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It was April, 1993 and a great crowd of well-behaved people had marched on Washington. The TV cameras shot pictures from above showing swarms of marchers moving slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue. A camera moved down and caught their animated faces. So that is what gay people looked like. Mostly they looked like ordinary people. They seemed festive, but well behaved. They were celebrating the eve of an executive order to lift the ban against people like themselves in the American military.
The crowd moved toward a stage where singers and comedians took turns at the mike. Giant speakers sent their voices echoing through the spring air. Tall, muscular young men, and chubby boys with rolling bellies, sat without shirts under the gentle heat of the spring sun. They were flanked by pretty young girls and white haired old ladies, people in wheel chairs, people with white, brown, black and yellow skin, eating hot dogs and drinking in the promise of acceptance. They were becoming America's accepted children, enjoying the feeling of being adopted. Somewhere mothers and fathers watched and could see that they were not sexual freaks, that there were other good people who were gay. There was optimism in the air. It was just a matter of time, so they all thought, and the ban would be lifted. The President would get a briefing from his men, Congress would listen to the opponents, and then there would be an executive order that would put the matter to rest. Promises had been made. The world was changing, and it would include them. And then, on July 15, the ban was lifted, but in its place was a new ban, with a new name, "Don't ask, don't tell"; a new ban that, when read between the lines, looked almost exactly like the old one.
The new ban said you could be gay in the military, as long as you never let it be known. Well, under the old one a soldier could always be gay as long as it was never known. And under both bans, you could be asked but need not tell. And under both bans, if you did tell that you were gay it would be grounds for discharge. So the gays had thought they would win this battle, but when the smoke had cleared, the military had clearly won.
And this new ban, the new 'Don't ask, don't tell' ban, snuffed out all the commotion, all the publicity. The gay people stepped back into their closets. The talk shows stopped talking about gay rights. The newspapers stopped carrying front page stories. The forces that had whipped it into a front page issue had lost steam.
But although things seemed quiet, out across the land, in courthouses everywhere, attorneys began gathering the files that had lain dormant in the back storage rooms for some months. These were the cases of proud young soldiers who had, in the last year, announced that they were gay and taken their cases to court. These were all soldiers with sterling records, and toothpaste smiles. They had spoken on talk shows and said, without shame or stridency, that they were gay and proud, saying things like, "I didn't know I was gay when I joined the military. Admitting it is the only honest thing to do."
These cases had sat on the dockets for months now, awaiting the lifting of the ban, waiting to vanish as the ban became history. But now they were started up again. The attorneys dusted off the files and the slow relentless motor of the judicial system began to click away. Sooner or later these cases would come to court. Decisions would be made here, and there, and then appealed, moving the sluggish beast, finally, into a constitutional issue that promised to plop itself onto the awesome docket of the Supreme Court. There, the newly chosen justices, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Ginsberg, and all the rest will tell us if the military ban against homosexuals is consistent with the intent of the Constitution of the United States. This group of carefully selected jurists will have to weigh the evidence and decide.
And we should weigh the evidence and decide, too. Should homosexuality be conceived of as a transgression like any other transgression? Should homosexuals be discharged to protect the sensibilities of those who do not like them? Or is the ban a hypocritical policy that ignores homosexuals when it is convenient [1] and asks them to lie and pretend they are heterosexual? [2] Does the military, which dismisses numbers of women far out of proportion to the numbers who are actually in the military use it to harass women soldiers into having heterosexual sex?[3] Is the ban used to harass and frighten men into submission? Or is it that in preventing these gay people from enlisting in the military profession we are denying them their basic rights as envisioned in our Declaration of Independence.[4]
On a practical level, in the 1980's alone, the United States military spent 500 million dollars on the training of soldiers who would later be discharged as homosexual. This does not include the salaries for the people investigating what can be very insubstantial charges.[5] No one believes that this effort actually eliminated all, or even a substantial portion, of homosexuals, or homosexuality, from the forces. Is this 500 million dollars well spent? Is there a better way for America to deal with the issue of homosexuality in the military?
Before we can consider whether there is a better way, we have to ask why the military wants to ban homosexuals.
When the ban was first implemented 50 years ago, a group of psychiatrists came up with a list of five categories of mental illness that soldiers should be screened for. Later, the military added homosexuality to this list.[6] And so homosexuality was treated as a form of mental illness. By the middle 1970's, however, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association had formally declared that they believed homosexuality should not be considered a mental illness.[7] Today the military recognizes that homosexuality is not a mental illness.[8]
Today the military, therefore, is in an odd position. It originally justified its ban on the grounds that homosexuals are mentally ill, and yet, today, everyone agrees that they are not. And so, one might ask, how does the military justify its exclusion policy? The answer is, with great difficulty.
The Stated Reasons for the Ban
Today, the military holds that we should ban homosexuals from its ranks even if we accept homosexuals in the broader society, because the military, so they say, is a special case. If there are homosexuals in the military, they will demoralize the troops and if the troops are demoralized they will fight less well.
In its basic form, their argument goes something like this:
Military personnel often have to dress and toilet in close quarters. Just as it is a privacy invasion for men to observe women undress so it is a privacy invasion for homosexuals to observe heterosexuals in states of undress. The experience of such a privacy invasion, the sense that others present might find one's body sexually exciting, can be expected to diminish morale and thus reduce the effectiveness of combat units. Even having to interact socially with homosexuals will diminish morale. Since the primary business of the military is warfighting, a policy which diminishes the effectiveness of the combat units is unacceptable.[9]
It is, therefore, an argument about privacy, or modesty, in situations of undress, and about morale.
The Underlying Reasons and Questions
Although the military's stated reasons for banning homosexuals needs to be taken seriously, and we will analyze them seriously in this book, it seems likely that their stated reasons are only part of the story as to why they would ban homosexuals. The energy that is often apparent in their arguments against homosexuals is remarkable and out of proportion to the evidence available to substantiate their views.
First, concern with privacy hardly seems sufficient to explain military leaders or recruits indicating that they would be willing to quit if the ban was lifted. The military has typically been unconcerned with soldier privacy in spite of the fact that it is aware that there are homosexuals in their ranks. Although recent facilities have introduced many safe and inexpensive ways to improve privacy protection for soldiers in latrines and other private areas, a recent RAND report tells us that the military is lax in upgrading the privacy protections in older facilities.[10]
Second, moral outrage seems unlikely to be sufficient to cause the military's drive to ban homosexuals. Research shows, for example, that the Navy discharges a disproportionate number of homsexuals,[11] yet the Tailhook scandal, during the same time period, makes the zeal in weeding out homosexuals seem hypocritical. The Tailhook scandal resulted from 117 officers sexually harassing 90 victims, seven of which were men, at the Tailhook Pilot's Convention in Las Vegas in 1991. The Navy initially downplayed the incident, and the investigation was taken over by Congress. There was such substantial evidence that the Navy had blocked a thorough investigation into the facts, that it eventually resulted in the resignation of the Secretary of the Navy, Lawrence Garrett.[12] And if the
Secretary of the Navy would block investigation of a morally outrageous incident (which even included homosexual transgressions) it seems unlikely that the enthusiasm the Navy evidenced during this period for discharging homosexuals was a simple result of moral outrage.
A part of the reason for the ban, surely, has to do with the military's image of itself. This is the institution that in not so many years past sold itself to the civilian world by saying that it could make men out of boys. And many frustrated parents have shipped their sons off to military school so the discipline could set them straight. In our society, the military has played the role of the institution capable of turning undisciplined, careless, rebellious lads into industrious, fearless right- thinking men. Surely it is understandable that an institution that understands itself as turning boys into men would hesitate at the thought of turning a blind eye to whether or not the men they had produced had come to prefer the sexual company of other men over that of women.[13] This has little to do, however, with whether the military can function effectively without the ban. It has to do with the military's concern that open acceptance of homosexuals will damage its masculine image.
But still, could it work? Could a person's sexual preference be as irrelevant to his or her military performance as a person's religious preference? America is a country that idealizes tolerance. Catholics and Protestants may have their differences but, to our way of thinking, this does not justify their killing each other or even threatening each other. Perhaps more than any society in history, we believe in the right to live and let live. We do not outlaw those who worship different gods, or allow those who endorse one set of religous convictions to require others to conform to them. In such a society, is it not possible for a fundamentalist Christian soldier who finds homosexuality personally abhorrent to be as tolerant toward his homosexual neighbor as he or she might be toward one who would worships a different god?
If it can work, and if the homosexual can fight along with the heterosexual without any disruption in the effectiveness of the combat unit, then we cannot ban homosexuals from the military without violating the basic rights that have inspired the very foundation of our government.
The question as to whether homosexuals can fit into the military, as our military is evolving, is a psychological question. Beware of ready-made answers from either the military or religious leaders. The question is psychological because it is a question of the psychology of soldiers accepting homosexuals. And the question is: Can soldiers accept homosexuals sufficiently for our military to be effective?
The Military Experience Cannot Tell if Moving the Ban Would Work
Our military commanders are not in a position to be knowledgeable about whether self-disclosed homosexuals could be accepted satisfactorily by military personnel. We can presume that these commanders, through their long, individual, distinguished careers have given little thought to what it means for a person to be a homosexual, or to what kind of people homosexuals are. They did not have courses on this topic, and if they did read about homosexuals, it was from the pages of writings by psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists. If they thought about it in the routine of their daily experience it was, presumably, because the unpleasant reality forced itself to be dealt with. Individual service men and women would be suspected, investigated, identified as homosexual, and then discharged. Just like that. It was a clean process, really, not one in which commanders would have the time to study what the effects would be if these homosexuals had not been summarily removed. So, keep in mind, if the military brass declares that it would be destructive to lift the ban, theirs is not likely to be an opinion based on the experience of observing recognized homosexuals working and living with heterosexuals on military bases. The military brass is likely to be quite uninformed about homosexuality and how disclosed homosexuals would conduct themselves.
Biblical Interpretation Is not Relevant
Do not trust Biblical argument against homosexuals as relevant to the question as to whether there should be homosexuals in the military. Our country is founded on the belief in separation of church and state. If we were to allow Biblical interpretation to guide political policy then we would deny the religious freedom of those who interpret the Bible differently -- for even among those who endorse the Christian Bible as the sacred authority there are many who believe that homosexuality is not immoral.[14] Even among Roman Catholics, 34 percent believe that homosexual behavior is not sinful.[15] And we must respect not only the beliefs of Christians who feel that homosexuality is morally acceptable, but we need to respect and tolerate those other Americans whose moral conscience is not grounded in Christian Biblical interpretation.
Because our country protects the civil rights of groups with varying beliefs and values, as well as the rights of those of different cultural background and genetic make-up, we need to drop the military ban against homosexuals if we cannot justify it on the grounds that it will damage our national defense. And, importantly, there is evidence that a military without a ban can work because it does work in other countries. The fact that it works in other countries does not prove it will work in the United States, of course, but the fact that it is working in Canada strongly suggests that it might work in the United States.
There are many ways in which the Canadians are very much like the Americans. One can cross the border into Toronto, for example, or Vancouver, and it has the look and feel of an American city. And many in the Canadian military believed that homosexuals would disrupt morale, just as many believe that in the United States.
In fact, from 1989 to 1992 the Canadians engaged in a heated debate over the issue of homosexuals in their military much as the United States is doing now. There were several court cases. The Canadian military did studies, and listened to experts tell them that removing the ban would destroy cohesion and demoralize the troops. They listened to prophecies of disaster, of violent rebellions and wholesale resignations, and then, just as a big case was coming to trial, in October of 1992, they dropped their case and dropped the ban. A careful review of the evidence had led them to decide that they could not defend the ban, for in the final analysis, the evidence suggested that dropping the ban would not be disruptive of military goals.
The advocates of the ban predicted disaster, but nothing happened.[16] There were no riots, no massive walk-outs, no filed grievances, no gay bashing, no demonstrations. Everything carried on with little evidence that there had been a change. The public outcry that had been predicted just fizzled into thin air.
Our own military has dismissed this evidence on the grounds that few homosexuals disclose their identity after the bans are lifted. But this is no reason to keep the ban. In fact, it is only one more piece of evidence that we do not need, and should not have, legal prohibitions against homosexual disclosures. The fact that hoards of homosexuals do not declare their homosexuality recklessly testifies that they will be circumspect and manage their identities cautiously. It is testimony to the fact that we do not need legal prohibitions against them.[17] Gay advocates do not expect for the removal of the ban to make it possible for them to be emotionally accepted completely by everyone.[18] Even if all prohibitive rules are lifted, gays will inevitably be required to manage the disclosure of their identities with caution and concern.[19]
And if homosexuals do not disrupt the workings of the military, do not diminish its capacity for fighting wars, we should not have the ban. The ban costs money. It involves the government in policing the private and sexual practices of consenting adults. It can be used selectively to harass and abuse soldiers - heterosexual soldiers as well as homosexual soldiers. And, most important, unless homosexuality disrupts the working of the military, the ban violates the human rights of a group of American citizens.
Recognizing Our Cultural Context
Born as we are on one tiny spot on a big diverse planet, in our own little wrinkle of time, we lose sight of the way our values and customs reflect our unique cultural context. And so it seems odd to us when we learn how different cultures have done things differently, how, for example, the warriors in the seventeenth century fought their courageous battles wearing decorative battle clothes, or how the Chinese bound the feet of their noble women crippling them so badly that they could not walk, or how the men in certain Eskimo cultures show their hospitality by extending the sexual services of their wives to male visitors.
Such foreign traditions amaze us because we see immediately that these people absorbed a culture very different from own own. We are surprised because the culture we have absorbed since infancy presents itself to us as if it contains the universal truths.
But all cultural truths are fickle. They fade as we cross the border into other countries, and even when we sit tight on the same spot, cultural truths fade over time. What was beautiful yesterday is no longer beautiful. And what feels right to do changes too. The vigilante justice of the cowboys, and the Salem persecution of witches, no longer seem valid. We no longer try to marry off our teenage daughters, or bequeath our estates only to our eldest sons. Over and over we learn that what feels stable and universal in our cultural traditions is mostly illusion.
Still, it is natural, perhaps, for all of us, to cherish the cultural fashion of our particular youth. We are fascinated with remnants of the eras we remember, old photographs, old cars, old songs. The future seems less well formed, more alien. And we will be older in it in a way that is hard to fathom. It is hard to let the past fade away. We can think of a million reasons to keep things the way they were.
But it is dangerous to cling to our own past blindly. The world we bequeath to our children will inevitably be a different world, with different traditions, different memories. And that is as it should be. We should not blindly perpetuate our traditions for we have not found the secret key to human happiness. Our divorce courts are full. Our prisons are full, and the counselors in schools and county offices have far too many cases to help. It is only fair that we let the rules evolve, that we do not cling to the rules we played by just because they were the rules we inherited. And the strongest among us will join our children to help them envision a better future. For all that any of us can do is to recognize the changes that are happening and try to shape their process a little, and in productive ways.
Our culture is now changing in ways that more easily accommodate homosexuals. The masculine soldier of our grandfather's army is in many ways an anachronism in today's army. And although there are some who will feel discomfort with their inclusion, our culture does not accommodate unfounded prejudice. Just as southern whites were required to send their children to integrated schools, so heterosexuals should be required to tolerate homosexuals if their objection is founded merely in prejudice.
Today, heterosexuals are gradually becoming more informed about homosexuality, and this information will lessen the sense that homosexuals are radically different from the rest of us. Nearly half of us today knows a homosexual,[20] and those of us who do know homosexuals are more likely than the rest of us to accept them. As we become acquainted with more of them, it will be hard to hang onto the myth that homosexuals are identifiable by appearance, that the men have unbearded and feminine faces[21] and that the women are masculine and unattractive.[22]
If the ban is dropped, it will be, in part, because we have learned to value the right of people to be different, and we have come to insist that our government not interfere lightly with discreet sexual practices between consenting adults, be they heterosexual or homosexual. It will be because we have come closer to our national ideals which require us to respect differences in values, religions and backgrounds.
But dropping the ban also means that we are beginning to heal a cultural wound that has ached in the American consciousness for almost a century now. About a century ago, we began to be afraid of male homosexuality. It took a while, culturally, for the fear to settle in, for us to worry when our sons looked too girlish, to cut their hair short as soon as possible and throw away the fancy clothes we used to admire on them as infants, to whisper in fear when our sons looked too delicate. Today this wound is still not healed. We still worry. If we are concerned with lesbianism, it is mostly because we fear lesbians will damage the masculine confidence of men.
This wound causes deep damage to heterosexual romantic relationships, preventing men and women from understanding each other, giving them different expectations, and generally providing us all with a recipe for romantic disaster. Our fear of homosexuality traps us in a romantic predicament that makes a mockery of love. We are so concerned to live up to our cultural expectations of how real men and women should be and perform, that we lose the sense of caring for each other's differences.
Healing this wound will take some time, but learning to live with the gays and lesbians will diminish our fear of homosexuality in ourselves, our children, our lovers.
This book concludes that the military's objection to homosexuals is rooted in a fading set of images we have all known -- images about the nature of men and women, and images about the military.
The military's argument for the ban begins with their contention that our practice of segregating the toilet and showering of men and women should justify segregated toileting of homosexuals and heterosexuals. But the data to be reviewed will show that this is a bad analogy. Separate rest rooms and dressing rooms for men and women increases heterosexual allure more than it decreases it.
There are better ways to diminish an awkward sexual excitement than to segregate people, for there is an etiquette, used in all cultures, that works remarkably effectively to diminish sexual excitement. It minimizes sexual excite ment. It is the same etiquette that a doctor uses to minimize the erotic potential of a medical exam, and the same etiquette than an artist might use to minimize the erotic potential of drawing a nude model. This etiquette minimizes sexual excitement in a wide variety of contexts in our own culture and it does so in militaries around the world. It will suffice to minimize the sense of privacy invasion that heterosexuals would otherwise feel with people who identify themselves as gay or lesbian.
The heterosexual's fear that homosexuals will violate them is based largely on myths we all learn by word of mouth. Because homosexuality has been a taboo topic we are all, homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, uninformed about it. We will look at some of these myths, ask how much truth they contain, and try to dispel the fears that are based on fictions.
We will study the typical process people go through when they decide they are homosexual in our condemning culture and what we learn here will give us reason to think that homosexuals are unlikely to violate heterosexuals. They seek the approval and acceptance of the heterosexual community. They are a part of our society, and want a place in it, not to take it from the rest of us.
Our study will also show us how ineffective cultural condemnation is in stamping out homosexuality. When we try to stamp it out, as we have tried, it does psychologically unhealthy things not only to homosexuals but to our culture as a whole. Afraid of looking unmasculine, or unfeminine, we posture behind showcase heterosexual relationships with those whose purpose is to demonstrate to the world our heterosexual success rather than provide us with the basis of love and support. We deny people of our gender the physical touches and tender words that are tokens of our deepest respect and affection. We sacrifice meaningful caring in order to avoid being vulnerable. The data we will look at will tell us that the psychological damage has been especially destructive for men in our culture.
Moreover, we set up a legalistic system in the military that specifically damages particular people who are called homosexual and who are wrongly demeaned by a system that sanctions and punishes them for it. When we look at how it works, we will find it objectionable. To toss out a token few it must damage those few badly and create a climate of fear for all.
There was a time, perhaps, not so many years ago, that these fictions of gender may have served an important role in the world, at least as we understood the dangers then. It was a time when we thought we needed to inspire young men with the glory of masculine imagery just in order to have them battle for us to their death.
Somehow, perhaps, this masculine war imagery created a psychologically entangled concern with antihomosexuality in America. And America has been more reluctant, as a result, than most countries to lift the ban. We are more afraid of homosexuality than most countries.
But the fact that we are less threatened by war in this new era may help us re-evaluate our excessive anxiety about homosexuality. For this is a new era. We are the world's only superpower in a world that no longer has a nuclear arms race. Oh, there is always some danger of war, but the danger is so much less now that we can no longer afford to insure ourselves against it at all psychological costs. We can count on the fact that our military will be primarily concerned in this new world with a peacemaking role. We will be trying to minimize suffering, not protecting ourselves from annihilation.
What we need now is the image of the good soldier, able to protect and guard people not so much from evil enemies that he or she will annihilate, but from the mischief of political rivalries, clan warfare, civil riots, civil dissent, and, even, natural disasters. Our new soldier will be heroic not because he protects so many, but because he, or she, protects so many while destroying so few. It is the imagery of peacekeeping, of humanitarian intervention, not of one nation against another nation, but of a union of united nations protecting themselves against their own internal mischief.
This new heroic imagery for this new era will honor and protect human diversity, people of many religions and values, people of many beliefs, against those who would abuse and limit their freedom to follow their own beliefs and values. And we must begin by allowing this sort of freedom within our own ranks, by allowing those whose sexual feelings are predominantly homosexual to define themselves, if they choose, as being homosexual. But before we can draw the conclusion that our society is ready to lift the ban against gays, we need to review the evidence that will tell us that heterosexuals will be able to accept them, that self-identified gays will not feel like an important invasion of heterosexual privacy, that gays will not destroy military morale, and that all the other evils that we have imagined are only ungrounded fears.
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