Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  Nunn’s ignorance was striking. There were countless ways, well short of an “admission,” that a person’s homosexuality could become clear—at least clear enough to worry anyone concerned about showering with gays. (Indeed some service members had said that “just the mere suspicion of homosexuality” could wreak havoc. According to one person who testified at Nunn’s field hearings, sailors broke regulations by stealing the mail of a shipmate they suspected was gay.) No less a Nunn ally than John McCain once said that he knew he served with gay people in the navy by their “behavior and by attitudes.”36 But Nunn simply could not envision the daily reality of gay life in America. For all his professed concern about creating a policy that was free of lies and hypocrisy, for the scores of questions Nunn asked under the banner of formulating clear direction for the military leadership, what he would ultimately endorse was a law that couldn’t have been more confusing, more misunderstood, or more predicated on concealment, innuendo, gossip, pretense, and dishonesty.

  NUNN’S MAY 10 “field hearings” at Norfolk Naval Complex, in Virginia, were a master stroke. The idea was to listen directly to the views of service members and to illustrate to the civilian world just how close the quarters were on ships and submarines. In the bowels of the USS Baton Rouge and the USS John F. Kennedy, with cameras rolling and microphones piled high, fresh-faced recruits from wholesome states swore they were not anti-gay but could simply never brook serving with gays. Sailors climbed into tiny submarine berths piled on top of each other to show how little privacy they had. They even simulated how they used the showers and toilets. It was a string of deft performances that, no doubt, reflected both the depths of discomfort in the ranks and the success of the campaigns by religious and social conservatives to whip up fear and opposition to lifting the ban.

  The field hearings were designed to give cover to the political and military leadership that was all too eager to back discrimination as the only viable path—practically, morally, or otherwise. A majority of service members were against lifting the ban, but Nunn acknowledged he was surprised by the number of men and women who said they had no objection to serving with gays. Indeed, while formal witnesses—those who appear on the roster of published Senate testimony—were overwhelmingly against gay service, the cameras caught a sizable number of young people saying, “I don’t have any problem with it” and “What I want is someone who does his job.”37

  The rhetoric of opponents of gay service—sometimes downright venomous—reflected the widespread absorption by service members of standard talking points that had been pushed for months by social and political conservatives. For many, gay exclusion was a moral requirement, normally rooted in religious belief. “This issue comes to the moral fiber of all of us,” said U.S. Navy Petty Officer Second Class Al Portes. People “like me believe in a God and believe that we are going to be judged.” He said he found homosexuality “morally incorrect. This is an act of rebellion. This is an act of rebellion against the God I believe in.” Portes said he entered the military because he knew that open gays were not allowed, and if the ban were lifted, “Al Portes will refuse, and this is not a call to mutiny or to massive disobedience, but I will refuse to serve with gays in the military.” He ended his comments saying, “Do not come blaming me” if more incidents occur like the “Iowa accident,” the 1989 explosion aboard the USS Iowa for which navy personnel falsely blamed a murderous, suicidal homosexual sailor who, they said, was acting out after rejection by a shipmate. Master Chief Harry Schafer agreed: “It is the belief and known practice of those people that is morally wrong. And that belief, that knowledge of what we traditionally—religious values, Mom and Dad raised us through the church and through society, for my 19 years, before I got 26 years of professional Navy experience, that’s wrong, just bottom-line wrong. And I will never accept that.”38

  Much of what was expressed during the field hearings had this quality of reflexive moral opposition, with no reason for gay exclusion offered beyond a straight service member’s own tradition of disapproval. But many, like the leaders above them, tied their moral opposition to practical costs they claimed gay service would incur. Lifting the ban, said Master Chief Tommy Taylor, “has got so much against it, so many bad things as far as morale, readiness of our navy, you are going to go right to the readiness of our navy.” Captain Gary Fulham of the Marines said, “The adverse effects of those persons openly engaged in behavior that a majority of our society and our species finds abnormal and repugnant will in fact be adverse to the military.” Master Chief Schafer said that having to serve with gays would dramatically undermine effectiveness. While civilians were free to tolerate “these sexually oriented homosexuals,” the close quarters of military life meant that open gay service would “be totally disruptive to good order and discipline.” Seldom were service members able to be any more concrete about how, exactly, the presence of gays would destroy the military. Senator Lott even had to ask, at one point, for examples of what would happen, saying, “I do not want a graphic explanation, but give me a couple of ideas of what you are envisioning here,” to which the answer was simply that “people will leave” and “reduce our mission capability.”39

  Sometimes the rationales given for gay exclusion strained credibility. Lieutenant Fred Frey claimed that “to be able to put your life on the line for somebody requires you to know that he has the same moral foundation you do,” that your comrades “believe the same things you believe,” and would conduct themselves “as you conduct yourself professionally and privately.40 It is hard to believe that any service members thought they shared the same beliefs with all of the nearly 3 million men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces. But to Frey, the homosexual “lifestyle is so objectionable to so many people currently serving in the United States military and the civilians of this country that there is no way that unit cohesiveness will not be detrimentally affected.”41

  The showers, not surprisingly, were also an area of concern. Petty Officer First Class Ginger McElfresh said she could have “a perfectly fine professional relationship” with a gay person, but “the very next day I may have to shower with that person. In the back of my mind, I am thinking, yes, they are acting professionally with me, but what are they thinking about me as I stand here in the shower naked?” Commander James Pledger said he had “never witnessed such an emotional response to any issue in my 21 years of active duty.” He said he had taken “an admittedly unscientific poll” and found that 98 percent of his crew opposed lifting the ban because of a combination of concerns over privacy and morality. “They are repulsed by the prospect of having to shower in view of homosexual shipmates, as well as sleep no more than 2 feet from homosexuals,” he said, acknowledging that his crew was “basically a group of conservative Christian young men.”42

  Not all the testimony from the field hearings was from people opposed to gay service. But most of the remarks in favor came, not surprisingly, from declared gays and lesbians. The most striking moment of the day came when Lieutenant Tracy Thorne announced, “I am the person you have been talking about.” “My sexuality is part of me, but it is not all of me,” he said. “Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I am Lieutenant Junior Grade Tracy Thorne, and I am a red-blooded American. I am the member of a family, the son of a doctor from Mississippi and a mother from South Carolina, a member of the Methodist Church. I grew up in a small town in south Florida. I lived the all-American boy’s life, going to school on weekdays and fishing on weekends.” Thorne said that simply because he told the truth, a shipmate “was ordered to climb a ladder with a rag and a can of paint thinner and he wiped my name from the side of the jet I once flew.”43

  The eloquence of Thorne’s speech made no dent in Nunn’s armor. Doesn’t tolerance flow “both ways” here, he wanted to know. Doesn’t Thorne also have to tolerate those who won’t tolerate him? Perhaps Thorne should admit that he had “some degree of intolerance for those who believe that they have a right of privacy too, and they have a righ
t to be in quarters that are not in any way connected with people who find them sexually attractive.” While Nunn dwelled on privacy, he didn’t conceal his wish to accommodate the moral animus of troops who believed that homosexuality was simply unacceptable. Tens of thousands of enlisted personnel “have been taught from early childhood that homosexuality is immoral.” Don’t they have rights? “You decided that you had to come out in the open,” Nunn told Thorne sternly. “Could you tell us why you felt that you had to come out in the open? And did you take into account by doing so, whether they are right or wrong, you were really making an awful lot of other people feel very uncomfortable in their surroundings?”44

  Thurmond elbowed his way in. He wanted to know if gay service members who came out in their unit retained the respect of their peers. Thorne and Lieutenant Richard Selland, another gay lieutenant junior grade in the navy, both replied that they did, even if some people had questions or reservations. Thorne said he was “pleasantly surprised.” He began to explain: “The reaction that I received when I . . .” but was interrupted by Thurmond. “You do not have to make your answer too long,” said the senator. “Just come to the point.” Keeping his composure, Thorne explained that the response to his revelation had been entirely positive until his unit was dressed down by Vice Admiral Anthony Less, the commander of Naval Forces Atlantic Fleet. The vice admiral had reprimanded his commanding officer for supporting Thorne over navy policy. The officers in his squadron, said Thorne, were “ordered to toe the Navy line. And from that day on, good order, discipline and morale suffered heavily. It did not suffer because of the fact that I had declared I was homosexual. It suffered because the Navy policy was enforced from above.” Thorne said that resolving the issue of gay service was about leadership, and cues from above. “My squadron disavowed me when they were ordered to do so,” he said. “When they [are] ordered to treat me just like any other American, they will do so. That is all it is.”45

  Senator Thurmond could no longer contain himself. “I would like to commend you both for your desire to serve your country,” he said. “However, your lifestyle is not normal. It is not normal for a man to want to be with a man or a woman with a woman.” A round of applause broke out. Thurmond then asked the two gay sailors “if either of you has considered getting help from a medical or psychiatric standpoint, or do you want to change?” Both said they did not wish to be heterosexual.46

  If the ban is lifted, asked Senator Richard Shelby, won’t the result be “open and defiant homosexual behavior” throughout the military? Of course, if open homosexuality were tolerated, it could not be called “defiant.” But Shelby’s remark raised the question of what value there might be in requiring gays to serve in the closet. What was wrong, in short, with Nunn’s idea of asking gays to keep their private lives private? Thorne had watched Kerry and Nunn spar on that very question three days before. So he turned to Nunn to answer the question. “What is fundamentally wrong with that, Senator Nunn, with all due respect, is that . . . most of you men who sit up there, you wear a wedding ring on your left hand, and at your office you may have a picture of your wife that sits behind you on your desk. And I pose the question to you: Have you ever cared about someone so much that you come into the workplace and you talk about that person that you care so much about?” Thorne told the senators that they themselves did not, and could not, keep their private lives wholly separate from their work lives, even in civilian society. “By asking me to keep my private life private, you are saying it is okay that you may be gay, it is okay that you may have someone that you care about, but when your ship pulls in after six months at sea, that person that you care about has to stay at home. And when you get letters while you are out at sea, you cannot read them out in the ready room because somebody may come over and find out that that person is not a woman.” Thorne finished by saying that “in order to live life as you would under this presumed ‘we will not ask if you do not tell,’ you would have to constantly fabricate lies, and it is just not right to ignore the truth in such a way.” But the senators would have none of it. The “overwhelming majority of people who are heterosexual” have rights, too, suggested Shelby. It was no wonder the Congress, and eventually the nation, yielded to the pleas of Master Chief Kelvin E. Carter, when he begged, “Don’t do it, please. Keep our Navy strong and proud.”47

  There were a few more days of hearings in July. Once Clinton announced his policy, Congress had to question Powell, Aspin, and other officials about the final proposal before lawmakers decided whether they could support it or would seek to reverse it in law. But by the May field hearings, most of the damage was done. Nunn had promised his hearings would be “fair and objective,” but the claim strains credibility. When Nunn found out that the planned testimony of a retired army colonel, Lucian Truscott III, would describe the experiences of openly gay service members seamlessly integrated into their units, he removed Truscott from the roster of witnesses. When he realized that the father of modern conservatism, Barry Goldwater, was also planning to testify that gays ought to be allowed to serve openly in the military, he replaced him, too. Indeed, gay rights groups charged that Nunn was stacking the deck by choosing witnesses friendly to his position and silencing opponents, and by the way he conducted the hearings.48

  A prime example was how he ended the field hearings. In response to a question from Thurmond about how military families felt about lifting the gay ban, a string of sergeants and captains said their wives, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, and in-laws were strictly opposed. They said it was a “major concern” for their families. Their wives had told them it was worth missing Mother’s Day to testify against gay service. Families were concerned that openly gay service would lead to married gay couples living on bases, “and quite frankly that is nothing they want to expose their children to.” Trent Lott praised the sentiment, prompting a round of hearty cheers. And Nunn, who had brought the chairman’s gavel down several times to halt forbidden applause, this time said he would “not bang the gavel on that applause because I think we all agree” on this one.49

  That May, Nunn went on NBC’s Meet the Press to try to convince Americans that he was not allowing moral opposition against homosexuality to affect his position on gay service or the way he was running his Senate hearings. But his performance was unconvincing, and put to rest any doubts about whether Nunn was anti-gay. “I can tell you that I have my own moral beliefs,” he said, “but that’s not playing a role in my hearings,” which he again insisted were fair and objective. Americans needed to be “tolerant of people who have different lifestyles,” he said, but he added that we must not “endorse the sex behavior of people that are lesbian and gay.” Nunn claimed he refused to “endorse different lifestyles” with “government policy” even as he sought to inscribe in law a policy enshrining the acceptability of heterosexuality over homosexuality. About this point, Nunn was pleased to be explicit. Asked by Robert Novak if he was “saying the heterosexual lifestyle is superior, is morally superior, to the homosexual lifestyle,” Nunn answered that he was “not only saying that,” but that “American family deterioration is one of the biggest problems we face in our culture, and government programs cannot solve that,” implying that somehow tolerance of homosexuality was a leading cause of the problem. Nunn’s statement might pass as an odd non sequitur, except that social and political conservatives had, for years, been linking homosexuality with family breakdown as often as possible, no matter how illogical the connection.50

  That same month, the U.S. House of Representatives held their own less publicized and shorter hearings. Not surprisingly, the two days of testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (a subcommittee would hold three more days of hearings in July) were a replay of all the same arguments contained in the Senate hearings, and included the now-familiar invective of the religious right and their champions in both the military and the Congress. The May hearings were chaired by Representative Ronald Dellums of California, who supported lifting t
he ban. Dellums said that to the extent the issue was truly one of unit cohesion, “what you really are saying, unfortunately, is that people have a problem with homosexuals.” But despite the leadership of Dellums, the House hearings were marked by some of the most virulent homophobia yet voiced in public debate. Representative Robert Dornan of California said, “You gentlemen all know that the best of your troops can never respect and thereby follow orders totally from someone who likes taking it up the bum, no matter how secret he keeps it. Once it leaks out, they think this person is abnormal, perverted, and a deviant from the norm.” It’s unclear if “leaks out” was a deliberate pun.51

  In both the May and July hearings, Duncan Hunter, also of California, broached the topic of morality unabashedly. In so doing, he helpfully clarified the upshot of political leaders’ support for the moral opposition to gay service. “Service leaders,” said Hunter, addressing top military officers at the July hearings, “have a duty to protect the values of your troops—if you consider them to be legitimate values.” A majority of military men and women, he said, do not want the ban lifted. Yet “you have not once used the term ‘value.’ You have not once accorded legitimacy to the feelings of people who serve in the armed forces who feel that because of their values, because of their faith, because of their traditions, homosexuality is repugnant and they do not want to serve in intimate quarters with homosexuals.” A lot of people, said Hunter, “have read the same Bible, they have read Romans and Paul and have repeated Paul’s statement which stated that homosexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong!”52