While General Abel never reached his goal of convincing nine-tenths of America to oppose gay troops, the polls mentioned earlier—showing sliding support for gay service between November 1992 and February 1993—suggest the effects of anti-gay religious rhetoric on American sentiment. Moskos’s comments and behind-the-scenes work to keep the ban in place added to the mix. His views on homosexuality, while often immature, suggested no animus against gay people, and he never expressed a belief that homosexuality itself was immoral or inferior, beyond quips about a gay commander he had in the 1950s who couldn’t keep his hands off the enlisted men. Yet his opposition to gay service was nevertheless grounded in morality, as he had said, in the “moral right” of heterosexuals to privacy. Of course, few people actually believed there were no gays in the military, and the eventual policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” merely offered military members a hand in pretending to a privacy that was in no real way achievable. In any event, in the hands of the religious right, Moskos’s privacy concerns quickly morphed into sweeping homophobic declarations that homosexuality threatened to destroy the military and, ultimately, Western civilization. With the help of Sam Nunn and Colin Powell, Christian conservatives were about to stave off Armageddon for a little while longer.76
3
The Powell-Nunn Alliance
AS PROPONENTS OF GAY equality worked to bring increased visibility to the gay troops issue in the early 1990s, and as opponents in the church and the military advocated against Clinton’s pledge to overturn the ban, the matter sparked the attention of Congress. In fact, political and military leaders had already begun to tackle the question several years before Clinton made his fateful promise to David Mixner in September 1991. The result was a series of parallel paths that occasionally intersected and often branched away from one another. If the work of gay rights advocates and ousted troops to overturn the ban is one strand in this trajectory, and the work of the religious right another, then the calculated deliberations among politicians and members of the military mark a third, intermediary trail through these confusing woods.
Starting in the late 1980s, the offices of Barney Frank and Gerry Studds, the two openly gay members of Congress, became call centers for gay service members terrified of losing their jobs or worse. Studds and Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado had worked to force the release of the PERSEREC study in 1989, which had concluded that gays were not security risks and could serve without compromising the military. When the report was made public, Pentagon leaders were suddenly on the defensive. In July 1991, Frank asked Dick Cheney about the policy at a congressional committee hearing and he appeared to have virtually no defense for the ban. “I have not spent a lot of time on the issue,” he said by way of explanation. Cheney went on to note that he knew of times when the policy had “not been administered in a fair fashion.” It was then that he made his now-famous remark, calling the security risk rationale “a bit of an old chestnut.” The issue turns, he said vaguely, “upon the need of the department to maintain the combat effectiveness of our military units, and that our sole mission in life is to be prepared to fight and win wars.”1
That fall, Democrats in Congress introduced a resolution opposing the gay ban. The measure would have been nonbinding, and thus unenforceable, but it kept a small degree of momentum going in the fight for equality. By early 1992, General Colin Powell was in the hot seat, taking questions from the same congressional panel that had prodded Dick Cheney the previous summer. Powell seemed more equipped to field the challenges.
Testifying in February 1992, Powell—then one of the most admired men in the United States for his role in the first Gulf War—agreed with Cheney that the gay ban was not justified by the old security risk rationale. Luckily, there was a new one: “privacy, good order and discipline.” Powell started out by saying that in a military setting, there is “no privacy,” an oft-mentioned point that begs the question: Why is it justified to exclude gays in order to protect something—privacy—that doesn’t even exist to begin with? He then went out of his way to praise gays and lesbians. This step may have been an effort to avoid appearing homophobic, and there is no evidence in the public record that Powell was prejudiced or homophobic, beyond his endless willingness to accommodate other people’s negative judgments of homosexuality. But the general’s language—referring to gays as “proud, brave, loyal, good Americans, but who favor a homosexual lifestyle”—dated his outlook. Already by 1992, the “lifestyle” phrase was generally used by those who were either over sixty or homophobic, a code to suggest that being gay was essentially a series of carefree choices about how one wished to spend one’s days—at brunch, at the gym, in boutiques, or on the beach. And finally, Powell made his case: Letting such people into such a setting “with heterosexuals who would prefer not to have somebody of the same sex find them sexually attractive” would be “prejudicial to good order and discipline.”2
While Powell was scrupulous about remaining high-minded, he never succeeded at explaining how the presence of gays would undermine order and discipline, and he never marshaled any actual evidence that gays hurt the often invoked notion of “unit cohesion.” In fact, he barely even tried, opting instead to simply assert the point as a given. Without proof that open gays harmed the military, Powell’s argument boiled down to this: Many straight people prefer not to be considered attractive to gay people.
Of course, military life was all about doing things you might prefer not to: wandering through a hostile war zone in the Iraqi desert in stratospheric temperatures; dismantling deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs) blocking the path of your convoy; literally giving up a limb to defend your country. Service members don’t generally enjoy this stuff, even as they may embrace it as a part of their duty. Some might even regard these grim realities as quite a bit worse than showering with an admirer. By fixating on this particular hardship and suggesting that this alone would break morale, Powell gave his imprimatur not only to the preferences of straight soldiers not to serve with gays but to the notion that there was, indeed, something wrong, something unacceptable, about homosexuality. Otherwise, serving with gays would have become just one of the hundreds of things men and women are required to do to become good, disciplined soldiers.
There was another glitch to Powell’s argument. Gays already served. Powell knew this and admitted it publicly. His testimony in early 1992 came before the nation began to absorb Moskos’s distinction between open and closeted gay service. That means he wasn’t speaking here about banning open gays, but all gays; a total ban was required by the principle he was defending. It may have sounded nice to say that gays must be banned to protect the privacy of straights. But since Powell admitted gays were already in the showers with straights, it wasn’t clear how a rule saying they weren’t allowed to be there accomplished anything. Later, when the distinction was made between serving openly and serving in the closet, that problem remained unresolved: If straight men didn’t like to have “somebody of the same sex find them sexually attractive,” what would be achieved by forcing gays to conceal themselves? Would anyone really take such silence to mean there was no one in the shower finding them attractive?
To astute observers, Powell’s argument—which echoed through all branches of the armed forces—sounded eerily familiar. “The Army is not a sociological laboratory,” one army official said. “Experiments to meet the wishes and demands of” every group and ideology in the country “are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.” Such pronouncements were part of a rising chorus of opposition to the push to modernize the armed forces. “The close and intimate conditions of life aboard ship,” read a navy memo from the same year, “the necessity for the highest possible degree of unity and esprit de corps, the requirement of morale, all demand that nothing be done which may adversely affect the situation. Past experience has shown irrefutably that the enlistment of” certain groups “leads to disruptive and undermining conditions.�
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But this chorus was sung not in the 1990s but in the 1940s about a similar yet also very different issue—the integration of African Americans into the military. The resemblance of the language from that battle to the current culture war is unmistakable: The presence of homosexuals, claimed the U.S. military in its 1982 regulation, “adversely affects the ability of the Military Services to maintain discipline, good order and morale,” and “to facilitate assignment and worldwide deployment of members who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy.” It wasn’t true with black soldiers and it isn’t true with gay soldiers. Racial integration was a challenge, but not an impossibility. In fact, desegregation was ordered and implemented even though it caused enormous problems with cohesion, morale, and discipline. Moskos himself, despite arguing that racial integration was prompted by military necessity, has pointed out that racial tension and hostility plagued the military throughout the Vietnam War. As late as 1972, race riots broke out aboard the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation as sailors wielding wrenches, chains, and brooms pummeled each other and left one another bleeding, wounded, and terrorized. As Barney Frank put it, “Saying we can’t have gay people in the military because heterosexuals won’t like them, regardless of how they behave, is like saying we can’t have black people around because white people won’t like them. That was wrong, and this is wrong.”4
Yet in the 1990s, when it came to gays, who were already integrated into the military, the very same language that had been used to justify racism was deployed to justify homophobia. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia had opposed military integration in 1948 because it would “increase the rate of crime committed by servicemen” since “Negro troops,” according to him, committed rape thirteen times more often per capita than whites. Likewise, General Norman Schwarzkopf worried that if openly gay troops were allowed to serve, they would sexually assault straights, citing “instances where heterosexuals have been solicited to commit homosexual acts, and even more traumatic emotionally, physically coerced to engage in such acts.”5
Russell had cast African Americans as disease-riddled outsiders who threatened innocent young white boys with deadly health risks, particularly sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis, gonorrhea, chancre, and tuberculosis, he said, are “appallingly higher among the members of the Negro race than among the members of the white race.” (During World War II, the military insisted that the Red Cross maintain separate blood banks for whites and blacks.) In the 1990s, the joint chiefs and the chaplaincy said the same about gays in the military when they complained to lawmakers that openly gay service could increase the spread of AIDS.6
In 1942, Vice Admiral F. E. M. Whiting testified to the General Board of the navy: “The minute the negro is introduced in to general service . . . the high type of man that we have been getting for the last twenty years will go elsewhere and we will get the type of man who will lie in bed with a negro.” In 1992, a four-star general insisted that “good people will leave the military in droves” if gays were allowed to serve. During World War II, the chairman of the navy’s General Board claimed that, compared to blacks, “the white man is more adaptable and more efficient in the various conditions which are involved in the making of an effective man-of-war.” Colonel Ronald Ray must have been consulting the same “science” half a century later when he asserted: “It has been proven in the scientific literature that homosexuals are not able-bodied” as heterosexuals.7
The echoes didn’t end there. In the 1940s, Americans were told that whites would not respect or obey commands by an African American; that integration would prompt violence against a despised minority that the military would be helpless to stop; that integration would lower public acceptance of the military and the federal government; that the military should not be used for “social experimentation”; that military integration was being used to further a larger minority rights agenda that would ultimately break the armed forces; that the military is unique and is not a democracy; and that integration would thwart God’s plan to keep whites above blacks. Every last one of these arguments was used, in some instances with frightening similarity, against letting gays serve.
Powell’s arguments were so similar to those made fifty years earlier against racial integration that some younger officers actually thought he was joking. But the joke was on history. Colin Powell was the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the beneficiary of the postwar racial integration and of years of affirmative action programs in the military since.8 He was also tall, large-framed, distinguished-looking, even-tempered: the very emblem of American military might. And his very existence was the perfect symbol of the country’s triumph over discrimination, its deliverance, to an impressive but still limited extent, from a history of bigotry and ignorance into a newer tradition of equal opportunity for excellence—for individuals and therefore for the nation as a whole.
But it was hard to miss the symbolism of the nation’s top general endorsing exclusion of a whole group of people using the very same language of fear and disruption that was used to mark his own people as inferior in the very same fighting force. In May 1992, Patricia Schroeder called him on it: “I am sure you are aware,” she wrote in a letter asking Powell to reconsider his position, “that your reasoning would have kept you from the mess hall a few decades ago, all in the name of good order and discipline.”9
Schroeder’s language set Powell up to settle the issue. “I know you are a history major,” he wrote back in rather dignified anger, “but I can assure you I need no reminders concerning the history of African-Americans in the defense of their nation and the tribulations they faced. I am a part of that history.” Powell then forcefully rejected Schroeder’s comparison, saying that skin color was “a benign, non-behavioral characteristic” while sexual orientation was “perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison between the two is a convenient but invalid argument.” He concluded with as much weightiness as he began: “As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as an African-American fully conversant with history, I believe the policy we have adopted is consistent with the necessary standards of order and discipline required on the armed forces.”10
Rear Admiral John Hutson recalls that moment as a definitive early victory sign for proponents of the ban. “Powell put a hole in the analogy to racial integration,” says Hutson, “not particularly logically, but just by force of his personality and who he was. That provided a bulwark behind which the rest of us could hide.” It allowed other defenders of the ban to say, “This isn’t the same as racial integration. This is different, and General Powell says so.”11 Schroeder went on that May to introduce legislation to lift the ban, but Powell’s opposition made its passage increasingly unlikely. Having confronted and handily dismissed the racial analogy, Powell managed to win the high ground. In so doing, he gave respectability to opponents of gay service, including those whose resistance was unabashedly rooted in moral animus against homosexuality.
What drove General Powell to come down so adamantly against gays in the military? Powell was a team player, a company guy whose willingness to put loyalty above principle was masked by a charismatic personality that made what can be a vice seem like a virtue. It was a trait that would become much clearer in the years following the passage of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, Powell, as secretary of state, helped bolster a shaky case for going to war, even though he later admitted he had strong private doubts. It wasn’t the first time Powell molded his own position to that of the big kids. After Operation Desert Storm in 1991, journalists learned that Powell had actually supported containment, not invasion, but was perfectly willing to become a chief salesman for George H. W. Bush’s war. And in 2000, Christopher Hitchens accused Powell of two “shameful cover-ups” in failing to come forward with knowledge of atrocities in the Vietnam War and illegal arms deals in the Iran-contra affair. Powell, charged Hitchen
s, “acted to gratify immediate superiors and to short-circuit any unpleasantness,” placing the “prestige of the military above any inconvenient ethical or legal concerns.”12
Powell’s commitment to keeping the military free of gays appears to have been rooted in this same loyalty to the beliefs, the traditions, and, above all, the men of the institution he loved. Powell had no evidence to support his arguments. He had admitted that the security risk rationale was discredited and that gays had served well throughout the nation’s history. Yet he simply repeated, ad nauseam, that reform would harm “order and discipline” and that it would be “difficult to accommodate” homosexuality in a military setting with little privacy, platitudes that resonated well with the views of anti-gay Americans who already regarded gays as, by definition, disordered and undisciplined. So what was his position based on? His soldiers, his officers, his military simply didn’t want this change. It was all he had left in an arsenal of weapons that even he admitted failed to make the case that the armed forces genuinely could not absorb the change Clinton was proposing.
While Powell set the tone of high-minded debate, he was essentially reflecting, and legitimizing, the opinion of military officers across the nation. Many of them, usually older, usually male, echoed the same concerns about discipline, morale, and cohesion. They said they had enough on their plate molding a group of testosterone-charged nineteen-year-olds from wildly different backgrounds into a disciplined, effective fighting force; they didn’t need one more thing to worry about. It was an unsurprising position: Ask a teacher in a large, rowdy, diverse classroom if she favors or opposes adding to her volatile mix a bunch of kids from one of the most unpopular minority groups in the country, and guess what she’ll say.
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