Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  WHAT OF COLIN Powell, Sam Nunn, and Charles Moskos? In 1991, Powell had written of the role of the military in American life with glowing praise: “The armed forces of the United States,” he wrote, “afford the opportunity for advancement” that “regrettably, is not in every part of our society, . . . the kind of opportunity that the armed forces lead the way with, and hopefully will eventually spread to all parts of our society so that only achievement and performance will be the basis for advancement. My generation in the military [is] a generation where almost all barriers have now been dropped.” It was a stark contrast to the discriminatory policy he spearheaded and championed for so many years. In 2007, he softened his tone, saying that while the policy “was an appropriate response to the situation back in 1993,” the country “certainly has changed” since then, though he wasn’t sure if Americans were ready for openly gay service. In December 2008, two months after crossing party lines to endorse the anti-ban Barack Obama, Powell went a step further, saying the nation “definitely should re-evaluate” the policy. “It is time for the Congress,” he said, “to have a full review” of the law, “and I’m quite sure that’s what President-Elect Obama will want to do.” 75

  Around the same time, former senator Alan Simpson, who had recently written his op-ed calling for an end to the ban, asked his friend Sam Nunn what he thought. At long last, Nunn budged. He wrote Simpson a letter saying that public and military opinion have “evolved” and that “no personnel policy should be set in concrete.” He said that enough evidence had accumulated to show that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is “getting in the way” of filling the military’s empty slots with talented personnel. And he called for “a thorough review by the Congress” of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law.76 His acknowledgment of the brain drain the policy had wrought was perhaps a tiny step beyond where Powell had landed.

  Nunn took the opportunity to ask his friend Moskos what he thought. But Moskos held fast. In a memo to Nunn dated October 6, 2007, Moskos wrote that there would still be problems if the ban were to end, and he worried recruitment would suffer. “Lifting the ban will not be trouble-free,” he wrote. Yet he continued, in good form, to focus on the little things that had always driven his interest in this policy. Most of the discharges come from voluntary statements, he wrote. When he was in the army, fifty long years ago, he was teased for buying a girl’s bicycle. “Today, they would be punished for such behavior. Is that going too far the other way?” Then there’s the law on “homosexual conduct.” It “specifically states,” he wrote, that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” But in fact it doesn’t. In a 2008 interview, he boiled his defense of the policy down to one of his famous pithy phrases. “Prudes have rights too,” he said. Asked if he was perhaps swayed by an emotional attachment to the policy he long claimed as his own, he responded, “Obviously I am. I think some of my friends would be disappointed if I turncoated.”77 Moskos died on May 31, 2008.

  EPILOGUE

  THIS BOOK HAS made an argument for why “don’t ask, don’t tell” must end if we are to reverse the damage it has caused to military readiness. The damage caused by this insidious policy has been far smaller than the wounds to the military from larger, geopolitical forces, but it has made its mark nevertheless. If the United States continues to ban open gays and lesbians from service, the detriment to our military and our nation will also continue.

  Fortunately, it is increasingly clear that “don’t ask, don’t tell” will end. It was designed as a temporary compromise, and political inertia has allowed it to outlive whatever usefulness it may have had. As we have seen, reason, facts, and evidence often have little bearing on public policy, but the sheer weight of the burdens of this policy—the cumulative impact of the vivid stories of lives turned inside out, of ugly animus and pointless logic—seems, at long last, to be having an impact. With every year since 2005, when lawmakers introduced the bipartisan Military Readiness Enhancement Act, support for this latest congressional bill for repeal has increased. It is likely that within a relatively short period of time, the federal government will strike “don’t ask, don’t tell” from the lawbooks.

  It is also crucial to consider why “don’t ask, don’t tell” should end, for the history and impact of this bizarre and convoluted policy raises pressing questions about who we are as Americans. How we answer these questions will help shape what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century—well beyond the rise and fall of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  What’s really at stake in the battle over gay service? Once we have dispatched the chimera of “unit cohesion,” what is the real meaning of the outcry over homosexuality in the military? Unlike other exclusionary policies, the central issue here is not status or strength or performance. Instead, underlying our fifteen-year drama are fundamental anxieties over knowledge, expression, and revelation. Fittingly for a postindustrial world, this battle is not over resources but self-understanding.

  This is why Professors Garvey and DiIulio wrote in their 1993 New Republic article that the real reason gay service is opposed by so many military men is that it would “change the meaning of who they are.” The “shared meaning” of military identity that they describe is not trivial. The willingness to put one’s life on the line relies heavily on the cultivated desire to participate in the shared meaning of the military. It is their self-image as members of a warrior culture that allows soldiers to carry on in battle despite unthinkable danger. A shared sense of self is also the reason that morality, in the end, does matter. Doing the right thing is essential to mutual survival in war, and to the larger ethos that legitimates warfare. Soldiers and civilians are not likely to support a killing machine if they’re not convinced it’s battling for a just cause. When patrolmen on the road out of Baghdad Airport spot what they think is a roadside bomb, only their moral compass can ensure they stop their convoy to approach and disarm it rather than leaving it to decimate the next batch of troops.

  The question is, how do we define what is moral in the twenty-first century? It’s a question that won’t be answered in these pages, but one thing seems clear: How American troops conduct their consensual sex lives in private should no longer be part ofthat definition. General Peter Pace found that out the hard way in 2007 when he tried to prop up an outdated rationale for the gay ban by bluntly calling homosexuality “immoral.” He didn’t remain chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for long. And the issue is not only a matter of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The fact that consensual sodomy—for gays and straights—remains a jailable offense in the military (while surveys say 80 percent of adults engage in one or more of its varieties) should be prompting insistent demands for change toward a more realistic, humane, and respectful code of military justice.

  Ultimately, of course, these questions are not solely about the shared meaning of warrior culture, but about the meaning of American identity. To accept gays fully into the military, to remove ancient, useless, and damaging taboos from our civilization, Americans must change the shared meaning of who we are. Are we—and should we remain—a culture that relies on ignorance, repression, and denial to stay afloat? Charlie Moskos’s privacy argument, and its continued usage as a rationale for the gay ban, seemed to suggest that we are. The notion that gays and lesbians must conceal their true selves to preserve the comfort of other troops is based on resistance not to the presence of gays in the barracks but to knowledge of that presence. And it’s a tenuous distinction. If knowledge creates the problem, then does ignorance resolve it? For Moskos, it did, and he was prepared to accept the consequences.

  But the gay ban is not really about privacy, either, for “don’t ask, don’t tell” quite simply does nothing to preserve privacy. Heterosexuals know they are serving with gays, and know that they could be undressing before eyes of desire. If the policy does anything useful for heterosexuals in inviting them to stick their head in the sand, its complicity in their repression is a grave disservice i
n the long run.

  At bottom, the ban on open gays is really about how Americans confront the question of desire—the desire to fight and other desires that some fear might sap it. Moskos’s congressional testimony made this clear. By acknowledging the presence of homoerotic desire in military culture, he gave voice to the half-conscious fears of sexual chaos and social breakdown that can accompany the confrontation of our true selves. The frank admission of this policy’s foundation in the repression of desire raises pressing questions not only about the appropriate basis for denying equal rights but also about what has happened to a fundamental ideal of Western civilization: the Enlightenment quest for progress through knowledge, liberation through illumination, and democracy through genuine self-command.

  The reason gays are denied equal treatment in the military is because our culture remains unequipped to acknowledge the full range of human desires, and the mere presence of gays is a painful reminder of this collective inadequacy. The significance of what might be called the “repressive hypothesis” in the military is not, of course, that all the troops are really gay, but that a variety of messy desires, needs, and fears swirl around in each of us. To manage them well, we must learn to confront them, not pretend they don’t exist. The alternative is the persistence of sexual repression, with the kinds of consequences we’ve seen not only under “don’t ask, don’t tell” but also in the revelations of the secret and destructive double lives of too many governors, congressmembers, pastors, and—to be sure—millions of ordinary people across the nation.

  For many, especially social and religious conservatives, simply acknowledging certain desires means tempting fate. But this fear raises a larger question: Must we pretend that we’re angels without impulses in order to ensure we’re not reduced to those impulses? Must we deny our sexual underside in order to decline its invitation to sin? Isn’t the greatest form of human freedom to know and govern yourself rather than to have to bury part of you to survive?

  The military’s effort to repress homosexuality embodies this tension between illumination and denial and highlights the failure of American culture to deliver the Enlightenment promise of achieving freedom through self-government. This is where the current debate over sexuality policy in the military should be played out. True, the strongest argument against the policy is one of national security: We simply can’t afford to waste good talent. But it is also one of national greatness: We can’t afford to treat the men and women of our armed forces like children, to indulge—with the approval of the military leadership—their worst instincts and to write repression and denial into federal policy. American service members are not infants who think that when they close their eyes, the world disappears. Operating as if they are doesn’t make our country great; it diminishes us.

  Fighting repression is obviously a worthy project for the small minority of people who identify as gay or lesbian and suffer the brunt of homophobia. It may seem less compelling for millions of people who are perfectly comfortable ignoring the full scope of human sexuality. Why should heterosexuals join in this battle?

  Gays and lesbians are denied equal treatment in the military not because they threaten national security but because of the unresolved issues of too many straight people. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is an expression of collective denial that requires deception in the name of “morale.” By creating a climate that is blindly intolerant of difference, by turning itself into a proving ground for fragile masculinity, the military mocks the freedom it is paid to protect. It sends the message that anyone who doesn’t fit conventional notions of what it means to be a “real man” or a “real woman” is somehow dangerous, ineffectual, or both. It suggests that only the straightest of arrows—in the narrowest sense—deserve equal treatment and the opportunity to take their place as full American citizens. And it perpetuates the notion that unconventional sexuality is so sinful that it is, literally, unspeakable.

  What would it mean to challenge this worldview? In the military, it would mean scrapping a policy that views off-base homosexual activity or on-base acknowledgments of homosexual orientation as threats to Americans’ hard-won and well-proven capacity for self-government. It would mean applying a single standard to the expression and conduct of all its members. It would mean retiring the outdated view that homosexuality is incompatible with selfless service and that heterosexuality is the mark of moral superiority. And it would mean reforming the Uniform Code of Military Justice to reflect the way Americans truly—and properly—live their lives today.

  For American culture at large, it would mean acknowledging and wrestling with the true range of our deepest impulses and fears, and it would mean continuing to cultivate and celebrate our capacities for self-command and self-authorship as the height of democratic liberty. Reassuring ourselves and our institutions, particularly the Pentagon, of these commitments and capacities will go far toward curbing the fear, hatred, and oppression—directed at one another and often at ourselves—that is currently bred by our collective denial.

  The closet walls are crumbling. Modern life has cast enough light on our repression that such studied ignorance has fewer and fewer places left to hide. But if the military closet, and the hatred and fear that fester in its darkness, are ever to be truly eradicated, it will take far more than sound policy or exhortations to tolerance, and certainly more than the shadows and silence of denial. It will take an ongoing democratic conversation that offers multiple visions of what it means to be free. What the story of “don’t ask, don’t tell” suggests is how far we, as a culture, have yet to go in expressing a vision of freedom that invites us to be fully human. It is not gays and lesbians alone who are silenced by “don’t ask, don’t tell”—it is all of us.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. Author interviews with Charles Moskos, February 17, 2000, subsequent follow-up communications, and March 13, 2008.

  2. Charles Moskos, “Has the Army Killed Jim Crow?” Negro History Bulletin 21 (November 1957): 27–29; Charles Moskos, “Racial Integration in the Armed Forces,” American Journal of Sociology 72 (September 1966): 148.

  3. Author interviews with Moskos.

  1. THE LONG HISTORY OF THE MILITARY CLOSET

  1. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 11–12; John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 30.

  2. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990); Wayne Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (New York: Gay Academic Union, 1985); John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Henry Abelove et al., eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467–76.

  3. Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 16.

  4. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters.

  5. Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 7–11.

  6. Gary Gates, “Gay Men and Lesbians in the U.S. Military: Estimates from Census 2000,” Urban Institute, September 28, 2004; U.S. Census Bureau, “Facts for Features: Women’s History Month (March),” February 22, 2005, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/003897.html (accessed March 8, 2008). Shilts mentions estimates by “military lesbians” in the 1980s, suggesting that between 25 and 35 percent of women in uniform were lesbian during that decade, and that the percentage dropped over the course of the decade as the stigma against women serving in the military faded. See Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 561. A 1984 study in the Journal of Homosexuality found that gay women were “significantly more likely to have served” in the military than their straight counterparts, and that gay and straight men were “equally likely” to have been in the military: Joseph Harry, “Homosexual Men and Women Who Served Their Country,” Journal of Homosexuality 10, no. 1/2 (1984): 117–25.

  7. Gates, “Gay Men and Lesbians
.”

  8. This account of gays and lesbians in the military during the midtwentieth century draws heavily on Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990).

  9. Sigmund Freud, “Letter to an American Mother,” in Chris Bull, Come Out Fighting: A Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001), 18; Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 15; Gregory Herek and Aaron Belkin, “Sexual Orientation and Military Service: Prospects for Organizational and Individual Change in the United States,” in Military Life: The Psychology of Serving in Peace and Combat, vol. 4, Military Culture, Thomas Britt, Amy Adler, and Carl Andrew Castro, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2005), 119–42.

  10. David Burrelli, “An Overview of the Debate on Homosexuals in the U.S. Military,” in Wilbur Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds., Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), 17.

  11. Lawrence R. Murphy, Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy (New York: Haworth Press, 1988).

  12. Bérubé, Coming Out, 13–14.

  13. Ibid., 14, 19.

  14. Ibid., 16, 20.

  15. Ibid., 15.

  16. Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming, 17.

  17. Bérubé, Coming Out, 261; National Defense Research Institute, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessments (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1993), hereinafter referred to as Rand, Sexual Orientation.

  18. The quote is from Rhonda Evans, “U.S. Military Policies Concerning Homosexuals: Development, Implementation and Outcomes,” white paper, Palm Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001. The ruling is the effective result of the “judicial deference” principle established by federal courts, which argues that the military is due special leeway in making decisions with a bearing on national security. In Loomis v. United States, for instance, the Court ruled that deference to the military had not been weakened by the 2003 Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws. “Plaintiff argues that [previous] cases are not persuasive as they relied upon Bowers before it was overruled by Lawrence,” said the Court. “We are not persuaded.” It then said, “We owe Congress a great deal of deference in matters concerning the military,” and that the gay ban was “rationally related to the military’s interest in promoting unit cohesion, reducing sexual tension, and protecting privacy.” Loomis v. United States, 68 Fed. Cl. 503 (2005). See also Marc Wolinsky and Kenneth Sherrill, eds., Gays and the Military: Joseph Steffan Versus the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).