Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  Many others also reported that the policy is not taken seriously and ultimately makes a mockery of military law. When a policy is so at odds with reality that it is virtually unenforceable, it undermines respect for all rules and regulations in the institution. “The policy is a joke,” said an army national guardsman. “It basically says that I can be gay but I can’t be gay; a person can only repress himself so long before it starts to have negative effects on his performance and attitude.” “The ban’s a joke. It’s a joke. It’s not uniformly enforced,” said another, adding that enforcement is, in reality, at the discretion of each commander. “The whole policy literally became a joke,” agreed an air force captain who entered the military before the policy was adopted. “It still is to this day.”25

  THE EMERGENCE OF “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a joke has corresponded with the lighter attitude toward gays and lesbians themselves. As the more virulent anti-gay animus recedes, it seems to be replaced by gentler humor and teasing, which older bureaucrats and politicians often mistake for—or exploit to suggest—dangerous and disruptive anti-gay hostility. Indeed, one sailor in the Pacific Fleet said, “the day we stop cracking jokes about you is the day you should start worrying because that’s the day we hate your guts.” Even joking that does have a homophobic bent does not necessarily indicate dangerous levels of hostility in the force. In 2004, a Marine commented on how much attitudes had changed since he joined the military in 1987, and how residual homophobia had struck a much lighter tone. Recounting a recent discussion in his unit about a proposed law to ban same-sex marriage, he said only one person backed it. “That, to me, shows how much attitudes have changed,” he said, adding that people care less about sexual orientation and more about performance. If a gay person was a “shitbird,” as he put it, a slacker or a complainer, he or she might be singled out for criticism. “But if a person performs his job really well, they might make a joke and move on, but they’d not try to beat them up or anything like that.” A navy lieutenant who joined the service in 1993, just before “don’t ask, don’t tell” was implemented, agreed that anti-gay comments were simply part of a larger culture of ribbing. In a revealing characterization, he said that a “high school” culture still prevailed in the military, in which “you have to make anti-gay remarks every once in a while in order to really be a guy, even though the majority of them really don’t care.”26 In this sense, homophobic banter is more of a knee-jerk device service members use to fit in with each other and does not reflect deep animosity.

  A soldier in the National Guard said the only disruption he had witnessed as a result of someone’s sexual orientation involved “the one queeny guy from my home unit. They call him names and . . . make fun of him behind his back.” But the soldier concluded that people are not “hateful” because he is gay. In general, he said about suspected gays that “no one seems to care because the persons suspected do not say it one way or the other, they just take a little ribbing from time to time.” He said attitudes were improving. “Some people instead of witch hunting us are now just making jokes and letting it go,” he said.27

  Some gay troops attributed privacy concerns to the same kinds of misunderstandings (or misrepresentations) by senior officials about how service members bond. Fred Fox, for instance, the Somalia combat veteran, said that stated concerns over the impact of openly gay service on military privacy “misunderstands what it means to be a soldier.” He explained: “I have never loved any man more deeply than some of the men I served with in Somalia, and I never had any sexual feelings for them. It’s not some big gay porn movie; it’s a brotherhood.” As infantrymen, Fox said, “we wrestle and beat each other up a lot.” Fox theorized that such rituals stem “from the fact that it’s just awkward for anyone to love someone that deeply and you don’t know how to express it, so I’m just going to sneak up behind you and throw you on the ground and wrestle for a while.” He added, “It’s like a big hug.”28

  A psychological operations sergeant who fought in Kirkuk agreed that privacy concerns were overblown, saying that context matters far more than the simple fact of being naked in someone’s presence. During both training and fighting conditions, he said, “a separate bond occurs between soldiers. You no longer look at them as ‘Joe’ or think ‘Joe’ is cute. You look at them as your brother who just saved your ass while you were fighting, or someone that you can rely on when the shit hits the fan. You don’t look at them as a potential sex partner. Once the bond as a military brother is formed, it is extremely hard to break that bond and look at them as a sexual possibility. Whoever thinks that gays join the military to sleep with a bunch of soldiers has obviously never served a day in the shoes of a soldier.”29

  THE SENSE THAT “don’t ask, don’t tell” has become a joke by the twenty-first century, and that the privacy bogeyman is overblown, reflects just how much the reality for young troops has changed since the policy began. And nothing bears out this reality like hard numbers. Between 1993 and the present, public opinion polls across the board reveal a substantial, and nationwide, transformation in feelings about homosexuality. While polls in late 1992 and early 1993 revealed large fluctuations in opinion, as Americans responded to the heated rhetoric of those months, support for Clinton’s pledge to lift the earlier ban on gay service sunk to a low of 35 percent in January 1993, according to a Gallup poll taken for Newsweek magazine. Conservatives, no doubt, took comfort in this figure, as it implied that a clear majority of Americans believed that gays should not serve in the armed forces. Throughout this period, polls showed the percentage of Americans supporting gay service as hovering between 35 and 45 percent, with occasional spurts above the 50 percent line. Gallup polls showed that, in 1992, just 48 percent of Americans thought homosexual relations should be legal, and only 38 percent thought homosexuality should be viewed as an “acceptable alternative lifestyle.”30

  Throughout the 1990s, levels of support for gay service remained in roughly the same range—40 to 50 percent. But early in the new century, support began to swell. In 2003, a Fox News poll put the number at 64 percent, while a Gallup poll put it at 79 percent. Each year since then, a wide variety of national polls has found that between 58 percent and 79 percent of Americans favor openly gay service. Between 2003 and 2007 small backlashes emerged in support for gay rights. By all accounts, they came as a reaction to the rapid pace of change in social norms and institutional rules during those years, a phenomenon that is consistent with the unfolding of every civil rights story in American history. In 2003, for example, the Supreme Court struck down state sodomy bans in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas case. The ruling reversed the notorious 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that had upheld the statutes. In a closely divided 5-4 decision, Lawrence said that “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, is not correct today, and is hereby overruled.”31

  Also in 2003 the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that marriage rights could not be denied to same-sex partners, a decision that paved the way for the first legal same-sex marriages in the United States a year later (although they were not recognized by the federal government because of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which denies benefits and recognition to same-sex couples even when lawfully married in their home state). And not surprisingly, in the summer of 2003, Gallup registered the first major reversal of general support for gay rights since talk of gay troops spawned a similar backlash in 1993. In just three months, the percentage of Americans who thought homosexual relations should be legal declined from 60 to 48 percent. More than half of respondents said being gay should not be considered an “acceptable alternative lifestyle,” the first time a majority said so in six years; and 57 percent said gays should not enjoy the same rights as married people, the highest number opposed to equality since 2000. Pollsters were so taken aback at the numbers that they did the poll twice, but the same results only confirmed that talk of gay progress had set back support for gay equality.32

  The backlash, however, proved temporary. A
major 2005 poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center showed that 79 percent of Americans favored openly gay service in the U.S. military; just as significant was the fact that these supporters included a majority of Republicans, religious people, and even individuals with negative attitudes toward gays. By 2007, Gallup reported that support for gay rights stood “at the high-water mark of attitudes recorded over the past three decades.” After several years of sagging tolerance, attitudes were bouncing back toward acceptance of homosexuality, as evidenced, for example, by responses to that perennial question: Should homosexual relations be legal? According to a Gallup report in 2007, “Public tolerance for this aspect of gay rights expanded from 43 percent at the inception of the question in 1977 to 60 percent in May 2003. Then in July 2003, it fell to 50 percent and remained at about that level through 2005. In 2006 it jumped to 56 percent, and in 2007 it reached 59 percent, similar to the 2003 high point.” In 2008, a Washington Post–ABC News poll found that 75 percent of Americans favored openly gay service, including a majority of white evangelicals, veterans, and Republicans, whose support had doubled since 1993. Nearly two-thirds of conservatives as well as 82 percent of white Catholics supported letting open gays serve.33

  Acceptance of homosexuality was also strongly reflected in an explosion in pop culture portrayals of gay characters, both real and fictional. In 1996, 32 million television viewers watched two lesbian characters wed on NBC’s hit comedy Friends. Only two of the station’s affiliates, in Texas and Ohio, chose not to air the episode, while the remaining 212 left it alone, perhaps because just weeks earlier, another gay couple got married on ABC’s popular Roseanne, and the world continued to turn.34

  The next year, a record thirty gay characters turned up in network shows, a rather sudden 23 percent increase over the previous year. It was also the season when Ellen DeGeneres, the comedian and actor, came out as a lesbian on the cover of Time and had her television character, Ellen Morgan, follow suit two weeks later on her show, Ellen. A whopping 42 million viewers tuned in, the biggest rating of any network show that year besides the Oscars. Religious conservatives organized a boycott of Disney, ABC’s parent company, but it did nothing to stop the momentum of America’s closet doors as they flung open. Ellen’s coming out was not trouble-free, but the lesson in the long term was telling. Television critics (and gay and lesbian fans) lauded the impact of her newfound candor on the show’s humor, making it more open, honest, and natural. But her ratings slowly declined, as her focus became “too gay” for some. Yet Ellen bounced back in the ensuing years, launching in 2003 a successful and critically acclaimed daytime talk show that focused on general issues and was embraced by mainstream audiences. Everyone knew Ellen was a lesbian, but at the end of the day, few cared.35

  Will and Grace burst onto the entertainment scene in 1998. It rose steadily in popularity and eventually became the third most watched sitcom on network TV, with a weekly audience of nearly 17 million. In 2003, the Bravo network, owned by NBC, launched a reality show called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The show’s 1.6 million viewers represented a startling 435 percent jump for its time slot and put Bravo on the map. In fact, NBC was so delighted by the ratings that it aired a version of the show itself, snagging an average of 7 million viewers.36 The show has bred product endorsements, book deals, licensing agreements, and spinoffs. Though a relatively small number of Americans actually watched the show, many more knew about it and understood what it represented: a new day in gay-straight relations. Some critics groused about the primping and prancing of the gay lifestyle coaches, too reminiscent for some of the sidelined, stick-figure minority characters of an earlier day. But the fact remained that Queer Eye signaled a dramatically different cultural landscape from the one that birthed “don’t ask, don’t tell’ exactly a decade before.

  Media critics, gay groups, and ordinary Americans alike marveled at the revolution in attitudes exemplified by the growth of gay characters on TV. “Mainstream Americans welcome out gay men into their homes where once they would have protested to the network until advertisers withdrew their support and the show folded,” crowed The Guardian of London. The paper said the gay-positive shows were “being hailed by mainstream media as a revolution for American attitudes to homosexuality on TV . . . America is being forced to confront its homophobia.” The editor of Out Magazine said, “American media can’t get enough of homosexuality right now. There is a changed climate and network executives are less afraid than a few years ago.” The New York Times saw the “growing prime-time roster of gay-themed programming” as signaling “a major shift in attitudes about gay subjects,” and said that entertainment executives viewed the Lawrence decision as confirmation that “the nation’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians are radically changing.”37

  Queer Eye was followed by a gay dating show, Boy Meets Boy, and the following year by a lesbian drama, The L Word. In 2005, Brokeback Mountain, an epic western about two young men who fall in love under the open skies of Wyoming ranchland, garnered critical acclaim, box-office success, and three Oscars. Despite concern about controversy and boycotts, only one theater yanked the film at the last minute, in Utah. The story of Brokeback’s release was not that a gay love story was made, but that the sexuality of its characters, while central to the story, was a nonevent. Yet the film’s release was a cultural watershed: The rights had been bought nearly a decade earlier, but the project had been rejected by several directors as too risky—would straight audiences pay to see a gay love story? Either it wasn’t time yet, or Hollywood was too scared or conservative to take the plunge. They had no idea that, in 2005, the Ang Lee film would become a critical favorite and one of the most successful independent films of all time.

  While the embrace of gays and lesbians in pop culture by no means assures full acceptance of homosexuality, television executives are notoriously risk-averse. By the time a controversial issue is confronted on national television, it usually means that commercial entertainment has caught up with, not pushed ahead on, American cultural mores. As we saw with the public opinion backlash around the 2003 court decisions on sodomy and marriage, progress almost always sparks resistance. Will and Grace premiered within a month of the savage beating death of twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, an event that both reminded gays and lesbians of the persistent threat to their safety and rights and spurred new momentum and sympathy for gay progress. While critics continued to raise questions about how gays were portrayed in the media, their presence had a far-ranging impact, not only as a reflection of growing acceptance of homosexuality, but also as a venue for Americans to face—often through humor—their conflicting feelings about homosexuality and the gays and lesbians in their own lives. The Boston Globe eulogized Will and Grace as a show that “worked to liberate homosexuality from centuries of silence by deploying nonstop gay-related jokes that could be self-ironic, silly, and sometimes touching.” It offered “a way to laugh about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and straight sexual politics from a place of pure affection, not fear and hatred.” Added one social critic, the show was “a signal moment. It brought everyday gayness into American living rooms in a way that made it almost banal.”38

  The embrace of gay culture is not limited to the nation’s living rooms; young recruits who enter the military come out of these living rooms, and the programming and culture follow them onto military bases around the world. Beginning in the mid-1990s, gay-straight alliances blossomed in high schools across the country; Fortune 500 companies rushed to offer benefits to same-sex partners; and the once radical act of coming out to a neighbor, friend, or family member became commonplace. The result was a tipping point in the visibility and acceptability of homosexuality that did not escape those in the armed forces. Far from being stuck in the past, the U.S. military is irrevocably shaped by the culture around it. A repeated refrain from interviews with service members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was this shift in popular culture. From Queer Eye and Will and Gra
ce to Brokeback Mountain, the landscape seems awash in things gay. The English language itself has shifted, these troops notice, as the term “metrosexual” has invaded even the straight-laced ranks of the armed forces. The result, repeated over and over again, is that troops have discovered not only increased tolerance, but also a new kind of iconic status for gay-straight relations. “The metrosexuals would come to me,” said one soldier. And they would say, “ ‘I’m going out on a first date, what should I wear?’ We became very good friends and my sexuality was never an issue.” “I think in today’s military,” said another, “there’s certainly not as much concern as there was before. Look what’s on TV these days: Queer Eye, Boy Meets Boy; the perception of gays has changed so much since the policy was first instituted that no one really cares anymore.” He said the people keeping the policy in place were those who wrote it or backed it initially and have supported it since the beginning. “We’re talking generals, who have basically fallen out of touch with everyday people. To enlisted personnel, it’s a big joke.” “I think the most important factor is generational,” said an air force captain. “It’s the old-school leaders who insist on these types of policies.”39

  IT’S NOT JUST young people and housewives whose attitudes are changing. In fact, in many ways, the story of the gay ban is a story of its professional champions, one by one, abandoning the very policy they once fought for. As these experts weighed new evidence, became embarrassed by the policy, or simply got caught up with the changing world around them, they realized “don’t ask, don’t tell” was no longer tenable. There was Lawrence Korb, the assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, who worked with the military to implement the 1981 gay ban. After witnessing the suppression of the PERSEREC studies, Korb concluded “once and for all that this was a clear case of blind prejudice and bigotry rather than a readiness issue, and that I had to do something about it or I could not call myself a social scientist.” The year “don’t ask, don’t tell” was implemented, he wrote that “over the past decade, my own views on this subject have changed considerably and I now feel that the nation and the military would be best served by dropping the ban entirely.”40