The evolving anti-gay outlook of this military-psychiatric axis involved circular logic at its most senseless. With lots of gut feelings but no credible evidence, officials nevertheless came to believe that gays were dangerous to the military; but because that danger seldom seemed to yield the consequences they feared it would, it became necessary to spin out a narrative of the “homosexual menace.” In so doing, they created images of sexual and gender deviants that rationalized exclusion, even, in many cases, of those who were not homosexual but were merely nonconformists. And because the world did not always share the certainty of doctors, generals, and other self-styled experts that gays and lesbians were a threat to military order and discipline, these narratives had to be explicit and damning. Simultaneously, in order to ensure that people could not avoid the draft by claiming to be gay, it was necessary to enforce and even intensify the stigma of homosexuality, both in the military and in society at large: Gay inductees will “contaminate our young boys,” just as they had in Newport; they will be “subject to ridicule and joshing, which will harm the general morale” of the unit; they will lower the quality of the force and drive good men away. The more military officials denigrated homosexuality, the more they and others believed the narrative of danger that had largely been of their own making. It’s a tale whose resonance remains far stronger today than reason can possibly dictate. But, then, reason has only a limited role in the formation of prejudice.
The policies created by this irrationality have had equal staying power. Throughout World War II, the different branches of the military issued dozens of revisions to their regulations governing the fate of gay and lesbian troops. By the war’s end, gays and lesbians were deemed “unsuitable for military service” and were officially banned from all branches, whether or not there was any evidence of homosexual conduct.16
The cold war did nothing to liberalize views toward homosexuality in the military. In 1949, amid growing fears of subversives in government and as part of a postwar congressional reorganization of the armed forces, the newly created Department of Defense sought to apply a single policy across all the branches of the military. The new regulation stated: “Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory.” As part of the reform, each branch was asked to give homosexuality indoctrination lectures in order to facilitate the ferreting out of gays.17
The following year, in an effort to reform and standardize disciplinary procedures in the military, Congress created the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which made “unnatural carnal copulation” in the armed forces a crime punishable by five years of hard labor and dishonorable discharge without pay. This sodomy ban remains military law to this day. The ban criminalizes both heterosexuals and homosexuals engaging in anal or oral sex (or sex with animals), despite a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that states may not outlaw sodomy between consenting adults. As a separate society, the courts have ruled, the military is exempt from the decision.18
The gay ban continued to face a hodgepodge of revisions in the second half of the twentieth century, the most significant of which came during the Carter administration. Following the embarrassing Iranian seizure of American hostages in 1979, Carter sought to strengthen his record on national defense. He vowed to reinstitute draft registration, increase spending, and get “tough on gays.” Several new court cases had recently challenged inconsistencies in the implementation of the homosexual exclusion policy. On January 16, 1981, one week before he left office, Carter’s deputy secretary of defense managed to push through a servicewide ban on gays and lesbians in uniform, removing any discretion that different branches or individual commanders previously enjoyed. The new policy, perhaps in a vague gesture toward destigmatizing gay individuals, but mostly in an effort to avoid legal challenges, modified the language that had dubbed gay people “unsuitable for military service.” Instead it stated that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” It explained the reason for the ban as follows: “The presence of such members adversely affects the ability of the armed forces to maintain discipline, good order and morale; to foster mutual trust and confidence among servicemembers; to ensure the integrity of the system of rank and command; to facilitate assignment and worldwide deployment of servicemembers who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy; to recruit and retain members of the armed forces; to maintain the public acceptability of military service; and to prevent breaches of security” by the threat of blackmail. It offered no evidence that any of the foregoing was actually true, but simply provided a list of alleged homosexual dangers—emanating from the specter of the “homosexual menace”—whose sheer length appeared to create an airtight rationale for exclusion.19
Despite the new policy, the 1980s were marked by increased tolerance of gays and lesbians in uniform, mirroring the greater awareness and acceptance of gay neighbors, friends, and family members in civilian society. On and around certain bases and ships, hundreds of gay service members gathered to socialize in storage rooms, cafeterias, apartments, and even “gay discos,” and met shrugs and affectionate joking and only minimal anxiety from peers and superiors of all stripes.20
But hostile sentiment toward overt homosexuality remained the norm, and despite the presence of fairly open gay subcultures, in some ways it was scarcely less trying or dangerous to serve in the military as a gay man or woman in 1985 than it had been in 1955. Discharges, abuse, evacuations, and prison sentences continued, and in the 1980s, the military lost seventeen thousand of its troops to gay exclusion.21 The majority of these losses were men, as the majority of uniformed personnel were male. But discharges of women were far out of proportion to their numbers, a fact that highlights the incidence of lesbian-baiting—threatening to tar as lesbian any woman who resisted or reported sexual harassment. It’s one of many examples of how fear of homosexuality works to bolster the power of heterosexual men.
During the late 1980s, women represented a quarter of gay discharges even though they were only a tenth of the military population; in the Marines, they accounted for nearly a third of gay discharges while representing only 3 percent of the force. These discharge figures reflect several conditions, some of which will be addressed in later pages. But one unavoidable reality was the rising level of tension during this period between gay and straight servicewomen; some straight women complained that lesbians formed their own faction within the unit, a charge that confirmed institutional fears about homosexuality as a disruptor of order, and that also helped these women demonstrate that they themselves were not gay.22
Complaints, rumors, accusations, and gossip began to build. They came to the fore early in 1988, when the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) began a sweeping purge of suspected lesbians at the Parris Island Marine training center in South Carolina. Threats, naming names, informants, revealed affairs, broken promises of immunity—these were the order of the day. By the end, after interrogating half the female drill inspectors at Parris Island, the navy ousted eighteen women and incarcerated three others. One suspect committed suicide while under investigation.
It was the Parris Island purge that prompted a small group of gay and women’s organizations to form the Gay and Lesbian Military Freedom Project (MFP) late in 1988. Seeking to end discrimination against gays in uniform, MFP worked to coordinate the different groups and individuals fighting to end gay exclusion in the military, to assist service members who were directly affected, to bring national attention to the ongoing witch hunts and their impact on the military, and to lobby for a change in policy. They were soon joined by other civil rights organizations, legal groups, and aides to members of Congress. The question was whether this new effort would be enough for the battle that lay ahead.23
Advocates of gay service were buoyed over the next few years by the perception that public opinion was turning in their favor. Becaus
e of the military’s anti-gay discrimination, college students ratcheted up their protests against the presence of ROTC on campus, bringing the policy “under assault,” as Professor Charles Moskos of Northwestern University complained in a piece in the Navy Times. Talk in the corps of military lawyers was that the gay ban was on its last legs and would imminently become a casualty of a legal culture quickly catching up to the times. Bold legal challenges from pioneering gay service members like Leonard Matlovich, Miriam Ben-Shalom, and Perry Watkins had put the government on notice that the gay ban was increasingly vulnerable to court action. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush, had a gay daughter and was reported to be no fan of the ban on gay troops. In 1990, Barney Frank, one of only two openly gay members of Congress, pressed Cheney privately on repealing the gay ban. Cheney acknowledged that he was not a supporter of the policy, but made clear that scrapping it was not a priority, though his words left open the possibility that he might, at some point, become a force in opposing gay exclusion: “I pilot a big ship,” he told Frank. “It takes a long time to turn it around.”24
Many thought the 1991 Gulf War would finally blow the military’s sails in the right direction. Troops known to be gay were sent to this brief war, only to be discharged upon their return. In the six months following the conflict, over a thousand gays were fired, including many whose sexuality had been fully known to their superiors.25 The hypocrisy did little to change the Pentagon’s tune, but it revealed further cracks in the old story about how gays undermined the military. After all, if commanders truly believed that homosexuality was incompatible with military service, would they let gays serve during wartime, when security and cohesion mattered most? Anger at the inconsistency added to the feeling among gay rights advocates that the ban was a policy in search of a rationale, and that little more than prejudice and inertia was keeping it afloat. They resolved to keep up the fight.
They received unexpected help when The Advocate, a gay magazine, outed a high-ranking civilian Pentagon official, referred to as a “senior spokesperson” for the defense secretary. The official, Pete Williams, an assistant secretary of defense, did not deny the allegations. Speculation was that Cheney had to have known he was gay. Williams had a high-level security clearance and had been a major spokesman during the Gulf War. Cheney had a choice to make: If he kept the aide, he risked further undermining the rationale for the ban by holding on to someone that his own military defined as a security threat; if he fired Williams, he would lose a trusted aide and compromise the loyalty he held dear. Matters were further complicated by the leak of a major military study written by the Pentagon’s Defense Personnel Security Research and Education Center (PERSEREC), located in Monterey, California. The study found that only 6 out of 130 espionage cases since 1945 were committed by gays, and concluded that being gay, on its own, was not a security risk at all. Blackmail, it said, becomes a concern when someone has an important secret, but many straight people have secrets and many gay people are out of the closet; security threats must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.26
In Cheney’s response, he first distinguished between civilian service and uniformed, where order, discipline, and morale were crucial, thus laying the groundwork for a continued defense of the military ban rooted in the alleged effect of a gay presence on unit cohesion. But he also admitted that gays do serve in the military, the first time a defense secretary had publicly made this obvious point. He further distanced himself from the discriminatory policy, saying he had “inherited” it from the previous administration. Ultimately Cheney decided to stick by Williams. In so doing, he helped dismantle the argument that gays in the military were a security risk, calling the notion “a bit of an old chestnut.”27
Without the security risk rationale, it became harder to simply assert that homosexuality was “incompatible with military service.” Yet many—probably most—military men continued to believe it, even if no actual argument backed it up, and even if the reason was an instinctual or moral opposition rather than a rationally derived concern for military effectiveness. Charles Moskos was one of these military men. A friend of Sam Nunn, the conservative Democrat from Georgia who had flirted with running for president in 1988, Moskos was hoping to have his friend in the White House come 1992. Unfortunately, Nunn once again disappointed supporters. After losing popularity by leading the Senate opposition to the popular Gulf War, in the spring of 1991 Nunn decided that he would not run for president. Moskos and Nunn had known each other for years, and had worked together on developing a national youth service corps, which Nunn eventually sponsored in the Senate. They also shared views on women in combat, expressing their opposition in the press when the issue came up. “It’s a cultural issue in this country,” said Moskos, “that women shouldn’t be compelled to go into combat, shouldn’t kill people.”28 Statements like these were another small indication of what drove him, and others, in their opposition to the military service of gays: not the demands of military effectiveness but a cultural and moral belief about the place of men and manhood in American society.
With Nunn out of the game, a little-known governor of a southern state named Bill Clinton began to pick up momentum as a Democratic rising star to take on George H. W. Bush. Although polls showed tiny name recognition in the summer of 1991, Clinton headed the well-organized Democratic Leadership Council, a group that Nunn had helped to found in an effort to win back centrist voters, especially in the South. It was a controversial organization, criticized by some traditional liberals as too right-wing, a “second Republican Party.” But it also generated excitement among those convinced that Democrats could only take power if they moderated their image as old-fashioned tax-and-spend liberals. By the year’s end, Sam Nunn had formally endorsed Clinton.29 Moskos’s influence would not be as direct as he had hoped. He would now have to catch the ear of Bill Clinton.
The evolution of Clinton’s role in the eventual enshrinement of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was irrevocably linked with an old friend, David Mixner. The two had met at a Martha’s Vineyard retreat in 1969, where a group of bright young anti-war activists had gathered to socialize and discuss tactics. Mixner remembers Clinton as irresistibly appealing and genuinely warm, while also appearing so smooth as to elicit some suspicion.30 The men bonded quickly as they learned how much they had in common: their small-town origins, their aspirations to have an impact on a troubled world, their unprivileged backgrounds, which made them outsiders in the world of New England’s liberal elite. But there were other reasons for their marginal status in the anti-war movement: Mixner was gay, and even the free-love ideology of the 1960s student movement failed to extend to overt tolerance of homosexuals; Clinton, for his part, was obligated to dwell around the edges because he harbored strong political ambitions and knew that vocal opposition to the war could derail them in a flash.
By the time these ambitions culminated in his presidential bid in the 1992 election, Mixner and Clinton had taken different paths but remained friends. Smart and politically astute, the two men both understood their distinct life courses as a kind of division of labor, which helped them avoid taking it personally when their positions clashed. As a young gay man who determined that he could not realistically hope to hold high office, Mixner, though often angered by his lot, felt freer to act on his beliefs than Clinton, whose every action since youth seemed calculated to avoid offense. The question was whether their friendship could survive a test as large as what lay ahead, and whether it could help both men to, at least in their own minds, do the right thing.
Since their anti-war days in the late 1960s, Mixner had come out of the closet, become a successful political and strategic consultant, and earned a reputation as an effective fundraiser for gay and lesbian causes. So he wasn’t surprised when Bill Clinton reached out to him for help in his 1992 presidential run. The call came in early September 1991. Clinton asked for his support, a somewhat ambiguous request that suggested Mixner might help generat
e both gay dollars and gay votes. Mixner never doubted Clinton’s genuine empathy for the plight of gays and lesbians, and appreciated his willingness to take political risks to show—and earn—support of the gay community. He had demonstrated this most publicly when, in 1980 as the young governor of a conservative, rural southern state, he boldly appeared at a reception hosted by Mixner and other openly gay supporters in Los Angeles. He eventually supported the passage of a gay rights bill in Arkansas.31
On the other hand, Arkansas had passed a law banning same-sex sodomy in 1977. As the state’s young attorney general, Clinton was in a position to make a statement on the law, but he remained silent. This would haunt him during the 1992 campaign when some skeptics pointed out that he seemed eager to win gay dollars and votes even though his record was unproven.32 In 1989 Clinton refused to issue a statement for National Coming Out Day as governor of Arkansas. Clinton’s request gave Mixner pause. The response of a savvy organizer and fundraiser was tactical: He’d love to help, but Clinton would need to build a public record of commitment to issues of concern to the gay community. When Clinton asked what positions he would need to endorse, the first one Mixner mentioned was the right to serve in the military.
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