Unfriendly Fire
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Thorne had trouble understanding why he was a greater threat to the military than the perpetrators of Tailhook. He told his board that he was a qualified aviator who simply wanted to serve his country. “But all you want to know,” he lamented, “is whether I’m a homosexual.” After a tearful statement to the Navy Discharge Review Board, in which he said he was “not a sexual predator with some sort of hormonal imbalance,” the navy recommended an honorable discharge, even though his commander had called him “exemplary” and a “hard-charging young lieutenant” with great “professional ability to do the job.” A navy attorney accused Thorne of “publicly attacking the military” by criticizing the policy on television while in uniform. He sinisterly suggested that Thorne was not to be trusted and that his commander had not realized who he really was. “You don’t really know much about him at all, once he leaves the doors of Jefferson Plaza,” he said ominously.49
As in so many cases that challenged the gay ban, the government did all it could to keep facts and evidence from coming to light. The navy board successfully argued that seventy-nine witnesses and exhibits that Thorne’s legal team tried to introduce were inadmissible, including scientists who sought to testify about the significance of sexual orientation in the military. Navy lawyers also told Thorne’s former roommate, Lieutenant JG Todd Suko, that if he testified, people might think he was gay, prompting charges by Thorne’s lawyers that the government was intimidating a witness. Suko testified anyway, calling Thorne “one of the finest Navy officers I ever met.” The navy’s tactics played on a basic fear ubiquitous in military culture: that any tolerance or support of gays and lesbians would call into question the sexuality and manhood (and, to a lesser extent, the womanhood) of straight soldiers. It was circular logic once again: If the military didn’t go out of its way to demonize and bar homosexuality, it would matter far less if someone was suspected of being gay; but the military deployed this fear of being gay to continue to perpetuate anti-gay sentiment and then to insist that that sentiment necessitated gay exclusion.50
On the heels of Thorne’s case, the military announced it would discharge Margarethe Cammermeyer, a fifty-year-old grandmother who was chief of nursing for the National Guard in Washington state. On the day of her discharge, which took effect on June 11, 1992, and made her one of the highest-ranking military officers to lose her job because of the policy, she filed suit in U.S. District Court in Seattle to overturn the ban.51
Colonel Cammermeyer was exactly the kind of person Bill Clinton touted as a model American citizen. Her family had supported the anti-Nazi resistance in Norway during World War II, hiding guns in Cammermeyer’s baby carriage and members of the resistance force in nooks in their apartment. Her father, a doctor, publicly protested the Nazification of the medical profession in Europe. Later, Margarethe joined the U.S. military to repay her new country for welcoming her family after the war. Earning a doctorate in nursing, she served in the military for twenty-seven years, won a Bronze Star for her service in a Vietnam field hospital, was adored by her commanders, who repeatedly stated they were discharging her against their will, and was in line to become the top nurse for the entire National Guard. Standing poised and upright at over six feet tall, she was literally a model of professional, selfless service to her country.
Cammermeyer had scrupulously kept her sexual orientation to herself until she was up for a security clearance that was required to be considered for the post of top nurse for the National Guard. Consistent with her belief in honesty and personal integrity, and not unaware of the perils of lying in a security clearance investigation, when asked that spring of 1989 about her sexuality, she told the truth. She recalls that moment, the one when she first uttered the reality of her experience as a human being fully loving another human being who happened to be of the same sex, as the first time she really knew who she was. At the time, she had no idea that admitting she was a lesbian would end her career, a remarkable reminder of just how little the topic was talked about in public before 1993.52
The security clearance investigation was also a reminder of the circular logic of gay exclusion: Gays are a security risk because their shameful secret could subject them to blackmail—so they must never tell anyone they’re gay, thus forcing them to carry the secret that they are then punished for having. It’s another example of how the cure is worse than the disease: Because the policy forbids gays from coming out—indeed requires them to carry a secret and insists that it is shameful—it creates the very security risk that it blames, and punishes, gays for causing.
Shortly after her discharge, Cammermeyer spoke directly with Bill Clinton. He was struck by her story, which exhibited all that was wasteful and un-American about the gay ban. He went on to praise her publicly, citing again the Pentagon’s own PERSEREC study showing the ban to be unnecessary, and reiterated his promise to end it.53
Cammermeyer’s discharge galvanized opponents of the gay ban, including many who had not been gay activists, as well as gays and lesbians who were politically engaged but had not focused on the right to military service. That a fifty-year-old grandmother who was the epitome of the dedicated, capable, selfless public servant could be rooted out of the service, her career crushed and her integrity impugned simply because of the gender of her personal partner, was too much even for many Americans who previously hadn’t given the policy a second thought. Her commanding officers, as well, were among those who began to find the knee-jerk opposition to gay service increasingly irrational. They, more than anyone, lamented her discharge as a needless waste of talent and a blemish on the honor of the armed forces. The major general who informed her of her dismissal, adjutant general of the Washington National Guard, actually wept during their conversation.54
MEANWHILE, THE BURGEONING relationship between Bill Clinton and gay donors culminated in a West Hollywood gala event in May 1992, which raised $100,000 for his campaign. The Clinton camp had set up more meetings with gay donors and supporters with the help of David Mixner, who assured all involved that Clinton’s promise was good and that lifting the ban would come with the simple “stroke of a pen.” In his emotional May address, Clinton talked about uniting the country, his abhorrence of discrimination, and the need for America to use all its people’s capacities. Citing the PERSEREC study showing gays were not a security risk, he vowed to act on that research and end discrimination in the armed forces. In a memorable finale that drew thunderous applause from the six hundred gays and lesbians gathered, he told the crowd that he would give up everything, including his presidential bid, if he could wave his arms and cure AIDS overnight. With help from an estimated $3 million in gay donations, as well as votes from gay men and women that totaled 4 percent of all ballots cast, Clinton won the California primary, the Democratic nomination, and, on November 3, 1992, the White House.55
2
Christian Soldiers: The Morality of Being Gay
THE MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT,” wrote a budding sociologist early in his career, “has means of coercion not readily available in most civilian pursuits. Owing to the aptly titled ‘chain of command,’ failures in policy implementation can be pinpointed.” Written in the American Journal of Sociology, the article was an evaluation of the widely celebrated racial integration effort in the U.S. Armed Forces. “Desegregation,” he explained, “was facilitated by the pervasiveness in the military of a bureaucratic ethos, with its concomitant formality and high social distance.” He concluded that “whatever the internal policy decided upon, racial integration being a paramount but only one example, the military establishment is uniquely suited to realize its implementation.” The author was Charles Moskos. The year was 1966.1
A generation later, the military’s special capacity to put new personnel policies into practice had become far less clear in Moskos’s eyes. If racial integration was “only one example” of the military’s ability to execute controversial policies, there must have been others. But gay service, apparently, was not among them. In several
articles written in 1993, he soundly rejected the comparison of racial integration to gay service, echoing the concerns of prominent black generals such as Colin Powell and Calvin Waller. “Policy makers,” wrote Moskos, “should think twice before invoking a misleading analogy between the dynamics of racial integration and the proposed acceptance of overt homosexuality.” Before Congress, Moskos suggested that comparing racial segregation to the ban on openly gay soldiers “trivializes the black experience. The black struggle, an enslaved people, is quite different, I think, from the gay/lesbian analogy.”2
Moskos’s principal point was that military effectiveness, not fairness for gays and lesbians or abstract principles of equality, must be the paramount concern. “The driving force behind integration of the armed forces,” he wrote, “was not social improvement or racial benevolence but necessity (notably manpower shortages in World War II and the Korean War).” Racial integration had increased military efficiency (although not immediately). But “the acceptance of declared homosexuals will likely have the opposite effect, at least for a time,” argued Moskos. If lawmakers did not face the “possible cost to military effectiveness” of letting gays serve openly, “we can only hope that our postmodern military never has to face the uncivil reality of war.”3
Why did Moskos lose faith in the military? He didn’t, exactly. “We could adjust to it,” he said in 2000, referring to lifting the gay ban. While the professor argued in public that lifting the ban would undermine “unit cohesion,” his commitment to discrimination in the military was not actually grounded in the needs or capacities of the armed forces but in his view of morality, of what’s right and what’s wrong. Discussions and interviews with him are peppered with talk of “universal law” and “natural law” and the “moral right” that he believed straight people have not to share close quarters with people who might fancy them. “I’m just against that,” he said of letting gays serve openly. “I should not be forced to shower with a woman. I shouldn’t be forced to shower with an open gay. If you choose to, that’s your business.”4
Despite Sam Nunn’s disappearance from the national scene after the 1992 election, Moskos remained influential in military circles. His position on the cultural imperative of discrimination continued to find its way to key opinion leaders and policy makers. Indeed, his impressive academic credentials gave them cover to argue that the United States must not move too quickly toward equality. Moskos shared with top military brass a traditional world-view that placed men, and a form of rugged masculinity, in positions of social power. This was the foundation of his belief that it was a “cultural issue” that women “shouldn’t kill people.”5
For Moskos, the ban on openly gay soldiers was grounded in a similar cultural concern to the one raised by women in combat. Invoking the analogy of sex integration, he asserted that the gay ban was necessary to protect “modesty rights for straights.” He asked, “What if you put three heterosexual men living in a unit of say, 100 women, and say, by the way, if you misbehave we’re going to do something, would somebody want that or not?”6 For Moskos, this privacy right appears to have been a sincere expression of his deeply held beliefs, a moral system he held so dear that he’d say almost anything to find a rationale for it.
Americans have long been reluctant to fully embrace the rights of gays and lesbians. As a sociologist, Charles Moskos felt that, in opposing an end to the military’s gay ban, he was simply articulating the truth of national sentiment and linking it to concerns about what impact a radical change in military culture could have on the armed forces. But Moskos’s academic and military credentials gave cover to a diverse group of opponents to gay military service, each of whom had their own reasons for their position. None of them, in the end, relied on empirical evidence or sound logic. All of them, including Moskos’s own reasons for defending the ban, were rooted in different varieties of moral beliefs about the place of homosexuality in American life.
Looking back, we can see that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the result of three different forces operating together and reinforcing one another—and all three rested on a belief that homosexuality was morally objectionable. The first was the conflicted feelings of the American public and, even more so, the military population. However committed both were on paper to tolerance and equality, many, if not most, were ultimately sympathetic to the traditionalist worldview that looked suspiciously upon homosexuality and resisted its full integration into mainstream society. The second was the powerful empire of conservative Christian groups that made maintaining the gay ban into their cause célèbre. The extraordinary alliance of the religious right laid the elaborate groundwork for the successful campaign that convinced America that it would let gays serve their country at considerable peril. And the third source was the personal opposition to gay service of academic, political, and military leaders such as Charles Moskos, Sam Nunn, and Colin Powell. The first two reasons are discussed here, and the third in subsequent chapters.
IN THE ABSTRACT Americans favored concepts like tolerance, equality, freedom, fairness, and civil rights. But polls showed sharp limitations on how far they would go in translating such abstractions into support for real rights. In 1992, according to Gallup, only 48 percent of Americans thought homosexual relations should be legal, and only 38 percent thought homosexuality should be considered an “acceptable alternative lifestyle.” When it came to gay service, Americans were fickle and impressionable. In August of that year, as Margarethe Cammermeyer tried to figure out what to do next with her life, 59 percent of Americans had supported letting gays serve, just before the national debate heated up. Three months later, that figure had dropped to 48 percent, the first time since 1977 that support to end the ban actually fell. In December 1992, 46 percent favored lifting the ban. By mid-January 1993, only 42 percent wanted to let gays serve, and by late January, following some of the most heated rhetoric about the gay troops issue, only 35 percent of Americans supported Clinton’s effort to lift the ban. Within the military itself, opinion was more consistent: solid majorities opposed letting gays serve, and stated that they “feel uncomfortable in the presence of homosexuals.”7
Why did so many Americans oppose letting gays serve in the U.S. military? What were they against? What were they afraid of? And what were they hoping for or trying to accomplish? Beneath the instinctive hostility to gay soldiers, what was the real source of opposition to officially welcoming gay and lesbian Americans into the armed forces?
The short answer is, in a word, morality. Millions of Americans found (and still find) homosexuality either viscerally repugnant or at least vaguely wrong. It logically follows that if something is bad, it should not be inflicted on an eminent American institution, particularly one that relies on discipline and a heightened sense of its own virtue as an antidote to the unavoidable fact that it’s ultimately about killing people. But part of the power of morality is the deep tug it has on our hearts; one’s belief about right and wrong is often not a rational position, but a gut instinct. And if homosexuality were to be approved by the U.S. defense forces—a bastion of conservative values, including traditional notions of masculinity—it might force the country to confront its deep discomfort with same-sex intimacy and sexuality. That discomfort could remain underground as long as no one had to talk about it; this is one reason why “don’t ask, don’t tell,” despite its bizarre and convoluted requirements, sounded like the natural solution.
Why were so many uncomfortable with homosexuality? The reasons can be numerous: they ranged from the “ick” factor of contemplating sexual intimacy that is unfamiliar and culturally reviled to the penetration anxiety of straight males; from the heterosexual fear of discovering one’s own complex desires to a fierce attachment to traditional norms of gender and sexuality, and to the social hierarchy it helped preserve. The ensuing taboo against homosexuality was expressed, for religious Americans, in doctrinal narratives that condemned homosexual desire and practice as sinful and socially destructiv
e. Often, this understanding of the gay life as sin produced feelings of anger and hostility rather than quiet judgment or reasoned questioning. Few anti-gay activists, for instance, stopped to challenge the selective use of religious doctrine. After all, most religions condemned divorce far more squarely than homosexuality, yet marital breakdown, while lamented by the religious right, yielded nothing like the obsessive machinery of hate and damnation faced by gays and lesbians, perhaps because too many conservative Christians had been unable to avoid divorce in their own lives. For others, whether grounded in religious faith or not, anti-gay sentiment reflected, and perpetuated, a need to humiliate a vulnerable group, to capitalize politically or financially on such humiliation or to protect, through clinging to tradition, the power and prestige of those who had grown comfortable with their privilege. Some simply associated homosexuality with sex and thus believed that it was an impolite subject of conversation. For still others, stereotypes of gay promiscuity meant that homosexuality represented pleasure unbounded by responsibility or the giving of life, ungovernable hedonism whose powerful hunger for pleasure seemed to threaten either people’s sense of self-control or their faith in the ability of society to control its members’ behavior.