Fran Hutchins: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is a National Security Issue

Fran Hutchins. Photo credit: Nick Martinez, NickMartinezStudios.com

Editor’s Note: Former Los Angeles activist Fran Hutchins now lives in Massachusetts.  This article is part one of a two-part overview of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy– which is receiving much attention today from Kathy Griffin’s rally in DC before the Senate Armed Services Committee.  –Karen Ocamb

Like many “gay Americans,” as I watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech last January, I was listening closely to what the President would have to say about LGBT rights.  In a paragraph that dealt with hate crime legislation, pay equity, and immigration, the President promised: “This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

The irony of the placement in the speech did not escape me.  President Obama, in the same breath, was proposing to allow openly LGBT people to serve their country and to make sure women get fair pay for a day’s work.  Why is either of these things even an issue?  And why are we still talking about them in major policy speeches?

The simple answer is simple: no matter what promises are made, no matter how far our society advances to accept the concept of women in the workplace and LGBT folks in the military, in practice, structure, and – in the case of LGBT service members – the law, inequality still remains.

That night, Twitter lit up with talk of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT),” and in the following days articles appeared on the Huffington Post, in the New York Times, and other major news outlets revealing that – despite the Obama Administration’s good intentions—the repeal could logistically take years to enact.  The following week, at the first congressional hearing on DADT in 17 years, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained that – although he supports the repeal – it is going to take a year to study and seek to mitigate the effects of such a repeal.  Finally, the AP reported that although leaders on the left and the right are coming out in favor of the repeal, it is now expected to take year.  Plural.

As Karen mentioned in her post several weeks ago, history is repeating itself in an unsettling way.  As a candidate, President Clinton promised to use his position of Commander-in-Chief to allow LGBT people to serve openly.  When Clinton took office in 1993, he was pressured by Congress and the military to postpone the lift the ban on gays in the military. Does any of this sounding familiar?  Instead of lifting the ban, President Clinton gave us DADT.  It seems to me that—to borrow a couple of military terms from President Clinton’s DADT snafu to President Obama’s extended repeal timeline, this situation really is FUBAR.

This sense of déjà vu prompted me to do a little research into the origins of not only DADT but also the history of LGBT people and military service.  Since the press is relegated to very slowly reporting on the very slow repeal, I decided to look backward instead of looking forward.  What I found most fascinating is the way that, over the course of several centuries, the U.S. military has regarded homosexuality first as a criminal behavior, then as a psychological deviance, and now, finally, as an identity.

The definitive guide to LGBT service in the United States is Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military by the late Randy Shilts. It’s 800 pages long, so if you get snowed in for a week, I highly recommend it.  Shilts locates the first discharge for homosexual behavior in the military all the way back in 1778, when a lieutenant in George Washington’s army was expelled for an unspecified act of sodomy with another man. Even though this happened nearly two and a half centuries ago, it says a lot about the way the military regarded homosexuality for a long time.  Namely, until the 1920s, it was the actual act of sodomy that the military regarded as out of bounds.

John Loughrey’s The Other Side of Silence is a history of gay male identity, broadly speaking, in the 20^th century. But he begins his book with a titillating account of the 1919 scandal at Newport Naval Station in Rhode Island.  The Navy forged an entrapment campaign to suss out sailors who took part in homosexual behavior.

The focus was again on the act of sodomy, which in many cases included performing oral sex on undercover “operatives” – and in a few cases, receiving anal sex.  The Navy was ultimately embarrassed by the scandal, not only because the young sailors who played the bait in the sting operation seemed to enjoy their assignment a little too much, but also because society as a whole was moving away from thinking of homosexuality as only a criminal/conduct offense and toward the belief that it was instead a deviant psychological problem.  This is evident in the evident distinction that the Navy itself and the operatives it hired made between the men who were arrested and those who had seduced them into performing the acts.  Loughrey points out that there were certain lines, such as kissing, that the operatives would not cross, because to do so would put into question their sexuality.

In the 1920s, homosexuality was beginning to be regarded as a distinct category of perversion, a status—if not yet identity—that could disqualify an individual from service.  No longer was homosexuality a single act that was suspect, but instead a way of being.  By the 1940s, psychological screening, including questions about homosexual tendencies, became standard for admission into the armed services.  During the first half of the 20^th century, how to deal with incidents of homosexual behavior lay in the hands of commanding officers in each separate branch of the military, but in the late 40s, the Department of Defense (DOD) wanted to standardize the regulations regarding homosexuality and many other forbidden behaviors.  The result is the Uniform Code of Military Justice (1950).

The new UCMJ regulations came around the same time that President Eisenhower, under pressure from Communist-hunting US Sen. Joseph McCarthy, signed an executive order requiring that homosexuals be fired from any government position.  This pairing came with a double dose of irony—when President Eisenhower served as commander of the World War II forces that defeated Hitler, his secretary was a lesbian and she said he knew it.

What’s more, McCarthy’s chief deputy was closeted right-winger Roy Cohen whose own ruin came from giving favors to his military lover.  Thanks to McCarthy, homosexuals, like communists, were subject to a witch-hunt in both the military and civil service.  This moment marks a shift toward the categorization of homosexuality as an identity that is more than just the sum of acts of sodomy.  It also seems to be the advent of the idea that homosexuality presented a security risk to the country, with the logic being that homosexuals could be blackmailed and forced to reveal state secrets.

This position was further reiterated in 1982, when a DOD directive called homosexuality “incompatible with military service” because it disrupts “good order and morale” and “unit cohesion.” And, like in the McCarthy era, homosexuality was seen as a cause of “breaches of security.”  (This is the same language, incidentally, used by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in the DADT hearing after President Obama’s State of the Union address.)  This directive has been seen as a response to several high profile constitutional challenges to the UCMJ regulations.  In the 1980s, over 16,000 troops were discharged for homosexuality.

Then in 1992, Bill Clinton was elected, which brings us back to DADT.

So – after all of that – why should this matter to me or to any LGBT person who doesn’t plan to serve in the military?

The crux of DADT as a policy is that it is completely about LGBT identity.  No longer does the spirit of the law concern itself solely with the commission of individual sexual acts.  The only act that matters—especially as the regulation is currently being enforced—is the speech act of declaring one’s self to be or identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.  What is being prohibited is not being gay, but coming out and speaking the truth about being gay.  In fact, the policy defines coming out itself as a homosexual act.

From Goldwater to Cheney, since President Obama’s announcement, several influential people on the right have come out in favor of lifting the ban.  Notably, Republican appointee Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that he supports the repeal of DADT.

Lt. Dan Choi. Photo credit: Marta Evry

In his statement, Mullen pointed out that “we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens or me personally, it comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”  It is exactly this conflict implicit in DADT that LGBT service members such as Lieutenant Dan Choi have been protesting in recent years.

The issue of LGBT service members as a threat to national security is undermined by the very logic behind DADT.  Those who violate the policy by speaking out are, by definition, not afraid to have their sexuality known.  They are no longer good candidates for blackmail, and therefore no longer a security threat.  The bigger threat to national security, as Lt. Choi’s situation highlights, is that DADT drains the military of resources – such as Arabic-speaking translators – that are crucial in our current political climate.

With the repeal of DADT in the not-so-close horizon, it seems almost certain that soon the military will be able to stop punishing people for telling the truth.  This is in the best interest of all LGBT folks, whether they are in the military or not.

Finally, the government seems ready to admit that the closet is a greater risk to national security than the truth.

Further Reading

The Palm Center houses many resources online, including a comprehensive whitepaper on the history of LGBT service members by Rhonda Evans, where I found most chronological information about formal policy.

For information about the link between military policy and the field of psychology, I looked to a 1993 article in American Psychologist “Sexual Orientation and Military Service: A Social Science Perspective” by Gregory M. Herek.

David K. Johnson’s work, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians by the Federal Government is a fascinating look into McCarthyism and its effect on the LGBT community.

To contextualize the issue within LGBT history as a whole, I picked up John Loughrey’s The Other Side of Silence. The first chapter deals with the 1919 Naval scandal.

Much of Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military by Randy Shilts is available online at Google Books.

Tagged as: Barack Obama, Don't ask, don't tell, Fran Hutchins, gays in the military