In the 1992 Presidential campaign cycle, President Bill Clinton promised to end the ban on homosexuals in the military and to press Congress for a lesbian and gay civil rights bill (Schmalz 1992). In an effort to uphold his promise to the lesbian and gay community, he signed the legislative policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 1993. At the time, it was regarded as a “compromise” bill. However, some activists claimed this policy did not fulfill Clinton’s campaign promise because it continued to prohibit openly LGB people from serving in the military, and if discovered, their discharge was required. However, this policy did offer some protections because it forbid the investigation of a service member’s sexual orientation without reasonable suspicion and restricted military efforts to discover or reveal closeted LGB soldiers or applicants.
Pressure to overturn the ban continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as public support for gay rights continued to build. Many lesbian and gay activists argued that the seventeen-year ban against lesbians and gays serving in the military was discriminatory and needed to be repealed. The Human Rights Campaign stated that DADT needed to be overturned so gays and lesbians could serve the country without compromising who they were as individuals. This fight was seen as a step toward lesbians and gay men being able to be honest with their comrades about who they love and having the freedom to be openly “out” (HRC 2011b). On the contrary, some queer activists argued against the repealing of DADT, because they saw it as a way for the Department of Defense to increase the size and power of the U.S. military (Nopper 2010). For instance, Cecilia Lucas (2014) states:
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell IS bad policy…Banning gay people from serving in the military, however, is something I support. Not because I’m anti-gay, nope, I’m one of those queer folks myself. I’m also a woman and would support a law against women serving in the military. Not because I think women are less capable. I would support laws against any group of people serving in the military…Because I support outlawing the military. And until that has happened, I support downsizing it by any means necessary, including, in this one particular arena, sacrificing civil rights in the interest of human rights. (109) All the while, service members discharged under DADT continued to seek redress through the courts, without much success. According to the OutServe-Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), a policy advocacy organization for LGBT service members and veterans, they found that the DADT policy hurt women service members more than men. They found while women made up only 14% of Army personnel, 46% of those discharged under the policy in 2007 were women; likewise, 20% of Air Force personnel were women, but 49% of the discharges in 2007 were women (Shanker 2008). The SLDN, under the Freedom of Information Act, found that in 2007, there was an overall increase in the numbers of discharges in both the Army and Air Force, where women accounted for 35% and 36%, respectively. Overall,
according to Pentagon statistics, the number of lesbian and gay men discharged from the military in 2007 rose to 627 from 612 in 2006 (Shanker 2008). Interestingly however, these figures represent a drop of about 50% from their peak in 2001, notably, which was prior to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Across each of the branches and for all service members, in 2007 the Army discharged 302 soldiers under the DADT policy, which was an increase from 280 in 2006. The Air Force dismissed 91 people, a decrease from 102 in 2006. The Navy discharged 166, which was the same in 2006; and the Marine Corps discharged 68, an increase from 64 in 2006 (Shanker 2008). According to a study released by the Urban Institute, they estimate that there are 65,000 gay men and lesbians who serve in the United States Armed Forces and more than one million gay veterans (Advocate 2004).
President Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign brought a renewed interest regarding the constitutionality of the DADT policy and gays serving openly in the military. The main
opponents to overturning DADT cited the compromise of “military readiness” and “unit cohesion” (West 2009). However, Owen West (2009) posits that this argument was similar to when President Truman tried to racially integrate ranks in the 1940s, where the public and troops alike said they wanted to continue having segregated ranks. Supporters of DADT claimed gay people would jeopardize unit cohesion because of the presumed reaction by homophobic and xenophobic troops, who did not want to cohabitate with people different from themselves (West 2009). However, one of the main differences in the arguments against integration was that a majority of people believe race to be a biological distinction (albeit incorrect) and view
homosexuality as a “behavioral” or “lifestyle” choice, thus discrimination of the latter was more justifiable (West 2009). West (2009) argues, the fact that DADT was still being upheld in 2009 proves that the U.S. public was still socially stuck in 1993. Contrary to public opinion, in a 2006
poll asking Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans about their feelings about integrating ranks, it showed that 72 percent stated they were “personally comfortable interacting with gays,” and the data indicated that there were “no associations between knowing a lesbian or gay unit member and ratings of perceived unit cohesion or readiness” (West 2009). Findings found that veterans stated that leadership and “instrumental quality” were much more important in shaping unit cohesion and readiness than a service member’s sexuality (West 2009). By 2009, there was a general shift happening throughout the armed forces towards accepting lesbian and gay service members, which allowed the eventual overturning of the policy to become unexpectedly easy for President Obama.
In a letter to President Obama, the HRC argued that DADT needed to be repealed because it was “contrary to our core values as a nation,” and that the policy had “deprived our military thousands of service members, many with critical skills in fighting terrorism” (HRC 2010). This letter appealed to a sense of nationalism and made the case that gay soldiers were needed for the “good of the country.” This transformation toward the inclusion of lesbian and gay people is quite striking because just decades ago, they were considered deviant and immoral. Now the gay body is reconfigured by the state into a useful, homonational subject, one who willingly puts their life on the line for their country, the most extreme example of nationalism.
Many advocates for overturning DADT argued that the government especially needed to overturn the policy because of the United States’ continued “War on Terror.” General
Shalikashvili wrote an article for The New York Times stating his view:
If gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces [and] our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job. (Shanker 2008)
The general’s statement is telling on a few accounts. First, his statement is not actually about equality. He is merely stating that the military needs bodies, and they will take whoever is willing and able due to the United States’ decades-long war efforts. Secondly, he is supporting the integration of gay service members only because it behooves the armed forces to have these members as participatory agents in the military-industrial war machine.
Despite changing public support and desire to repeal DADT by the mainstream gay community, there were critiques about the efficacy of this strategy.Queer activists argued that focusing on DADT distracted from the very things the queer liberation movement was founded on: “anti-imperialism, anti-racism, equal access to housing and health care, and struggles against patriarchy” (Jones 2010:143). Jamal Rasad Jones (2010) criticized Gay, Inc.’s attention to overturning the policy, stating:
It seems almost irrelevant to me whether or not gay soldiers can “come out” in the military when the U.S. military is not only carrying out two genocidal campaigns [Iraq and Afghanistan] for U.S. imperialism and corporate profit, but also when the war budget is draining the funds needed for almost every other service we so desperately need in this country. (Jones 2010:143)
Jones not only questions whether allowing more gays and lesbians into the military was a valuable strategy towards equality, but also challenges the idea that large mainstream gay
organizations should be financially supporting the war machine instead of funding much-needed social programs and services.
In a similar manner, the change in public opinion on gays in the military happened much in the same way as it did for same-sex marriage. The well-funded, corporate-friendly, and media- savvy gay lobbying groups developed a monopoly on popular representations of not only what it means to be gay for LGBT/Q communities, but also what it means to be “pro-gay” for straight allies. Through controlling and shaping the discourse and media images, they projected the
notion that the only way to be “pro-LGBT” was to support marriage “equality” and military inclusion (Sycamore 2014:103). For example, The American Jewish Committee wrote a joint letter to Congress denouncing DADT, the letter stated: “We believe this policy is unjust and [has] become an anomaly among western nations. Advanced militaries throughout the world, including many of our NATO allies and Israel, allow gay, lesbian and bisexual personnel to serve openly” (Oster 2010). Therefore, for many Americans they believed repealing DADT would bring the U.S. in line with many of the other countries in the international community that support open service.
Furthermore, the rationalization to repeal DADT deliberately did not address the expansion of the military and militarism in the U.S. and abroad; rather it covertly centered on messages of patriotic love and duty and the policy being “out of step” with national identity (Editors 2010). Ultimately, this rhetoric circumvented valuable and critical conversations about military-state violence and imperialism. Nair, Conrad and Chavez (2012) argue:
Given that gay rights, and human rights discourse in general, are used in the service of imperialism and that violence against women, queers, and people of color continues to permeate all aspects of the military apparatus, radical LGBTQ people should be the first to be ever vigilant and opposed to the any expansion of the military industrial complex. (Nair et al. 2012)
Advocates supporting the repeal of DADT argued that it was lesbians and gays’ civil right to serve in the military; indeed, they are correct, anyone should be allowed to serve if they choose to. However, the control of the discourse is significant for several reasons. First, the framing of the discourse gives the false perception that all members of LGBT/Q communities are supportive the military and are wanting access to serve. Second, how the discourse is presented restricts the ability to have any meaningful debates about the goals of the gay rights movement. Third, the
discourse gives straight allies the impression that they need to support LGBTQ military inclusion to be supportive of the gay community and, by extension, progressive.
Despite the critiques from queer activists and scholars, the mainstream gay organizations and lobbying groups won their battle. On December 22, 2010, President Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 which created a pathway to allow LGB people to serve openly in the military (Broverman 2010). Under this bill, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy remained in place until the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs could attest that the repeal would not harm military readiness, followed by a 60-day waiting period (O'Keefe 2011, Stolberg 2010). However, in July 2011, a court order required the Pentagon to immediately suspend the ban, and the government complied. The legislative repeal of the DADT policy took effect on September 20, 2011 (Barnes 2011). The HRC’s website celebrated the repeal and reported that the organization had worked steadily to overturn the policy by dedicating over $3 million in financial resources, and sent over 650 thousand emails to members of Congress. They proclaimed that this repeal signaled a “new chapter for the nation’s military…Gay and lesbian Americans eager to serve their country but not willing to compromise who they are as individuals will, for the first time ever, be able to openly join. Finally, the brave men and women currently serving will have the freedom to come out and be honest with their comrades about who they are and who they love” (HRC 2011a).