Some senior military officers managed to keep their language just above the fray of anti-gay rhetoric. But almost all, including Powell, eventually betrayed with their words a worldview that regarded homosexuality as either harmful, predatory, immoral, or sinful. General Gordon Sullivan, army chief of staff, cast his concerns in terms of “difficult management problems,” but added that he owes his soldiers “a certain amount of privacy and security.” It’s not clear how banning gays protected soldiers’ security, unless gays are viewed as innately predatory. For others, this view was simply implied. Letting gays serve “could upset the good order and discipline of the unit,” said a Marine Corps general. He described “standing in this shower tent, naked, waiting in line for 35 minutes for a 5-minute shower.” Then he raised the question: “Would I be comfortable knowing gays were there standing in line with us? No. It just introduces a tension you don’t need.”13
The four-star general who said that if the ban is lifted, “good people will leave the military in droves,” was sending a clear signal of support not just for opposition to gay service but for the moral rectitude of anti-gay sentiment. After all, if you resigned in protest at the acceptance of homosexuals, and were singled out as “good people,” your position must be morally sound. As a senior military officer said, in a rare example of public (albeit anonymous) dissent from the united military opposition to gay service, “We have been allowed—by law—to become homophobic.”14
The sentiments of Admiral Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would be amusing if they weren’t so repugnant. Saying he had no doubt that gays in the military would cause problems, he predicted a scenario: “I can guarantee you that these young people . . . will spot a homosexual a mile away as soon as he comes in, and they’ll have to name him Tessie or Agnes, or whatever, and then subsequently he’ll get caught in some kind of sexual activity and then he’s discharged.” Moorer found the issue of gay service “the most disturbing that I’ve ever encountered in war or peace because what is going on here is an effort in effect to downgrade and demean and break down the whole structure of our military forces.”15 Moorer, not surprisingly, authored the preface to Wells-Petry’s book, Exclusion.
Sean O’Keefe, the acting navy secretary, said that even debating the issue had already hurt morale. Like Powell, he acknowledged that gay service would not break the military. “It’s not so severe as to suggest that the basic objective of what they’re asked to go do is threatened by it,” he said of gay service. But his resistance was absolute nonetheless—based on his judgment that pleasing the majority of his force on this issue was the higher imperative than fairness or inclusion. “Is anybody happy out there that [the navy] is being used as a public debating society for all manner of societal issues?” he asked. “No.”16
The navy gave free rein to its officials to denigrate gays and lesbians in defense of the ban. “Homosexuals are notoriously promiscuous,” said a navy spokesman, Commander Craig Quigley, one more repetition of what, by the early 1990s, was nearly a military mantra. If gays are allowed to serve openly, Quigley continued, straight men would have to take showers with the “uncomfortable feeling of someone watching.” Navy officials cited the court-ordered return of Keith Meinhold as evidence that gays hurt morale, as his squadron had to spend “many hours dealing with issues created by his return.” Of course, Meinhold would never have had to “return” to the navy if he hadn’t first been kicked out by an anti-gay policy.17
Indeed, as with virtually all the stories offered as evidence for disruptions caused by gay troops, the problems in Meinhold’s squadron were actually caused not by Meinhold but by the homophobia that had caused his ouster in the first place. But navy personnel seized on the story to fan the flames of anti-gay sentiment. The press reported in January that Admiral Frank Kelso, chief of naval operations, was “deluged with angry questions from sailors and officers about the lifting of the ban.” His own defense of gay exclusion was vehement. (Kelso, who was accused by a navy judge of lying about his role in the Tailhook scandal, struck a deal with the Pentagon in 1994 to retire early in exchange for an exoneration by the secretary of defense.)18
Powell, too, was hit with anxious queries about the prospect of gay service in the navy. After a long and jovial speech in January 1993 at the Naval Academy, in which Powell regaled the midshipmen with talk of virtuous sailors and “charming young ladies,” the very first question, met with loud applause from the audience, was on the gay ban. If the ban is lifted, a cadet wanted to know, what should be done by “the majority of us who believe that homosexuality is an immoral behavior?” Powell’s revealing answer was an effort to continue the diplomatic tone he had struck since beginning to field queries on this issue a year before. But he slipped. “We’re all Americans,” he said, “and there are some Americans who are homosexual. That is a choice they have made.” Perhaps realizing he had waded into moral waters that inflamed instead of defused the controversy, he quickly added, “Or it may have been made for them, I don’t know.” Powell dwelled for a bit on the moral aspect, as if trying to find his bearings. He said that in his professional capacity he could not “make a moral judgment as to whether that is a correct lifestyle or not.” As Americans, everyone is free “to make our own moral choice about that.” In fact, his final answer to the question was less than inspiring: “If you find it so morally unacceptable that you could not serve in that capacity,” then the only alternative to conforming is to resign.19
The upshot of Powell’s answer was not to advise people to resign, but simply to lay out the existing options for service members struggling with the issue. When an order conflicted with your moral beliefs, either you gulp and swallow or you leave. But like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to come, the significance of his answer lay between the lines of what was said. If being gay was not benign, then it must be—at least a little bit—malignant; if gay service would cause disorder and indiscipline, then homosexuality must be harmful and obviously undesirable.
AS THE GAY service issue made headlines at various points throughout 1992—in response to Powell’s remarks, growing legal challenges, inchoate gay lobbying, and the rather glib way in which promises of reform rolled off of Bill Clinton’s tongue—Charlie Moskos had an idea. His friend Sam Nunn had opted not to run for the White House, but the senator remained one of the most powerful members of Congress. That spring, Moskos dashed off a fateful memo to Nunn, outlining a plan to let gays serve in the military as long as they remained in the closet. After Clinton entered the White House, Moskos sent copies of his memo to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and, through George Stephanopoulos, to the president himself. Moskos would meet with Nunn half a dozen times over the next six months to discuss the issue, which landed him a starring role in Nunn’s Senate hearings in March 1993. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” had been born.20
In his memo, Moskos acknowledged that gays had long served effectively in the military. “What is at issue,” he wrote in a commentary piece in the Army Times, “is allowing declared gays and lesbians into the military.” Putting on his sociologist’s cap, he elaborated in a string of op-eds early in 1993. Open service, he wrote, “is an entirely different kettle of fish from the service of discreet homosexuals in uniform.” Moskos knew his idea would not be popular. But it didn’t seem to bother him much, and indeed almost seemed to drive him. “Yes, you are treating gays as second-class people by saying they can’t identify their sexuality,” he acknowledged. “And so be it. Who says life is fair?” In another piece in The Washington Post, he cast his compromise as a pragmatic approach to an intractable problem, one best resolved with a dose of realpolitik. To condone “discreet homosexuality” while codifying an official ban on known gays, he wrote, “is to set oneself up for the charge of hypocrisy. And it probably does no good to say that a little hypocrisy may be the only thing that allows imperfect institutions to function in an imperfect world.” But returning to his preferred tone of folksy common se
nse, he offered up yet another analogy, which betrayed a troubling inattention to the most basic modern understanding of sexual identity. Adultery, he pointed out, was also illegal in the military. “You could say adulterers are being repressed because they can’t wear an ‘A’ on their sleeves. What about adulterers’ rights?”21
That an old-school Democrat like Charles Moskos would come out so heavily against openly gay service spelled trouble ahead. In the very first weeks after the election, Clinton had fielded press inquiries about his intention to lift the gay ban. He repeatedly assured reporters that his plans had not changed. “Status alone, in the absence of some destructive behavior,” he said on Veterans Day, November 11, 1992, should not disqualify people from military service. On Monday of the next week, he was asked about the issue again. And again, he reiterated that the nation did not have a person to waste. More to the point, there were already gays in the armed forces, he said. “We know there have always been gays in the military,” he answered. “The issue is whether they can be in the military without lying about it.” Referencing his commitment to meritocracy, he emphasized there would be a code of conduct that applied equally to all service members, and again distinguished between the simple fact of being gay and the prospect of disruptive behavior. “There is a great deal of difference between people doing something wrong and their status or condition in life,” he said.22
These answers sounded reasonable enough, echoing as they did his campaign theme of judging actions rather than identity. But Clinton left open the thorny question of just what kind of behavior would be allowed and what kind punished, if gay and lesbian soldiers were officially allowed to serve. Would they be admitted so long as they avoided the sexual conduct that defined their status as homosexuals? Would they have to be celibate? Was Clinton hinting that he would welcome gays and lesbians so long as they didn’t do what homosexuals do?
For the moment, such niceties troubled neither the White House transition team nor the reporters trailing them around. The mixture of guns and sex made for racy copy, and the larger question of gay service quickly became something of an obsession for the media. An outpouring of front-page and lead stories clogged the major papers and television news shows for the next eight months. While many newspapers editorialized in favor of letting gays serve, the American public was decidedly mixed, and would grow more opposed to the idea the more they heard the scare stories of military brass and the religious right on national security, the spread of disease, and the decline of the American family.
When Clinton was elected, many gays were overjoyed. They saw it as a sign that their exclusion from respectable spheres of politics and society was finally coming to an end. After all, their increasingly effective political organizing had helped elect the first president who publicly courted them during the campaign. In electing Clinton, their fellow Americans seemed to them to have rejected the overtly anti-gay rhetoric of the Republican Party’s presidential bid, lowering a major barrier to reform. Gays and lesbians now had little reason to doubt Clinton’s promised intention to lift one of the last remaining instances of legal discrimination against a minority group in the United States.
For their part, the president-elect and his advisers began the Clinton years with a strong sense of momentum on the issue. Hanging in the air was Truman’s virtuous legacy of desegregating the armed forces with what appeared to be a simple executive order. (In reality, not surprisingly, the racial integration of the military was slower and more complicated than it has often been depicted.) The Republican National Convention in August had seemed to add to this momentum by creating a minor backlash against gay bashing. When Patrick Buchanan opened the convention with an inflammatory tirade declaring a culture war “for the soul of America,” the Houston Astrodome reacted with wild praise; Pat Robertson estimated that a third of the delegates were members of the Christian Coalition. But mainstream Americans responded poorly and the speech added to the GOP’s reputation for being intolerant and out of touch. The convention did less than expected to raise the sagging fortunes of the Bush campaign.23 Chastened by voter disapproval of the convention’s tone, mainstream Republicans briefly backed away from the nastiest anti-gay rhetoric.
But Republican reticence on the issue, it turns out, was a boon to anti-gay forces. It added to the false confidence of Democrats who believed they could expand gay rights without great resistance. It encouraged them to let down their guard only to be pummeled by a surprise attack shortly after the election at the hands of social conservatives and their military and political allies. Once Clinton was in office and ready to act, Republicans would hammer Democrats as soft on gays and untrustworthy with issues of national security, a line that would gain traction with an emerging narrative that Clinton and his supporters actually aimed to bring down a military they had opposed since the early days of Vietnam.24
Barely a week had passed since the election victory when trouble began. Hoping to focus on the stagnant economy and other issues of great importance to the nation, Clinton found instead that much of his time was devoted to defending his campaign pledge to let gays serve. The issue became priority number one for much of the media, who questioned the president-elect whenever they could, particularly in the wake of the court order to reinstate Keith Meinhold. Press reports typically quoted military people as solidly against lifting the ban. “We’re 100 percent against it,” said a recently retired master sergeant in the army to the Associated Press. “I believe this sailor is entitled to his rights,” said another, referencing Meinhold. “He just shouldn’t be in the military. It was a hidden issue before and that was all right, but knowing about it is going to be disruptive. Now that it’s out, there are going to be fights—and somebody’s going to get hurt.” Some acknowledged that their opposition was cultural or moral and had little to do with military readiness. “No, you just can’t have gays in the military,” said an army sergeant. “It’s just the principle of the thing—the long tradition.” Another worried about her safety: “You’re in such close quarters and would literally have to take showers with these women,” she said. “You get dressed, sleep, do everything together. Will I be protected? That’s what I wonder.”25
As Clinton was pushed onto the defensive, Powell led a unified front by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make public their opposition to gay service. “The military leaders in the armed forces of the United States—the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior commanders—continue to believe strongly that the presence of homosexuals within the armed forces would be prejudicial to good order and discipline,” he told reporters. “And we continue to hold that view.” To avoid any appearance of insubordination, he added that the decision was ultimately “a judgment that will have to be made, and appropriately so in our system, by our civilian political leaders—the president of the United States, Congress.” At the end of the day, he said, “the armed forces of the United States will do what we are told to do.”26
The Joint Chiefs also made the Clinton team aware privately that their resistance would remain fierce so long as the president-elect continued on a course to letting gays serve. The chiefs acknowledged that gays already served, but said that if such service were formally allowed, gays might become open about their sexuality, which could undermine morale and discipline.27 With no evidence tying gay service to undermining readiness, the officers could only speak in hypotheticals—gays could become more open, which could cause problems with cohesion and morale. When pressed, they could only offer isolated anecdotes in which the disruptions were actually caused by the actions of homophobic military men, or recycled fear stories about how sexual advances by gay men—a problem of misconduct, which no one was proposing to make legal—had hurt morale.
Aware that a confrontation could be brewing, Clinton met in person with Colin Powell two weeks after Election Day at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., to discuss this and other military matters. Chief among them was Clinton’s plans to downsize the Pentagon, including a major cut to th
e defense budget. As the first baby boomer president, and the first president to be elected since the fall of the Soviet Union, Clinton came to office representing the hopes of millions of liberals to finally yield a “peace dividend” by reversing the costly military buildup of the previous generation. Money from the military budget was needed to fund Clinton’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. The defense community was aware of such plans and understood that it would be increasingly challenging to explain to the public the need to keep open cold war military bases and fund expensive and controversial programs like the Star Wars missile defense system. Some in the military faced the arrival of the new administration with a sense of dread, a feeling that social, cultural, and fiscal pressures were conspiring to marginalize them. They worried that their livelihoods, their lifestyles, and their beliefs, including their unique perception of the dangers that would continue to threaten the United States, were increasingly neglected or mocked by a misunderstanding public.
From Clinton’s anti-war days, he had gained a reputation as no friend to the armed forces, once describing his generation’s “loathing” of the military. As David Mixner tried to explain to the press, Clinton was hardly a strident member of the anti-war community. In fact, he was considered a relative outsider to the cause, almost a dabbler in the movement when many young liberals had become greatly radicalized around their opposition to Vietnam. There was both virtue and vice in Clinton’s actual feelings around the war. Mixner recalls the future president had genuinely struggled with his moral position on the war, which is more than can be said for many. But his wavering also reflected his desperate need for approval, his wish to please everyone, sometimes at the expense of failing to commit passionately to a principle and fighting for it at great cost, as so many of his generation had done around Vietnam. Clinton’s mixed feelings about authority also appeared to have shaped his ambivalent relationship with the military and the activities of his antimilitary peers. Mixner even sensed that in Clinton’s adult life, he had developed a kind of “awe” for the military that reflected this conflict between his youthful instinct to resist power and his later wish to grab its reins.28
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