Why was such behavior banned in the armed forces? The moral and legal strictures against same-sex intimacy in the military mirrored those of Western society, and reflected the wider proscription against any sex that was not procreative. Contraception, masturbation, fornication, even having sex in the wrong position, were all banned or punished in the colonial era. These norms were themselves an outgrowth of religious taboos that had been incorporated into English common law and adopted without fanfare in the original thirteen colonies. (Sodomy was even punished by execution in several colonies in the seventeenth century.) But they were also rooted in the prevailing belief that the heterosexual family structure was the primary source of production and social stability. Any sex not geared toward reproduction was regarded as a barrier to the social and survival goals of increasing the population, dividing up labor, consolidating family wealth, and preserving the family lineage, including lines of blood, race, and religion. Both within and outside the military, these beliefs took the form of efforts to control people’s behavior, maintain social order, and protect existing relations of power. They revealed a recognition that sexuality was a powerful force that could lead to both very good and very bad things.4
Yet despite the taboos against it, same-sex love has simultaneously been knowingly tolerated—and even deeply relied on—in the military throughout history. It has been so from the Sacred Band of Thebes in the fourth century BC, where martial valor was said to rest on the love of each soldier for the other, to the American Revolution, where Friedrich von Steuben, a brilliant gay Prussian captain who was considered a genius at training men, joined the war effort and wrote an indispensable drilling manual called Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. He is considered by historians to have been invaluable to the war’s success, despite the fact that “order” and “discipline” are precisely the qualities gays are now said to impair.5
Indeed, the indebtedness of the armed services to same-sex love cannot be underestimated. There are two reasons for this. First, though it doesn’t exactly broadcast the fact, the military relies on gays to make up its fighting force. An estimated sixty-five thousand gay and lesbian Americans currently serve in uniform, a small but significant portion of the nearly 3 million U.S. service members. The role of lesbians is particularly vital. Without women, who make up 15 percent of all personnel and 20 percent of junior personnel, the military would simply not have enough bodies to complete its missions; and without lesbians, there would be far fewer women in uniform. According to statistical analyses of the U.S. census and other data, the proportion of female service members who are lesbian is 5.2 percent, nearly twice the estimated proportion of lesbians in the general population.6
The exact number of gay men in uniform is trickier to estimate. While it’s possible that anti-gay law and attitudes in the military have kept the number of gay men lower than their proportion in the general population, some evidence suggests that gay men are equally or even more likely to have served in the military than straight men.7 There are two reasons to believe there could be a higher percentage of gay men in the military than in the general population: As an institution that segregates the sexes, the military is a homo-social environment, and may draw men who, as it’s said, prefer the company of men. And because military service relies on individuals who are willing to leave home for extended periods of time, it can be more appealing to those who are not living with partners and children, a category that still includes more gays than straights.
The second reason the military is indebted to same-sex love is psychological. Without homosexuality as its foil, the military would not be able to be “straight,” just as without the concept of femininity, it could not function as a proving ground for manhood. The U.S. military would therefore be unrecognizable if it weren’t for homosexuality. If the very self-image of the American warrior is straight, the counterimage of the homosexual is essential to its existence. As we’ll see, the heterosexual self-image of young male troops is also quite fragile, and this vulnerability plays a central role in explaining the powerful opposition to openly gay service. The point here is not to offer a laundry list of the contributions of homosexuality and gay people to military service. But recognizing the indispensable place of both gay people and same-sex love in the armed forces is essential to understanding Americans’ ideas about the perceived relationship between sexual expression and social order, and how it ultimately gave birth to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Until the end of the nineteenth century, that relationship seemed simple enough: Sex outside of heterosexual marriage was a transgression against God and society—both a sin and a crime—and a danger to the structured order of things. Nonproductive sex was a waste of precious energy and an invitation to put pleasure above duty and order. All individuals were thought to have the capacity to engage in such misbehavior, and it was thus important to punish it whenever it was discovered, so as to discourage masses of people from transgressing at will.
By the twentieth century, new models of sexuality had begun to emerge, ushered in largely by the medical and psychiatric community. Instead of regarding homosexual conduct as a transgression anyone could choose to commit, it was increasingly viewed as the characteristic behavior of distinct personality types. The developments in the first half of the century were fitful and complex, and they defy easy categorization. But the changing interplay between psychiatric understandings of sexuality and the evolving needs of the U.S. military had a profound influence on many of the assumptions and policies that continue to govern our understanding of homosexuality today.
The early efforts to reform views about homosexuality in the years leading up to World War I were largely spurred by the fledgling psychiatric profession. While the practitioners of the new analyses were products of their time, and sometimes reflected moralizing biases that can sound hostile to modern ears, most were seeking to better understand people with homosexual tendencies with an eye toward alleviating suffering and even integrating them into society. Their assessments built on a disease model, which viewed homosexuality as a neurological defect that was either congenital or the result of bad habits that actually damaged the central nervous system. As such, it was a mental disorder, and one that might be regarded as a moral defect in cause or effect. Yet its classification was not part of an attempt to condemn, but to understand and treat. Homosexuality was normally screened out of the military only when it manifested itself in overt conduct or glaring nonconformity.8
The psychiatric profession itself was not of one mind in its thinking about homosexuality. Sigmund Freud, for instance, believed that homosexual orientation was neither a moral weakness nor a disease, but a “variation of the sexual function.” The father of psychoanalysis famously wrote that homosexuality was “nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.” In the United States, however, the psychiatric community was more hostile to homosexuality. “The homosexualist is not only dangerous but an ineffective fighter,” said a San Francisco psychiatrist during World War I. He advised the military to seek out and separate homosexuals to protect the “combative prowess of our forces” during the war. Another American psychiatrist argued that only heterosexuality was natural and that homosexuality was a phobic response to the other sex. American psychiatrists increasingly viewed homosexuality as a degenerative personality disorder that had to be stopped to preserve optimal mental health. It was this kind of thinking that created a pathologizing characterization of gays and lesbians in the United States that was pitted against the normative vision of exclusive heterosexuality. Like the military’s policy on homosexuality, this outlook frequently masked the scientist’s own moral or religious animus to gay and lesbian people.9
It was during World War I that sodomy—though still not homosexual identity—was explicitly banned in the military. In 1917, when the Articles of War were revised, sodomy was named for the first time as a military crime, but only
if committed as part of an assault. A second revision three years later made consensual sodomy a crime in the military. While the sodomy regulation applied to both homosexuals and heterosexuals, its formulation reflected a new understanding that “sodomists” were a group of people with a coherent identity, who were more prone than “normal” people to practice the unmentionable act, and were sometimes defiant in their insistence that there was nothing wrong with their behavior, much to the chagrin of medical, military, political, and cultural leaders.10
By the end of World War I, the military was increasingly intolerant of a gay presence. In 1919, the U.S. Navy conducted a purge of its installation in Newport, Rhode Island. It was headed by Chief Machinist’s Mate Ervin Arnold, who said he could spot “degenerates” a mile away by their clothing, walk, and effeminate manner. In Newport, he worked in Ward B of the Naval Training Station hospital, where young gay sailors revealed their life and subculture to him, including girlish nicknames, women’s clothes, and orgies. Repulsed and yet compelled to learn more, he started to informally collect gossip and take down names of suspected sailors, eventually expanding his activities to include an investigatory crew of volunteer “operators” who spied on suspected homosexuals. Securing authorization to formalize his investigation from Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, Arnold formed a group of enlisted sailors to take the next step beyond spying: At the local YMCA, they entrapped suspected gay sailors by soliciting and having sex with them. With amnesty from the navy, Arnold’s operators were instructed to go as far as necessary to obtain evidence, but not to take a “leading part.” They claimed to have been motivated by a belief in the mission to rid the navy of unwanted sexual perversion, regarding themselves as “normal” and dutiful service members. A dozen sailors were ultimately arrested, court-martialed, and convicted of sodomy; they served several years in prison.
It was not lost on many observers, including the U.S. Senate, which censured the navy for its “shocking” and “indefensible” investigative tactics, that the military had no trouble rounding up its own men to sleep with other men as part of a sting operation to rout out gays. In its reprimand, the Senate panel wrote that “perversion is not a crime, in one sense, but a disease that should properly be treated in a hospital,” reflecting the changing outlook of the era.
The investigation and its censure had great historical significance. The young sailors who volunteered for the entrapment operation, who the senators acknowledged might have been gay, were nevertheless cast as victims. Perversion had been “practically forced upon boys who, because of their patriotism and the patriotism of their parents, had responded to the call of the country to defend their flag and their homes.” Outraged over the “iniquitous procedure” that seemed to have corrupted wholesome young American men, the senators recommended a ban on ever using enlisted personnel to investigate immoral conduct again. A better approach, they suggested, would be “the arbitrary wholesale discharge of suspected perverts” from the navy, as well as the ejection of all suspected civilian homosexuals from the town of Newport. What this meant was that actual sexual conduct could no longer be the required proof for screening gay people out of the military; from that moment on, the focus would be on personality types that, simply because of who they were suspected to be, were considered threats to the moral purity and operational capacity of the armed forces. It was the beginning of the rationale for banning gay people, since the task of banning gay conduct had proven to be perilous, and had inadvertently thrown light on how easily “normal” men could end up in the jaws of a homosexual rapport.11
As psychiatrists sought to circulate their ideas around the country, struggling to earn respect for their young science and maximize its influence, they readily offered their service to the military. Instead of sending sensitive boys to the military to become men, they counseled, “Send them to us!” Some in the psychiatric community still felt they were looking out for the interests of both homosexuals and the military; even when recommending screening gays out, their objective was to minimize the level of “psychiatric casualties” resulting from combat, so as to save both gays and the military the trouble of a bad match. But others increasingly spoke of gays in pejorative and moralizing terms. During the interwar years, the situation worsened, as the military bureaucracy took the process out of the hands of psychiatrists and relied on the most crass and slapdash characterizations of gay people. Military officials went far beyond psychiatrists’ efforts to classify, treat, and protect gays and lesbians from prison or psychological harm. They began to exclude men from service whose bodies they deemed feminine, as evidenced by “sloping narrow shoulders,” “broad hips,” or a “female figure,” as well as those with “degenerate” psychological traits that were believed to prevent individuals from properly joining the civilized world. Between the wars, purges, crackdowns, and persecutions of homosexuals increased. Often service members were dismissed or incarcerated for “moral perversions” or “conduct tending to the destruction of good morals.” At the same time, however, a sizable underground culture of gay men thrived in the military, partly a product of the mobilization and concentration of military men in port cities during World War I.12
If World War I began the process of punishing homosexual conduct, World War II systematized discrimination against homosexual people. The massive war mobilization sent an unprecedented volume of recruits through the military’s accession offices, prompting a new effort to make the process efficient and discerning. Some service branches excluded not only gays but blacks and women as well. The crucial difference was that, of the three groups, the identities of blacks and women were readily discernible, while gays had to be detected. The need to screen nearly 20 million young people to determine who was suitable for the exacting demands of defeating totalitarianism meant the creation of an elaborate apparatus designed to separate the worthy from the unfit. In the process, the military helped to solidify views about homosexuality, and the impact spread far wider than just the armed forces. These views included not only the notion that homosexuality was a distinct identity, and a dangerous one at that, but that gay people could—and should—be identified by relying on stereotyped characteristics that were often unrelated to whether one was actually gay.
Psychiatrists played a lead role in this effort. In 1940, an advisory committee of psychiatric consultants to the new Selective Service System began giving lectures on how the military should screen for mental health. Homosexuality was only one among many traits included, and it was not singled out as a particular threat to the military. But as the training spread throughout the bureaucracy, quality control suffered. Poorly trained psychiatrists, for instance, relied on examinations of limited pools of mentally troubled subjects to draw sweeping conclusions about the mental state of homosexuals, failing to realize that most gays were living well-adjusted lives far from these clinical samples of people seeking psychiatric help.
Based on these skewed conclusions, in the early 1940s the military began to issue new regulations that, by the end of the war, had formalized the exclusion of gays by distinguishing them from “normal” people. The rules used the language of identity and mental illness and the philosophy of preemption: “persons habitually or occasionally engaged in homosexual or other perverse sexual practices” were to be separated, as they suffered from a “constitutional psychopathic state” that made them “sexual psychopaths.” The mark of a homosexual person was the identification of “tendencies” or “proclivities” toward homosexual conduct. This formulation lingers today in the anti-gay policy’s use of the word “propensity,” as if describing an impulse that just can’t quite be controlled. And it remains as ineffective now as it ever was in identifying true threats to order, discipline, and cohesion in the military.13
Because it was difficult to pin down what it meant to have a proclivity to engage in homosexual conduct, authorities came to rely heavily on stereotypes, especially on the pseudoscientific association of ef
feminacy with homosexuality. With limited time and, ultimately, inadequate tools to conduct psychiatric evaluations of the masses of new recruits, World War II examiners scrutinized not only those they deemed effeminate, but anyone who indicated in occupational questionnaires that he might want to pursue interior decorating or dancing after the war. Such classifications were not always instances of homophobia, but could be expressions of concern over the impact of nonconforming men on the morale and cohesion of the group. One military medical team advised in 1942 that “sissy” men should not be allowed to serve, even if they were heterosexual, because their “appearance and mannerisms” would subject them to scorn that would undermine the good of the group.14 But the subtext that enabled such distinctions was always deviant sexuality, rooted in the belief that such nonconformity signaled a personality disorder that kept individuals from being team players. Gender inversion— adopting or displaying gender roles that were typically associated with the opposite sex—was just as feared as homosexuality, and the two were often mistaken for one another.
The specific elements feared most by the authorities are instructive, as many continue to form the basis of opposition to gay military service. As sexual psychopaths, gays and lesbians were seen to suffer from an excess of desire, as individuals who compulsively eroticized aspects of life that well-adjusted, civilized people would never regard as sexual. Not only did homosexuals feel such desires, but they were unable to restrain themselves, to grow fully to maturity and assume the adult responsibilities that were the mark of healthy people and the sine qua non of an ordered civilization and a functioning military. The threat of these alleged sexual deviants ranged from gender nonconformity, whose presence could embarrass “normal” military men and provoke hostility, to the insistent expression of homosexual desires, which could violate the privacy of heterosexuals and even result in sexual predation.15
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