a particular occurrence of sodomy), the discharge would be characterized as honorable, and not as a “misconduct”[17] discharge. Cementing this “protection” just before Reagan took over seemed like an “accomplishment.” But the military would still code discharge certificates with “spin” numbers to identify the discharge reason as homosexuality, and the military would often deny full benefits to separated officers.
To his credit, Mr. Claytor probably thought he was doing gays a "favor" with this second provision, and his desire to make most of the discharges honorable, as a matter of policy, accounts for his hurry to change the policy before the Reagan administration took over in 1981. Mr. Claytor, by his own statements, saw homosexuality as a "disability" (like diabetes, perhaps); most of us in the gay community would gag at such a notion today.
However, as Randy Shilts points out, the revision of the policy seems to have had the opposite effect. Military witch-hunts (including illegal coercion to get servicemembers to "confess" and implicate other homosexuals) increased during the 1980's, many gay servicemembers went to prison, and some ROTC students actually were chased for repayment of their scholarships, including several honor students at Harvard and MIT. Some of the incidents (reported by Shilts) did involve tangible violation of military law, including fraternization between gay servicemembers of different ranks.[18] However, many of the incidents were egregious indeed. One female Marine Corps captain was forced to resign merely for visiting the home of a "known lesbian," and another was sentenced to 38 years for "sodomy" (or, as she puts it, “for being gay”) in a case where there was no real evidence (her sentence was reduced to a few months when she agreed to name other "lesbians" in the famous Parris Island Purge).[19] In the late 1980’s, the Navy tried (unsuccessfully) to blame a catastrophic ship explosion on an imaginary failed homosexual relationship on board, and did not investigate the incident properly for months.[20] Senator Chuck Robb reports that an Air Force officer was discharged in 1992 solely because of allegations of homosexuality made by an ex-spouse in divorce proceedings.[21]
It is commonly believed that the 1982 policy made "homosexual status" or "homosexual thoughts" grounds for separation, in contrast to just "homosexual acts." In a previous chapter, we saw that "homosexual tendencies" (really the same thing as "status") had been legal grounds for discharge ever since World War II (and probably back to WW I), however inconsistently enforced. What the 1982 policy tried to do was make discharge for apparent homosexual status mandatory. Even so, enforcement was inconsistent, "at the convenience of the government". During the Gulf War, commanders deployed personnel who had tried to get out by declaring their homosexuality,[22] only to discharge them after Saddam's "surrender."
Furthermore, it is important to understand the policy with respect to homosexual acts. Article 125 of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) defines "sodomy" (see Appendix 3) in terms of penetration (including, since 1920, oral sex), and it is possible to interpret it as referring only to acts committed under aggravating circumstances. However, any same-sex physical contact at all which results in gratification is prohibited conduct that can result at least in administrative discharge (even when performed with a consenting adult civilian, off base, while on leave or pass, and in private, if subsequently reported by the civilian), and any statement (whether verbal or not) which expresses an interest in homosexual contact similarly requires discharge. Furthermore, seemingly innocuous acts could be (and are) prosecuted under articles, such as "conduct unbecoming" or "conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline." Specifically, solicitation for illegal sexual acts (Article 80) is also a prosecutable offense.[23] The UCMJ has always applied to active duty servicemembers (but not civilian reservists while not called up) at all times and all places, even in the “privacy” of the servicemember’s own “home.” By extension, administrative rules (as opposed to the UCMJ which is a criminal code) also apply twenty-four hours a day to members of the military. The UCMJ always applies even though, at present, all members who enter the military join voluntarily.
During the period between 1981 and 1993, the services did ask, at enlistment, whether a recruit was "a homosexual or bisexual" and defined a homosexual as someone who desired or intended to engage in homosexual acts as well as someone who had actually committed them. Theoretically, someone could have admitted to homosexual "desire" in answering "yes" to this question and been qualified for enlistment if his "desire" was subsequently interpreted as less than "intent" or "propensity" (this distinction would eventually become important in court cases, especially Meinhold). However, the military lists these questions under the heading "Character and Social Adjustment"; there can be no doubt that, in "asking the question" in this manner, the military is demonstrating that it regards homosexual inclination as a character defect which disqualifies one from service. Military administrative rules already stressed the concept that a person who stated her homosexuality was presumed to engage in homosexual acts.
A servicemember who committed a crime even in a civilian jurisdiction can be courts-martialed under military law. This rule had been compromised by a Supreme Court decision, O’Callahan (June 1969), which overturned a military conviction for rape of a civilian off base on the theory that civilian authorities were in a better position to offer “due process” (defined later); however it was restored in 1987 in another case, Sorlorio. (At least, in 1955, the Supreme Court had ruled the Armed Forces couldn’t courts-martial someone once discharged from the service!) The military also applies its administrative and disciplinary rules to its personnel when they are on civilian premises. The military would often visit gay bars (“off limits”) looking for license plates; until about 1990, military police or “shore patrols” in civilian clothes would even scour gay discos like Tracks in Washington, D.C. to look for military personnel they could recognize at sight.
In the meantime, defense-related issues
still affected civilians. Selective Service, under an order from President
Carter in July 1980 (in reaction to the Soviet invasion of
The military policy was also affecting civilian colleges and universities. In 1989, the Army tried to pursue former cadet James Holobaugh for ROTC scholarship monies after Holobaugh told his commandant of his homosexuality but offered to serve his obligation anyway.[29] In 1992, the Navy made applicants for scholarships sign releases obligating them to pay back ROTC scholarship benefits if they were found to be “gay.” In 1991, 62 university ROTC programs were closed, at least a few because the military was violating their own anti-discrimination policies[30]; but other schools couldn’t afford the loss of associated defense contracts.
Even (relatively) low-level “openly gay” civilian employees of military services were affected for a time. In 1993, former Marine Tom Swann was repeatedly harassed at his job in a California Navy base after he publicly involved himself in the attempts to lift the ban,[31] and Robert Le Blanc, another former Marine, would experience similar difficulties in a VA Hospital, after, he claims, he was “outed” in Conduct Unbecoming.[32] An Air Force civilian employee would be fired for cross-dressing in public when not at work.[33]
A few months after the Persian Gulf War, Robert Graham, an unemployed writer who had joined the Navy at 31 and served on the ship that started Desert Storm, wrote a letter to Secretary Cheney, disclosing his homosexuality and condemning the rough treatment he had experienced from (in his case) homophobic cadre. He was discharged just three weeks before the end of his four year enlistment,[34] with a certificate that read “admitted homosexuality.”
All of this went on while I minded my own civilian business. In 1991, I would experience a quick “remembrance” of war, and then vanish into my own preoccupations of the workplace, with obsessions about production abends, nightcalls, security, and a frightening skirmish with professional disaster. In the roller-coaster campaign of 1992, when the two-party system almost came apart, my perceptions were to change, very suddenly.
Senator Sam Nunn Wears Scratchy Woolens
Before Breakfast
But right after his election, someone did
ask President-elect Clinton, and his answer was - well, let's say, he had it
right the first time. He said, "the issue should be - conduct. Whether it's
Tailhook, or any improper advances, what should get you thrown out of the
service is behavior. I simply want to
protect the rights of those who really have done nothing wrong. The right thing to do is lift the ban, and develop
a code of conduct that applies to everybody."
A few days later, Federal District Court Judge Terry Hatter ordered the Navy to reinstate Petty Officer Keith Meinhold, as he warned he was likely to find The Ban unconstitutional. The Navy balked, and then readmitted Meinhold under threat of contempt citations. The attention drawn to the Meinhold case would quickly tempt conservative politicians and pressure President-elect Clinton to stake out a plan to deliver on his “promise.”
About that time, I went on vacation and
drove through the mountains in southwestern
A few days later, Senator Sam Nunn appeared during breakfast on “Good Morning America,” and explained his opposition to the President's lifting the ban and oversimplifying the idea of acceptable "conduct."
"We have to think about the rights of
those who are not homosexual,"
he said, calmly. "They don't go
home at night like you or I do. They
have given up all their privacy." Shortly thereafter, military sociologist
Charles Moskos reinforced Nunn's comments: "Most heterosexual men and
women dislike being exposed to homosexuals of their own sex,” and compared
mixing gays with straights to mixing men and women.[37] The Armed Forces, he claimed, goes to great
lengths to keep the housing of the two biological sexes separate. We know that
some military deployments are made into conditions so primitive, such as in
For the next nine months, "gays in the military" would be the social issue. I was quickly reconstructing my feelings, that seemed the military was (and had always been) leading the way for other interests to scapegoat us and declare us as a “burden” on legitimate society and “normal” people. If “they” could claim gays disrupt the cohesion of military forces defending the country, then “they” could re-invent the claims that gays were unfit for teaching because students perceive them as “role models.” The Boy Scouts had always used such excuses. This could become a very slippery slope.
Quickly, I outlined in my own mind what seemed to me the most pertinent points in organizing our case, beyond repelling the stigmatization cycle I had extrapolated from my own experience with the draft a quarter-century before. There are several big reasons why everyone (and not just gay soldiers) should care about the Ban.
The
biggest one is the government-sponsored privacy invasions that the Ban
requires. Most people in the military,
after initial training, do have lives of their own. In the
Indeed, the government maintains that the private sexual behavior of soldiers is indeed its business, even when it occurs off-duty, off-base, and with civilians in private. Since the government knows it cannot easily prove that specific sexual acts have taken place, it resorts to a “presumption,” based on “ordinary understanding” of the soldiers’ statements and associations, that they frequently or eventually will occur. The military has imprisoned gay soldiers for “private” acts of sodomy (in violation of Article 125), and has used the testimony of civilians (sometimes jilted, sometimes unwillingly) as leverage to gain convictions in court-martials. At other times, the military has forced officers to resign merely for having been seen in the homes of “known” homosexuals. There is no way to maintain a policy like this, if the military is really to keep all homosexuals out, without maintaining Gestapo-style witch-hunts which regard gays as the “Jews” to be rooted out of any otherwise perfectly ordered machine. By keeping the prerogative, however erratically used, to hunt down “queers,” government is maintaining that some positions of public “trust” must exclude homosexuals; you can’t let a queer have his hand on the nuclear missile button on a submarine. In combat, soldiers’ (and even civilians’) lives are placed at deliberate risk.
There are other, very practical reasons to
look at the Ban. The military is an important employer (1.5 million active
duty), particularly at entry levels. In 1993, when making deliveries for Food
and Friends, I passed an Arlington recruiting station that bragged, “We’re
Still Hiring,” I cringed. The military is also an important source of college
scholarships, through ROTC (even junior ROTC’s in boarding schools) and four
service academies.[39]
Reserve duty provides additional income to many individuals and families. The Armed Forces often finance graduate, law,
or medical school educations, and provide an attractive alternative to the
long-term debt of student loans. Military officers have sometimes resigned
rather than accept government financial aid for legal education which will
later require them to prosecute or discharge gays.[40]
Military service is an important precursor to most career opportunities in some
civilian areas, such as commercial aviation. In the early 1970’s, some computer
or engineering companies like
Clearly, then, the military has a large impact on civilian life beyond its uniformed ranks. The military, by and large, controls security clearances; it seemed likely that a military exclusion of uniformed gays would indirectly affect civilians with security clearances (even after allowing for recent progress in civilian clearances). A military ban sets a bad example for police and fire departments and for school boards, which seem to conduct their own witch-hunts these days for (usually heterosexual) abusers of kids. And since there is not even a right to stay out of the military, the military still does maintain a contingent capability to impose its values on everyone. During the Vietnam war, some engineers would not work for defense contractors out of “conscience,” and it is not hard to imagine this employment-loyalty quandary could be repeated with the Ban.
One can argue, let’s cut a deal. Keep the Ban - in fact, reinforce it, but then make up for it by eliminating Selective Service and also passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to protect civilian employees, at least of large for-profit businesses. There are many reasons not to trust such a barter, most of all because it expects government to umpire conflicts between work and personal lives and divert people from thinking these problems through for themselves. The politicians will whittle at such a deal whenever doing so suits their purposes; the kind of people who want the Ban probably would want a contingent draft and resist civilian protections for gays - all out of the same “moral animus.” The rationale for keeping gays out has more to do with the supposed objections of “normal” soldiers to their presence, than any serious claims of incompetence of gays themselves.
This false moral indignation provides one more reason for the Ban to go. Since it is so easy to charge females with “lesbianism,” less scrupulous male soldiers and even commanders are even more aggressive with sexual advances, often to maintain their own illusions of “male power.” The services have been rocked with sexual harassment incidents, especially since the Gulf War. Allowing relatively “open” gays to serve would, ironically, make it easier to show “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment. Alas, this is not what the military wants.
Some of the Armed Force’s best performers, even in the command and leadership areas, have been gay (women and men). When depending on a volunteer force, the loss of dedicated talent is no trivial matter. Shilts relates a situation where the Navy was left with no Arabic translators in the Persian Gulf because of gay discharges. Gay men in the military perform as well physically as straights; there is no reason (unlike the situation of admitting women to military academies such as Virginia Military Institute [VMI]) to debate lowering standards.[43]
Sometime during this period, ABC “20-20” ran a story on the Roman Catholic “Ban” against married priests, which I imagined as almost a Ban on “heterosexuals.” This bore a curious antithesis to the military ban; while the Church should be free, as far as government is concerned, to choose its priests as it wants, the policy seemed equally silly, even on religious grounds. Yet, unlike the military Ban on gays, it seemed motivated, not to stigmatize anyone, but to provide a “legitimate” place in the church and society for men otherwise disinclined to marry.
It Takes More Than the Stroke of a Pen
“Gays in the military?? You gotta be kiddin'." That's probably the reaction of Bubba-in-the-street, who would conjure up images of gay men aroused by the continual exposure to the nakedness of other men in intimate barracks or shipboard surroundings. A few men in my own workplace reacted this way. They saw allowing gays back in as frankly “indecent.” Ten years earlier, at the height of AIDS hysteria, proposing such a thing would never have entered the mind.
Maybe, the knee-jerk reaction sounds like plain “common sense.” Should men who get sexually excited around other physically attractive, virile young men (as I did) live in a cramped, intimate environment like Army barracks or a Navy ship or submarine? People who have openly gay people (especially men) in their families or count them among their friends know that it just doesn’t work this way. Gay men and women, when around others in an intimate environment, do not normally become aroused, ogle or stare, or behave in a manner that others notice. This is due to the fact that they have been allowed around other men in same-sex settings for their entire[44] lives and have learned to "turn the light switch off" as necessary. No one without such self-discipline could survive in the military. Furthermore, naked men in such a commonplace environment becomes old hat; most gay men find 99% of the other men they may happen to glance at sexually unattractive. This is very different from the situation for heterosexuals, for whom being allowed to view the opposite sex in the nude is really a big deal. Lifting the Ban would not imply toleration of sexual overtures, comments, or stares in the barracks or in any operational military environment. Persons unable to exercise self-control in intimate living could still be discharged. Surely, everybody realizes this, or do they?
No, the public seemed oblivious to the reality that gays had been serving covertly for decades. Most gay men in the military probably didn’t admit their homosexuality to themselves until after they were in for many months or years, so “asking” at induction has been clearly ineffective.[45] Despite the steady increase in discharges until the Gulf War, most gays (men and women) got very good at “hiding,” even faking heterosexuality by opposite-sex dating (or arranging contract marriages, as much for benefits and housing as to hide) and joining in fag jokes when necessary. Thousands of gay soldiers and sailors served without incident.
Maybe this meant, let sleeping dogs lie. The most important purpose of the Armed Forces has always been to defend the country, or the nation’s vital interests, and, to put it bluntly, prevail in war when necessary. You don’t fool around with such a bottom-line foundation for a free society.
But the Pandora’s box was open. People would ask now, more than ever, and gays would tell, even brag.
Sometimes the gays-in-the-barracks arguments got humorous. One person at work passed around a newspaper cartoon showing Saddam Hussein running from a GI shouting “I’m gay!” The hilarity underscored the deeper motive behind keeping the Ban: maintaining a sanctuary within society where heterosexual men could still prove their masculinity.[46]
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The gay “general public” had really been naive to believe that the new President really could end the Ban against gays in the military (let alone discrimination against those already serving) with the stroke of a pen. Were the President to do so, Congress would codify the Ban (including explicit requirements to “ask” and to “investigate”) into United States Code quickly, and the President would run a difficult gauntlet risking, at best, a veto override.
To have any reasonable chance of success, I believed, the gay community would have to answer these assertions that the presence of gays invaded the sexual privacy or modesty of heterosexual privacy in the barracks. Gay leaders generally ignored this, and believed the notion to be so ridiculous as not to deserve an answer. Their refusal to dignify the question with an answer tended to suggest to some that radical gay leaders just wanted to “use” the military in their battle for suspect-class status. The “unit cohesion,” the absolute bonds of trust between members of a unit and the willingness of one to put the needs of one’s unit over one’s own, even to offer one’s life in combat to save a buddy, seemed so subjective as to be unanswerable, except that writers like Shilts would point out that the military had knowingly kept open gays in uniform when it needed them, as during the Gulf War, and there had been practically no problems.
The privacy-for-straights debate can be split two ways, but it’s like folding a ribbon into a Mobius strip. Soldiers generally don’t object to a proven, already trusted combat performer when they find out he is gay; so a sequence of “outings” by military professionals would break down whatever objections Nunn imagines. Yet, Nunn and Moskos are claiming the very act of “telling” invades a straight soldier’s privacy, rather like exposing oneself indecently.[47]
Sometimes, our community tried to rely on a comparison to integrating blacks into the military in the late 1940's. Hadn’t the supposed objections of white soldiers to bunking with blacks been vented before President Truman? This was nothing but blind, “tribalist” prejudice. (The Navy had, during World War II, allowed African-Americans to serve only as mess attendants!) Today, if a fundamentalist Christian objected to bunking on a submarine next to a Moslem or a Jew, would his feelings of personal offense be honored? Of course not. But sexual modesty seemed, almost as a matter of common sense, a much more substantial concern than mere racial or cultural dislike. Wouldn’t the Armed Forces want to keep apart those who would find same-sex bunk mates sexually interesting? Take an extreme case: given that a drill sergeant owns the daily lives of his trainees, wouldn’t knowledge among the troops that a drill sergeant is gay create an atmosphere where sexual tension is expected? Or is it enough to say, no, the drill sergeant and his trainees must, as individuals, always account for their own personal conduct?
Even if homosexual servicemen behaved perfectly in the barracks (as most actually do), their “presence” might introduce a sexual tension that undermines the fighting, aggressive edge of a gung-ho infantry squad that has to take a beach-head. A soldier who knows his colleague is gay might resent, not sexual interest from the gay person, but knowledge that the gay person considers him unattractive![48] This view gives a strange, accrual credit for the personal charisma of a number of the homosexuals (particularly male officers or senior enlisted) already known to be serving.
This notion of forced intimacy could not be so easily dismissed. The only way, in my opinion, was to tackle it as a "systems analysis" issue. What was needed was a detailed understanding of what really does happen in the military, both in "everyday life," and in combat deployments.. Still, it seemed this sudden bodily modesty and “discomfort” around homosexuals was something men could get over; it was all just in their heads. Otherwise, what are these jarheads and doughboys ¾ young and underprivileged drones whom we sacrifice the way we did the cannon fodder in Vietnam? I hope we’ve finally outgrown that moral outrage. But maybe we are depending on just those kind of kids to “volunteer” to do the dirtiest work in defending us (or our economic interests) and really don’t want to talk about it.
The notion that the military is unique in its residential privacy problems did not hold water with me. Other occupations ¾ such as fire departments ¾ do require that men (in particular) live together for periods in relative intimacy. In New York City, in the mid-1970’s, the idea of gay firemen had raised the ire of the New York Post, with images of gays sleeping around straights in the firehouse. (The New York Gay Activists’ Alliance had met in a Soho building called “The Firehouse.”) The fire department issue raises another image: most smaller communities have volunteer fire departments where men bond together as expected to risk their lives for the benefit of the community.
And, there are plenty of other examples of
civilian copies of the military paradigm.
Even today, we have a “civilian” merchant marine[49]
and sometimes scientists live together in cramped quarters for long periods, on
space stations, in underwater labs (that are rather like submarines) or in
Antarctic bunkers. In sports locker rooms where men tape up, people used to
say, “if they’re queer, they kick ‘em out.” [50]
The FBI and
This whole “forced intimacy” issue has a
psychological dimension, that goes beyond the issue of physical proximity in a
submarine or when sleeping bags are draped together for warmth in a barn in
Since our culture is more open to some intimacy among women, sexual “privacy” would be a less acute issue for female military billets. The presence of lesbians, apparently, is distracting to male soldiers who feel even more sexually expendable given the knowledge that some women don’t need them. This was hardly the attitude during my service, and it sounds like a totally irrational concern.
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The antidote for all these problems was simply to draw up the rules defining allowable conduct. When Bill Clinton referred to conduct, he obviously meant disruptive behavior within a military environment - essentially, "sexual harassment." The military, in all of its incarnations of the Ban, had cleverly defined conduct recursively, to include any statements, at any time or place, that demonstrated an inclination for any same-sex gratifications (even just hugging and kissing), whether “sodomy” or not. Senator Nunn, in the debate that ensued the following spring, once said on the Senate Armed Services Committee floor, "when you state your status, you have described your conduct!" When military people or politicians speak for keeping the ban, they usually imply they would answer Bill Clinton's "conduct" concept by invoking this presumption. Quickly, through double-talk, this appeal to a simple “conduct” paradigm for a solution was dead-ended.[55]
My own mental process consisted of a “bottom-up” review of this whole “conduct” question. There were several policy objectives that seemed necessary to me to make the policy fair to gay servicemembers without causing any real hardship for military readiness or intrusions upon straight soldiers. Probably, the first goal was to make sure that the military respect the fundamental constitutional rights of all of its members. Common decency said, first, “don’t ask.” People have a right to keep sexual thoughts to themselves when they want to. Asking a seventeen-year-old recruit about his sexual interests and, at least indirectly, his future sexual performance amounts to psychological sexual harassment! As a practical matter, military people (not on deployment and beyond basic training) do have private lives and associations, and these are at least indirectly protected by free speech, and military people are entitled to due process of law and equal protection of the laws. People senior enough to live off post should be able to live intimately with adults of their own choosing (outside of fraternization) without interference from the government.
Thus, people must not be thrown out of the military when there is no evidence of their doing anything wrong. The witch-hunts, the interrogations and "naming names" has to be stopped. Similarly, the military should not spy on servicemembers when they are on "pass" or "leave." The military should not place establishments off limits simply because they cater to homosexuals, unless actual crimes take place on the premises. A reservist should not penalized for gay activities or associations between deployments. A student on a ROTC scholarship could not be penalized for belonging to a campus gay club, because such social connection was clearly a fundamental right. A soldier or cadet involuntarily expelled when "discovered" to be gay (or "coerced" to "confess") must not be sued to recoup scholarship monies or enlistment bonuses.[56] Many gay activists at this time hardly understood that a servicemember need not be charged with a crime (under the Uniform Code of Military Justice) to be discharged (even with downgrading) through purely “administrative” measures and procedures.
A second fundamental goal was that young men and women who could perform and behave themselves were not to be denied military opportunities (including ROTC scholarships and service academy appointments) simply because they were not visibly heterosexual. Should the Naval Academy in 1983 not have admitted Joe Steffan because he had not shown much interest in girls? Many universities which may still depend on defense contracts, object even today to ROTC programs which indirectly force then to discriminate against gay students in admissions, scholarships, and even job placement.[57]
Third, the military should be rewarding its best people on merit, just as any other organization should. Joe Steffan should indeed have finished #3 in his class; he became like a baseball home team forced to forfeit a game because the fans ran out on the field prematurely (like the last game the Washington Senators played in RFK Stadium in 1971, when they had “beaten” the Yankees, 7-5, before the fans took over). From even a conservative perspective, Steffan should have been allowed to graduate and at least to serve the six years of “consideration” in return for the Navy’s $100,000+ investment, as long as his performance and behavior within clear sight of his unit remained appropriate (and it certainly would have).
The
fourth point would address the question, what about allowing gays to be
"open"? What did that mean?
The military was implying that merely for a gay soldier's heterosexual buddies
to know - that put an unreasonable
strain on their privacy. But, when does
one really know, anyway? When does
appearance or rumor become fact? If a
heterosexual soldier sees a buddy go into a gay bar or
Does the previous anti-gay conditioning of many young men - especially those that would enlist in the military as an economic opportunity - make them more “vulnerable” to a sense of privacy invasion if known gays bunk nearby? Perhaps soldiers who have grown up with reasonable information about homosexuality (particularly by knowing gays willing to “come out”) won’t feel threatened or distracted. Then this whole “privacy” argument would sound circular. An honest “political” debate, so championed by conservative judges later, almost required that soldiers come out to defuse the “irrational” fears.
This argument of Nunn and Moskos reflected a sentiment to keep personnel policy simple and consistent, for a military that may, in theory, deploy any uniformed member into combat anywhere in the world without notice. It seemed like common sense to me, however, that homosexual talk in Basic Training, a crack jarhead unit, among soldiers snuggled against another in the winter cold of Bosnia, or in an academy Plebe Summer is far more distracting than among members of an intelligence unit (where security requires openness), or among staff officers in the Pentagon. If men tend to “self-discover” after joining the service, we might find more gays among officers and senior enlisted; then one questions what happens when the younger enlisted (who live in more crowded environments) find out about their gay superiors. Still, Nunn seemed to be over-simplifying “reality.” A uniform, inflexible policy might not be in the best interest of combat readiness after all. As one Army sergeant put it to me, “Nunn’s sexual privacy thing was just the best excuse he could think of.” It smells like blaming the victim.
Any code of conduct would have to ensure that no one in these intimate barracks or field environments felt that he or she was the object of sexually-motivated attention. That probably meant, in most cases, "not talking about it." The military might claim that such an expectation in a prolonged deployment is simply undoable; gay activists might be offended by a continuing “gag order,” but it had to work this way.
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It was easy to anticipate other problems in lifting the ban. Occasionally, conservative writers would echo Judge Gasch in the Steffan case by insinuating that gays would contaminate their battlefields and military blood supplies with HIV. Of course, this argument could not apply to lesbians (who, remember, have few sexually transmitted diseases), and the military tests recruits at induction and regularly thereafter for HIV, particularly before deployments. I quickly asked around with my ex-military friends, as was told that the military does not pressure its members to give blood.
What about dependent support? The military is in no position, at least in the near term, to extend family support services (such as dependency allowances and married base housing) to homosexuals the same way it does to married heterosexuals. When driving through Ft. Lewis, Washington, I noticed an “Enlisted Spouses’ Club” (as well as a Girl Scouts’ Auxiliary at Ft. Eustis!) As long as same-sex marriages are not recognized (with the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is seems unlikely the military will have to consider them in any foreseeable time), there is no reason to expect the military would have to deal with the sociology of same-sex couples housed on base. The military even “discriminates” (against singles) in preferentially subsidizing off-post housing for legally married soldiers. I was told by one Air Force person that this is particularly troubling because single female airmen can usually get off-post allowances before male airmen because the men have proportionally more barracks. Nor should the military be expect to support gay clubs and social activities, even though (according to Randy Shilts, at least) underground gay discos have often existed in military environments (as on aircraft carriers).
In the best of arrangements, the military would still be practicing some discrimination against gay and lesbian servicepersons, and I felt this was unavoidable. Gay and lesbian servicepersons have often entered into fake "contract" marriages to obtain these benefits as well as to cover up their homosexuality. After all, the military acts in loco parentis (the way colleges used to with female students!) and, theoretically, at least, provides a complete "lifestyle" for soldiers, a chaperon for personal was well as professional affairs.
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Any solution, however, would have to fit into the specific practices of military life. Nunn had claimed that the military is just “different.” What I have sometimes questioned is, “how different?”
Maintaining that the military is "different" should make us question, what really does define military life as a "separate society?" (a term to be used by Congress later). Colin Powell has called the military the one profession of state-sanctioned violence, the ultimate exercise of government’s police powers. A servicemember does not have the right to resign at will (although officers generally may, especially when passed over for promotion); he must go through a formal process of discharge from active duty status. Besides the obvious issues of facing combat (and the possible call to give up one’s life), wearing uniforms, and following a chain of command according to rank, and subscribing to a separate judicial system controlled by officers rather than by peers, military people face more than just discharge or getting "fired" if they disobey orders or break military law. They can go to prison. The military justice system requires trial before a board of officers, not necessarily one’s peers. Another distinction is contingency. A military person must be immediately deployable upon receiving “orders” anywhere in the world, in any conceivable environment, however primitive or intimate, however improbable this seems given his or her current military occupational.[58] This is an extension of a concept already common in well-paid civilian jobs that require persons to share in an "on-call" rotation as a part of employment. Still another is loyalty, which restricts or discourages certain public self-expressions for the cohesion an