Rooke said that for any gay person who leaves the military, the policy is definitely part of their decision. “If the ban weren’t there, it’s quite possible that I could still be on active duty to this day,” he said, adding that it was difficult to measure the true costs of the policy because many gay people leave prematurely because of the ban. Rooke’s sentiment echoed remarks by many other service members. Wendy Biehl, a former army specialist who served in the Middle East, opted for a discharge when her tour ended, having decided that the policy did not allow her to be herself. “It’s one of the reasons I got out of the military, because I wanted to be gay, I wanted to be openly gay,” she said. “It became a big issue because the person I am now and the person I was in the military are two completely different people. I really wasn’t happy and that became a problem for me.”17
Brian Hughes agreed. Hughes was part of the U.S. Army Ranger team that rescued Jessica Lynch in 2003. The Ranger regiment is an elite infantry unit that is part of the Special Operations Command. Hughes took time off from Yale University to join the army in August 2000 and became a sergeant. In the fall of 2002, he was deployed to Afghanistan, where he did search patrols for personnel and weapons. He then cycled into Iraq for the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he participated in the Lynch rescue. For Hughes, the policy meant he was not allowed to “bring your partner to events” and it precluded his partner from being able to “plug into support networks” that others took for granted. “When people ask me why I don’t want to reenlist, I say because of the family life,” he said.18
One service member reported that many gays grow to resent the military when they realize what they’re being asked to do in order to serve. In preparing to go to war, he said, “some people have the sense: ‘Why should I face that situation if I’m being dealt such a hard hand by the military?’ Frankly a lot of gay people are driven to take advantage of the policy and to come out because of this. If the military is not going to let me form normal, happy, healthy relationships,” he asked rhetorically, “if they’re going to discriminate against me, why should I fight for this institution and risk death?” This conclusion was seconded by a sailor who deployed to Iraq, and reported that “a lot of people are getting out” by exploiting the policy. “They don’t want to be there.” An officer with an air force expeditionary unit in the Middle East echoed this report, saying “a lot of the people who were voluntarily identifying as gay were [doing so] with the full knowledge that they were going to be discharged.”19
After nearly eight years of service and a deployment to Bosnia and Afghanistan, in which he slept in the same safe houses as British troops who are allowed to serve openly if they are gay, Brian Muller knew he had done his best to conform to the policy. The army staff sergeant was trained in counterterrorism and bomb assessment. He had celebrated his eighteenth birthday in Bosnia. He had been to war, and had twenty-one medals to show for it. His commander knew he was gay—he’d guessed as much and there had been some third-party disclosures to that effect over the years. This seemed not to be a problem. But Muller had heard other commanders say, “All fags should get AIDS and die,” and, as he strove to continue service while maintaining a forbidden relationship, he felt the burden grow. So he came out. “I’d done everything I could do in the military,” he recalled. “People couldn’t say I was trying to get out of war because I had gone to war, so for me, it was a principle.” He was also tired of not being able to be with his partner. But equally important, he was driven to leave by fear and uncertainty about the policy. “My fear was that they’d discover it and I’d be dishonorably discharged,” he said.20
Despite successfully serving as an out gay man, Robert Stout, like too many soldiers fighting in Iraq, had a life-altering experience during his tour that made him think twice about the institution to which he gave so much. A twenty-three-year-old army combat engineer from Utica, Ohio, Stout was out to most of his twenty-six-member platoon, which served in Iraq as part of the 1st Infantry Division’s 9th Engineer Battalion, based in Schweinfurt, Germany. “Almost everyone I know is supportive and handled it just fine,” he said. “I have never seen someone refuse to work with a soldier based on his or her being gay or straight. People forget that we are a family in the Army. We stick by each other no matter what. You can really see that after a long deployment.”21
The platoon’s job was to sweep roads and forward operating bases in order to locate IEDs and roadside bombs. The task was vital to securing the battleground for fellow soldiers. The idea of route clearance is to scan the area for attacks on fuel and supply convoys. Soldiers look for dead vegetation, which can indicate the presence of chemicals used in an IED, or for fresh mounds of dirt that suggest the recent burial of an explosive device. Once such devices are located, soldiers either destroy the explosives themselves or cordon off the area and call in the Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team. The EOD teams had no room to mount machine guns on their trucks, so they had to be escorted and protected by the 9th Engineers.22
In early May 2004, Stout was made a gunner, the soldier mounted atop a Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun. It’s one of the most dangerous spots in all of Iraq. Within his first week, his platoon got a call from the squadron. A suspicious truck had been found in the rebel stronghold of Ad Duluiyah, less than an hour north of Baghdad, and troops were needed to determine if it contained explosives. Stout strapped on his night vision goggles, mounted his M1114 uparmored Humvee, and drove through the town of Ad Duluiyah to assess the threat. The truck was abandoned and no bombs were found. All sighed with relief.23
But they weren’t out of danger yet. Stout was in a rear vehicle, doing security patrols, scanning out to his right, when suddenly, from his left, someone began firing. Before anyone had time to fire back, a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the Humvee, just above the left rear tire. The RPG detonated and went through two plates of armor and the steel piping that attaches the weapons mount to the top of the vehicle. “It shot through it like butter,” Stout recalled.24
The blast blew his night vision goggles off. Suddenly, Stout couldn’t see or hear. His face felt completely wet. He managed to squeeze himself out of the vehicle. It was then he noticed a large wedge of shrapnel lodged in his arm and bits peppered in his legs and neck. His vision and most of his hearing came back in a matter of hours, but his ears continued to ring. Stout was sent to Germany for surgery to remove the biggest chunks of metal from his arm, but his injuries were superficial enough to allow for his return to duty by July of that year. In fact, while he was in recovery, his tour was extended by stop-loss.25
Stout’s injury changed him. “I’m a lot more assertive now and no longer see the need to stand idly by and let the world go by,” he said the year after his ordeal. “It has changed me to the point where I am no longer scared of day-to-day life. There is nothing the army can do to me that is worse than what happened that night, and I now know what it is like to be truly afraid.” Emboldened, fearless, with three combat tours under his belt, three Army Achievement Medals, a Good Conduct Medal, and now a Purple Heart for the shrapnel shards still lodged in his limbs, Stout decided it was no longer his duty to serve his country in silence. If he could expose himself to the enemy and take incoming fire in order to secure the battleground for his fellow soldiers, then he would insist on being at least as open to the fellow soldiers whose recognition he had earned in his service to them and the country. What sense did it make for him to remain silent when most of his platoon already knew he was gay? “We can’t keep hiding the fact that there’s gay people in the military and they aren’t causing any harm,” Stout thought.26
Stout made headlines in April 2005 as the first gay wounded soldier to come forward during the Iraq War. He announced that he would reenlist, but only if he could be honest. His story quickly spread throughout the Internet and landed on the editorial pages of major papers, including The Washington Post. When a photographer from The Advocate called his base in Germany for p
ermission to take photos on post, Stout’s battalion commander called him in and asked him to sign a letter stating he would stop speaking with the media. But by then it was too late. His story was already public. Eventually, an agreement was reached for Stout to sign a form saying he would not (further) violate the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which meant he must stop talking about his sexuality, not have sex, and not marry or attempt to marry a man as long as he remained in the military. By signing the agreement, Stout was allowed to serve out the remaining weeks of his contract until his tour expired. Stout said gays and lesbians routinely leave early because of the policy. “I know a ton of gay men that would be more than willing to stay in the Army if they could just be open,” he told reporters. “But if we have to stay here and hide our lives all the time, it’s just not worth it.”27
What is particularly damaging about the talent loss is that the older and more senior a service member becomes, the more difficult it is to serve without explaining the details of one’s personal life. It is often expected that officers and other senior personnel will be married and will attend social events designed to encourage comradery and identification with the force. The gay policy’s gag rule and its ban on homosexual relationships make it uniquely difficult for people with senior positions to attend such events and maintain normal ties with their peers, since they face increased scrutiny about whether they have a spouse or why they have not shown up with a date. And the more time a soldier has invested in a military career, the more she has to lose if she’s suddenly rooted out. The result is that the most experienced, highly trained, and skilled gay service members have a greater incentive to leave the military because of the risks and requirements of serving silently.
“I’m getting up in age there,” said a senior noncommissioned officer in the air force, “and they’re asking me, ‘Hey, where’s your girlfriend? Where’s your wife?’ and I say, ‘She’s away, she has a very prestigious job, she couldn’t be here.’ ” He said the policy stifles innovative thinking by discouraging experienced personnel from building a career in the military. Plum jobs, he said, would prompt close scrutiny of his files and many detailed questions, and being an apparent bachelor would count against him in promotions, as it might seem to suggest instability. And when people take visible jobs that put them in charge of many subordinates, others routinely try to fix them up with dates. “You can only duck a blind date so many times,” he said, and “lies are very hard to juggle; it’s hard to keep the story straight.” Often, it just didn’t seem worth it.28
A captain in the air force reserves said that at age thirty-five people are expected to have a “traditional” family. Seemingly harmless questions, which reflect a “genuine interest in getting to know” one another, follow accordingly. “Don’t tell” disqualifies him from participating in these forms of socializing: “When I find myself in a discussion regarding personal experiences,” he said, “I often stay silent or don’t add much to the conversation in order to avoid those uncomfortable moments. If I have to think very carefully about each word I say, then I’d rather say nothing at all.” As a result, “I’ve earned a reputation for being all business, hard-nosed and very difficult to get close to. This is an accurate description; however, it’s not by choice. The military has forced me to become this person.”29
Rear Admiral Alan Steinman served in the Coast Guard for twenty-five years, retiring in 1997 at the age of fifty-two. In 2003, he became one of the three highest-ranking military officers to reveal he was gay, in an article in The New York Times. Steinman had graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and served the Coast Guard as a flight surgeon. Eventually, he became the top doctor of the Coast Guard, overseeing the entire medical establishment of the force. The position earned him the prestigious Coast Guard Distinguished Service Medal. But to land where he did, he had to close off an enormous part of himself. “I was denied the opportunity to share my life with a loved one, to have a family, to do all the things that heterosexual Americans take for granted,” Steinman said. “That’s the sacrifice I made to serve my country.” Steinman knew that if he wanted to make admiral in the Coast Guard, he would surely need to have a companion—but of course that person would have to be a woman. So he placed an advertisement in the personals section of the Washingtonian, an upscale magazine. The ad caught the eye of Mureille Key, a widow who used to look through the personals section because she found them amusing. “Gay businessman looking for social partner,” it read. She called, they met and hit it off, beginning a long friendship of many years, in which the two appeared at Coast Guard functions together. They didn’t have to lie; generally, no one asked and they didn’t tell. But it was a mark of the extraordinary lengths to which gay service members often have to go to have a career in the armed forces. Steinman was willing to make this enormous sacrifice for a career serving his country. “I loved the Coast Guard,” he said, “and I loved what I was doing. But the price for that was I could not be who I knew I was.” Not everyone is willing to bear that burden. Giving up a family, living a life of secrecy, suppressing the human desire that lies in us all, these are what Steinman called “the tragedies of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ” And he added that “a lot of our younger generation doesn’t want to pay that price.”30
This was especially true in the years after September 11, 2001, when the military needed them the most. It wasn’t that younger people were less willing to sacrifice. They simply had less and less experience living in the closet and they increasingly believed—correctly so—that crawling inside one to appease some three-star general from a bygone era was utterly unnecessary. They also saw firsthand the damage this policy was doing not only to careers but to the military itself. In Afghanistan and Iraq, gay troops described long hours of down time, even in combat zones. People would talk informally and discuss friends, family, and other personal matters. During these moments of social bonding, some gay troops had to censor themselves, remain silent, or opt out of conversations altogether. The result was that these troops were seen as uncaring or uninterested. They were compelled to shut down in an environment in which forming close bonds was encouraged.31
“It can’t be all business all the time,” said the army JAG officer. “You have to be able to talk about your life, you have to be able to bond with the people, and I could never do that.” An enlisted man said that in some units, he felt comfortable enough to come out to most of his coworkers. But when he was in a unit where people did not know his sexuality, “it makes it harder to form interpersonal relationships to the point where people can go to war together.”32
One petty officer first class in the navy explained the added strains created by “don’t tell,” the gag rule of the policy. “If I have to sit there and hide my life,” he said, “that is stressful. Because people talk: When you’re at work, do you sit there and talk about work all the time? When I can’t sit there and talk about my life and my family, it does get stressful.” The sailor recounted a rumor that circulated after he was spotted in a Starbucks with his civilian boyfriend. The next day at work on the ship, it was reported that they had been holding hands, which was untrue. Wishing to confront people and correct the record, the sailor opted instead to lay low so as not to draw attention to himself in a matter relating to sexuality. The silence took a toll. “Their closed minds just make me into a very impersonable person here at work,” he said.33
A senior noncommissioned officer in the air force who has served for eighteen years said the squadron is like a family, which serves as a support group away from home. “If you can’t be yourself or reveal too much about yourself, you’re still going to be odd man out,” he said. A senior airman said she avoided get-togethers with coworkers for fear of battling awkward moments in conversation: “That’s like your family when you’re [deployed], so if you can’t be open with them and trust them, it’s kind of like you’re out there by yourself.” Because of the gag rule, “you don’t really have anybody to talk to.�
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An enlisted service member elaborated on how the policy can compromise the development of trust between people in a unit. “A great deal of military service is being able to trust people around you,” he said, “being able to be comfortable enough around them that you can trust someone with your life. Having to conceal something like this can make you doubt the personal bonds and professional bonds that you have with people.”35
A navy lieutenant studying aeronautical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology observed a similar problem. He said the ban “ends up driving more of a wedge [between gays and straights] than really helping.” The policy, in his view, “makes very sharp distinctions . . . but if everyone were able to be out, there wouldn’t be such sharp distinctions.” As a result of the policy, “I don’t socialize as much with the people I work with because I can’t be out to them, and that’s not good for cohesion.” If he were able to be out, he said, he would probably socialize more with his peers, which is especially important among officers in the squadron, who function “like your little social group.” He called the ban “detrimental” and said it was exhausting to keep up appearances and pretend to be interested in women on a regular basis. The lieutenant was out to over a dozen other gay sailors, but was never sure whom he could trust, and worked and lived with the daily fear of being revealed. “It makes it a little bit more sane for my state of mind that there are a few people who know and you don’t have to be secret from everyone,” he said.36
The policy’s damage is not restricted to gays and lesbians. By requiring that gay people conceal basic information about themselves, it institutionalizes the presence of dishonest troops; service members know that people in their midst are misleading them. Imagine trying to build a cohesive fighting force while effectively announcing to recruits that they are serving with people they cannot trust. “It’s a forced lack of integrity on your part,” said a lower enlisted service member. “If you’re living a lie,” your comrades “are not trusting you, they’re trusting a picture of you that you put in their head.”37
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