LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Gay 'n Gray |
by John D. Siegfried |
Which One?
Chan Lowe, the son of Carol Channing, is an award winning cartoonist for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. One of his recent cartoons depicted three flag draped coffins attended by a military guard standing at attention. The caption was, "Which one is gay?" The cartoon is an appropriate finale to Unfriendly Fire, a 2009 book authored by Nathaniel Frank and published by St. Martin Press. The book's subtitle is an accurate capsule of the content, "How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America." Like many other Americans I accepted the enactment of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy fifteen years ago as a politically necessary face-saving compromise made by Bill Clinton. He couldn't deliver on his campaign promise of removing the barriers for gays and lesbians to serve in the military so the administration's compromise allowed gays and lesbians to serve if they kept their mouth shut. This, of course, was no policy change at all. There have always been silent homosexuals in military service. "The first recorded incident of a discharge for homosexuality was that of Lieutenant Gotthold Frederick Enslin in 1778. Caught in his Valley Forge bunking cabin with a male private, he was found guilty of sodomy." The term homosexual didn't even exist at the time. When I lived in suburban Philadelphia two decades ago, I visited Valley Forge frequently to walk or jog the scenic trails. The thought of having sex in a tiny log and sod cabin covered by snow is chilling to say the least. Perhaps it was a colonial way of generating heat on a cold day, or a demonstration that hot and horny is hardly a new phenomenon. The point is that the history of men who love men serving in the military is not new. According to the author, Baron von Stuben, a Prussian who drilled the soldiers at Valley Forge and who is widely acknowledged as a key to the success of the American Revolution was gay. Today an estimated 65,000 gay men and lesbian women are in uniform. The number who would like to serve in the military but are deterred by the DADT policy is unknown. What I found so disheartening in reading Unfriendly Fire was the recognition that DADT, instead of easing matters for gays and lesbians, made the situation worse. The policy was essentially the work of Sam Nunn, then the head of the Senate Armed Service Committee, and Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It enshrined their moral bias into law under the guise that the presence of gays and lesbians would hurt "unit cohesion." No proof was ever offered to support this bias and proof to the contrary was ignored. Powell's argument was that "many straight people prefer not to be considered attractive to gay people." The ultimate argument was that a straight man naked in front of a gay man might be upsetting to the straight man. It's a concern reminiscent of Saudi Arabia where I worked in the early eighties. There, women are veiled and cloaked in black on the assumption that a man seeing the face of a woman, much less a female form, would commit rape in the streets. So, straight military men, like Saudi women, must be protected by extreme measures. I have showered with hundreds, perhaps thousands of menYMCA, high school phys ed, college locker rooms, summer camp, swimming pools, gymsand I'm unaware of a single straight man or boy who was ever threatened by my presence. The truth is I've never entered a shower attempting to assess the sexual orientation of the other men. Perhaps that's a phenomenon limited to straight men who are threatened by their own same sex impulses. While "Don't ask, Don't tell, Don't pursue," sounds very permissive and laissez-faire, it is anything but. The policy created the legal means of terminating military careers simply on suspicion. No sex act is necessary and in many cases no proof is required that the service member has erred from the policy of DADT. Simply buying Anne Rice novels was admissible evidence of homosexuality in the discharge proceedings of a Marine corporal. Thousands of service personnel have been terminated under DADT; many have been career officers of rank and with multiple commendations. Even in the face of an acknowledged shortage of linguists to translate Arabic, gay translators have been drummed out of the corps. Equally discouraging is the long history of the Pentagon in destroying, hiding or suppressing studies from the Rand Institute, The Palm Center and other academic bastions if the evaluations undercut the Pentagon rationale for discrimination against gays. Twenty-six countries, including Israel, Canada, England, Australia, and Spain, allow gays to serve and have done so without any demonstrable loss of "unit cohesion." I would have to presume that males in those countries are more resilient than American menor perhaps just less bigoted. The multiplication of permissive policies within other military organizations is totally ignored by our top brass. Also a downer is the fact that during the Iraq conflict implementation of DADT was officially diminished. It was Pentagon policy that gays could serve in Iraq and get killed; it's just showering with a straight man that can't be tolerated. And now in an era when the military has relaxed recruitment standards in order to meet manpower goals, gays are still discriminated against. A convicted felon, i.e. as a murderer, a kidnapper or even an individual known to make terrorist threats, can obtain a special waiver permitting military service. But no waiver is available to a law abiding, tax-paying productive gay man or lesbian woman. Obama made campaign promises to reverse DADT and according to his press secretary, he will. And it's understandable that in the midst of the many catastrophic issues on the President's agenda, DADT might not be the current top priority. But it should not be neglected. The status quo sucks. How can I be proud of my country when three flag draped coffins still evoke the question, "Which one is gay?" John Siegfried, a former Rehoboth resident who now lives in Ft. Lauderdale, maintains strong ties to our community and can be reached at hsajds@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 19, No. 04 May 08, 2009 |