Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  The British military was so convinced by these findings that, in 2006, the Royal Air Force announced it would hire Stonewall, the largest gay rights group in Britain, to help it attract gay and lesbian recruits. The deal meant the RAF would be placed on Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, a list of Britain’s one hundred top employers for gays and lesbians, and that Stonewall would provide intensive training about how to create an inclusive workplace environment with greater appeal to gays and lesbians. The RAF also agreed to provide equal survivor benefits to same-sex partners and to become a sponsor of the gay pride festival. “The Armed Forces are committed to establishing a culture and climate where those who choose to disclose their sexual orientation can do so without risk of abuse or intimidation,” said the Ministry of Defence.27

  The RAF action was prompted in part by recruitment shortfalls. But the move also makes clear that the British Forces believe that a climate of inclusivity and equal treatment makes for a superior military, further evidence that the only impact of gay inclusion is a positive one. At the 2007 British gay pride parade, a Royal Navy commander made this point, stressing that what mattered to military effectiveness was teamwork. “If the team is functioning properly, then we’re a professional fighting force,” he said. “We want individuals to be themselves 100 percent, so they can give 100 percent and we value them 100 percent.” Background, “lifestyle,” and sexuality were not a part of the equation, he said, adding that the British military recruits “purely on merit and ability” and new members become a “member of the team and are valued as such.”28 As the year 2000 British Ministry of Defence internal assessment had suggested, the replacement of a group-specific ban with a policy of equal treatment had helped to shift focus away from sexual identity, precisely the aim of the new policy and, incidentally, the opposite of the effect that the American policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has had. Because the new Code of Social Conduct in the British Forces emphasized good behavior and fair treatment for all, sexuality was now regarded as a private matter and service members were freed to concentrate on the duty of each member to behave in ways that were beneficial to the group. The report indicated that the policy change had produced “a marked lack of reaction. Discussion has rather been concerned with freedom of individual choice and exercising personal responsibility across the board, rather than a focus just on sexual orientation.”

  The Ministry of Defence report also indicated that, because colleges no longer banned the military from campus, recruitment prospects were brightened by greater access to potential recruits: “Some areas that had previously closed to the Forces, such as Student Union ‘Freshers’ Fairs,’ are now allowing access to the Services because of what is seen to be a more enlightened approach.” Indeed, the Ministry of Defence called recruitment “quite buoyant” in the year after the ban was lifted. After several years of shortfalls, the year both before and after the policy change finally saw recruiting targets filled.29

  Reports from many countries now suggest that ending gay exclusion policies may be the best way to move beyond the worrisome focus on sexual identity and its effects on military cohesion. This is certainly true for the gay and lesbian service members themselves, who generally “breathed a sigh of relief”30 when they learned they no longer had to lie to serve their countries. But the effects of liberalization go beyond just the obvious impact on gays to impact straight people, too. These effects reach to the heart of heterosexual’s anxiety about their own role in the military, about how they should behave with respect to homosexuality and how they should interact with those they suspect or know to be gay. And whether such concerns are conscious or not, anyone who serves in a modern Western military must at some point confront the issue of sexuality. The only question is whether they will do so in a way that is healthy or unhealthy for the group.

  Chief Petty Officer Rob Nunn, who had been discharged from the Royal Navy in 1992 for being gay, rejoined the British Forces after the ban was lifted in 2000. The response from his comrades was overwhelmingly positive when he returned, and he was even asked casually if his partner would be accompanying him to the Christmas ball. But what’s most instructive about Nunn’s experience is the impact of the new transparency not on him but on his straight comrades. Immediately after his reinstatement, Nunn found his colleagues were unsure how to respond to him. “It’s the old, ‘I don’t know quite what to say,’ ” he explained in an interview. With one other service member, in particular, Nunn decided to guide him to a place of greater comfort, now that he could take advantage of the option to speak freely. This “one guy that I talked to who couldn’t sort of talk to me, I said, ‘Right, I’m going to ask the questions that you want to ask, and answer them.’ So I did.” Nunn reported that the greater openness, whether it came from him or from others, allowed any remaining discomfort to evaporate and gave him the chance to counter stereotypes, expose friends to greater understanding, and put people at ease. After Nunn helped his reticent comrade out of his shell, the person became “nice as pie.”31

  Having the choice to speak out when it’s necessary or desirable yields another highly important fruit: It allows those who are threatened by anti-gay harassment to confront their perpetrator or inform authorities without fear of coming under investigation themselves and facing discharge. Fear of reprisal has been a serious problem in the American military, particularly for women, who are all too often the victims of lesbian-baiting. The term describes a scenario when women who rebuff the advances of men are tarred as lesbian, whether they are straight or not. The phenomenon helps explain why women are discharged at higher rates than men: Many may come out to take control of a situation that otherwise threatens to end in a discharge that’s out of their control. Stark evidence of the positive impact of ending gay exclusion is found in the case of Canada, where the number of women who experienced sexual harassment dropped by a whopping 46 percent after the ban was lifted. The drop may not have been exclusively caused by reforming the gay policy, but the statistic can’t be ignored. Given the heavily documented evidence for lesbian-baiting as a cause of harassment against women, the decrease in Canada clearly shows the positive, rather than negative, effects of gay inclusion on military cohesion.32

  Even when harassment statistics are not this clear, though, there is no doubt that the pressure generated by gay exclusion rules to fixate on the private lives of service members is itself a threat to cohesion and morale. This is why Australia’s human rights commissioner said he believed his country’s termination of the ban had positive effects on the military. “It’s bad for morale to have your guys snooping on other of your guys,” he concluded. This conclusion is borne out by evidence from gay service members, who reported after the ban ended that the liberalized policy allowed them to spend less energy monitoring what they and others said and more focusing on their work. One army captain, Squadron Leader Chris Renshaw, said that under Australia’s new policy, “you can be more honest. That’s one of the key things about being in the military—honesty and integrity. Because you haven’t got to worry about if someone’s saying something behind your back, or is someone gossiping or something, because if they gossip, I don’t care. So I’m more focused on my job, I’m more focused on what I’m achieving here, and less worried about [rumors] and what people think. In terms of productivity, I’m far more productive now. . . . Everything’s out in the open, no fear, no nothing, no potential of blackmail, no security implications . . . nothing.” Renshaw spoke of the positive impact of the new opportunity for casual banter, so much a part of the military bonding experience. Planning to take his male partner to the Christmas party, he told his superior as a courtesy. “He just looked at me with a bit of a pained expression and said, ‘I expect you to behave.’ And I just sort of looked at him and said, ‘Look, knowing the other people that work on this floor and how they behave with booze, you’re worried about me?’ ”33

  An enlisted member of the Royal Australian Navy echoed the importance of teasi
ng as a form of bonding and the positive role of joking even about sexual orientation: “I’m quite open about my sexuality. Sometimes the boys decide to give me a bit of a ding-up with a joke or something like that, but that doesn’t bother me. We work really well together, and I’m sure it’s the same for other gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors who are out, and they’re accepted by their peers. O.K.—they’re the object of ridicule sometimes, but everybody is.” Military experts must surely understand how central it is for young people in the armed forces to navigate their relationships, in part, through playful insults and oneupmanship, at times becoming caustic or even aggressive. It’s no secret that the military functions as a proving ground, both as part of the training process and apart from it. Yet many of these experts have cherry-picked instances of gay-straight tension and cast them as dangerous examples of social strife, when in fact it is part and parcel of the military bonding experience.34

  The Palm Center study on the Australian Defence Forces in 2000 reported that working environments had improved significantly for gay service members following the end of the ban. But yet again, the most telling lesson from that experience is the impact of reform on the rest of the military. In conjunction with lifting the ban, the ADF issued new instructions on sexual conduct and equal treatment, and leaders made a visible commitment to taking these seriously. As a result, service members saw a marked improvement in a military climate that had failed in the past to adequately respect the promise of equal opportunity not just for gays but for women, for blacks, and for ethnic minorities. The climate of fear and instances of betrayal that had accompanied life for gays in the Australian military carried over to affect the lives of straights, too. In one case, a service member who was reportedly heterosexual committed suicide after coming under investigation for his association with a gay sailor.35 Suicide is obviously the product of a complex array of personal and social issues. But there’s no question that living in a repressive climate of unnecessary, unspoken taboos is an aggravating factor in yielding such a tragic result.

  IT IS POSSIBLE, in theory, that all the nations of the world could integrate open gays seamlessly and the United States of America could still be incapable of doing the same. The world’s superpower is unique culturally, historically, and militarily—so goes the argument. It cannot afford to take its cues from other, weaker nations, and a traditional streak running through its society bodes ill for imposing liberal norms of sexuality onto the more conservative military population. As more and more countries lifted their bans in the 1990s, conservatives in the United States rushed to make the “irrelevance” case, not long after ban defenders had used those very same countries (before they lifted their bans) as models of appropriate policy on gays.

  Bill O’Reilly summed up this case succinctly: “Just remember the different cultures in Britain, Israel, Australia, and the United States,” O’Reilly said on his immensely popular television program, The O’Reilly Factor. “Different cultures.”36 O’Reilly’s point was that eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from middle America were not the gay-loving, French wine—swilling soldiers of progressive Europe, and whatever went over well there would not necessarily go over well here.

  As retired colonel David Hackworth put it, “I don’t think gays will ever be openly accepted in the military . . . [by] corn-fed guys from Iowa.” Hackworth, who served four tours in Vietnam and ratcheted up over a hundred medals, played the typical “it’s not me, it’s them” card, saying, “In the views of thousands of soldiers I’ve spoken to, it won’t work.” But his own position was hiding in plain sight. When questioned by a group of newspaper editors at the U.S. Naval Academy, Hackworth said he believed gays would make sexual advances if allowed in the military because “it’s their nature,” and cited an army captain from his Vietnam days who had propositioned another man while drinking at a party. Asked if straight army men ever drank and made passes at women, he said that in airborne units, “we never did anything like that.”37 Hackworth seemed to be trying to prove that the United States was far more boorish than our allied countries, a point for which he was all too happy to sell gays down the river—while, of course, drawing the line when it came to the vaunted behavior of his fellow straight troops.

  How different, though, was the United States from other cultures, in actual fact? As previously discussed, evidence suggests that Israel was slightly more homophobic than the United States in the 1990s. In Britain, a law was passed in 1987 banning any discussion in schools that promoted the acceptability of homosexuality. Even in the 1990s, a majority of the British, according to polls, believed sex between members of the same sex was always wrong. In Canada, in the years preceding the admission of open gays, polls showed strong moral disapproval of homosexuality. Military researchers at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences regard the Anglo-American nations (the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland) as sharing “a more-or-less common cultural heritage” with the United States. The researchers pointed to a 1992 study in Germany that found that respondents viewed homosexuals as less acceptable neighbors than foreigners, Hindus, racial minorities, and Jews, and equated gays and lesbians with criminals, AIDS patients, and the mentally handicapped. In France, “deviant behavior” was tolerated because, as it was a Catholic country, the possibility of forgiveness for sin was always available.38 Not exactly a ringing endorsement for homosexuals. Corn-fed Iowans, it turns out, may not be all that different from their military brethren in the rest of the world.

  IN ANY CASE, the U.S. military has never found it irrelevant to learn from other countries, big and small. In 1986, it created the Foreign Military Studies Office in order to research and learn “about the military establishments, doctrine and operational and tactical practices of” foreign armed forces. The FMSO, which expanded its work after the fall of the Soviet Union, studies not only technological, strategic, and tactical operations of foreign militaries, but those relating to cultural aspects of service, such as housing, health care, and personnel policy.39

  The FMSO was apparently meaningless to Calvin Waller, who had referred in his congressional testimony to “China men” and lumped gays and lesbians in with liars and thieves. Waller’s confused testimony both compared the U.S. military to foreign armed forces and simultaneously rejected doing so. The general said he was “dismayed” that so many would compare the U.S. military—the world’s sole superpower—to that of other countries. “When we allow comparisons of smaller countries to this great nation of ours, the comparison between these countries with their policies regarding known homosexuals serving their country, it is my belief that we do a grave disservice to our fellow American citizens.” Other militaries, he said, have unionized forces, seldom deploy abroad, and let their troops return home at night.40

  Given his indignant repudiation of the relevance of foreign militaries, it was bizarre that in the very same testimony, he cited the small nation of Korea as a model for the United States: “Now . . . my experience in Korea leads me to understand that their policy is ‘no toleration of known homosexuals in their ranks.’ ” He didn’t stop there. “In all my dealing with the many nations who provided military forces to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm,” he continued, “the vast majority of those nations, as you have heard here today, did not allow known homosexuals to serve in their military units, who were part of the Persian Gulf forces. This is something that was not lost on this old soldier.”41

  Like Waller, Charlie Moskos had testified at Nunn’s hearings about the limited relevance of foreign militaries. “No neat and tidy lessons can be drawn from one country to another,” he said. Moskos told the senators that studying foreign militaries could yield some insight into the matter of gay service. But ultimately, he said, “inasmuch as the United States has the most formidable military force in the world, it could be argued that such countries might draw lessons from the United States.”42 The remark seemed snide. Did he really believe that if the famously t
olerant Dutch armed forces reinstated their ban on gay troops so they looked more like the U.S. Army, then the Netherlands might finally become a true world power? Put the other way around, was he suggesting that the Dutch armed forces were small potatoes largely because they tolerated gays? The thrust of Moskos’s congressional testimony, along with his public remarks elsewhere, was that no matter what gay activists and media hacks said about foreign militaries, he knew the truth, and it wasn’t gay-friendly.

  Moskos acknowledged that many foreign militaries allowed gays to serve, on paper. But he disputed their relevance to the United States, saying other militaries had different cultures or lesser combat obligations or that their practices regarding gay troops were actually less tolerant than their formal policies would suggest. Of the Dutch and Scandinavian militaries, Moskos said, “These aren’t real fighting armies like the Brits, the Israelis and us. If a country has a security threat,” he argued, that country would then implement “a policy that makes it very tough for gays.”43 But he was wrong. Britain’s ban was lifted in 2000 and its powerful military became the chief partner to the United States in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq beginning the next year. No one ever mentioned the idea of rolling back the clock to start rooting out gays again, in hopes of keeping its military strong enough to do the job. But Moskos had perfected the roving rationale, allowing him to defend his policy, to mutate his answers in order to evade whatever evidence might be put before him.

  His discussion of Israel makes this crystal clear. In his effort to dismiss the relevance of foreign militaries to the United States, Moskos told Congress that gay troops in the Israeli military did not fight in elite combat units, did not serve in intelligence units or hold command positions, and did not serve openly in high positions. About this last point, he was adamant. “I can categorically state that no declared gay holds a command position in a combat arm anywhere in the IDF,” he stated. Open gays, he said, “are treated much in the manner of women soldiers,” in that they are excluded from real fighting and serve primarily in support roles from “open bases” where they can go home at night. He repeated these assertions in a companion essay and op-ed, and in radio broadcasts as late as 2000, saying there were no open gays in combat or intelligence positions in the Israeli military.44