Military Blindness: Don’t Look, Don’t Think, Don’t Tell the Truth

I’ve always taken a contrarian view of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue policy for several reasons, not the least of which is that my idea of balancing the federal budget is to slash the Pentagon budget by two-thirds. I think that having a large military only encourages unscrupulous politicians to get involved in global military adventurism. Nor am I among those who valorize warrior culture; I share the viewpoint of Eugene Debs who, in 1917, observed that he couldn’t see the point of asking one group of poor workers to put on uniforms and go halfway around the world to kill another group of poor workers on behalf of rich masters. And I surely don’t understand why gays or lesbians would ever want to be part of an organization that forces them to be silent, second-class citizens with a Sword of Doom dangling over their heads.

Okay, that’s me and I understand that lots of folks disagree. But here’s what I really don’t get. How can anyone who knows a damn thing about history or military experience possibly believe that having gays and lesbians serve is in any way harmful to the nation’s defense? One hears all manner of nonsense about how homosexuality would harm morale, destroy unit cohesion, and jeopardize military preparedness. Such points of view are a combination of ignorance, mindlessness, and downright lying. They each rest on the presumption that homosexuality has been largely absent from US military history--that just a small band of “perverts” have populated military ranks. (And one also hears of how such people “violated their oaths” by lying about their sexual orientation.)

In my other job as an academic I was recently asked to review a book by Justin Spring titled Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. It tells the fascinating tale of Steward (1909-1993), a gay man who would have been labeled a “slut” if he had been female. Steward had sex with over a thousand men and kept a detailed journal on each liaison. He also amassed a huge collection of gay pornography, adorned his apartments with graphic gay murals, was one of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s major collaborators, and had his journal and explicit photos in plain view during an age in which doing so exposed him to great dangers. Under the name Phil Andros he also wrote homoerotic pulp fiction and operated a tattoo parlor that doubled as a gay parlor. This is to say that Sam Steward was in the closet, but just barely.

What does this have to do with don’t ask/don’t tell? Steward had flings with bohemians and famed figures such as Rudolph Valentino, Thornton Wilder, and Julien Green, but Steward’s number one source for gay sex was the U.S. military. I exaggerate only slightly when I say that, if Steward is to be trusted, there were more straight men in Greenwich Village gays bars than there were on U.S, Navy and Marine Corps bases in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. When Steward wrote, “the U.S. Navy has always had an attraction for me,” his double entendre was as factual as funny. He had sex with hundreds of sailors, Marines, and soldiers and history does not record that World War II, Korea, or the Cold War was lost because of oral sex. (Would it be too much to call Steward’s biography a real Fellatio Alger tale?)

Why don’t we know this story? Well, we do actually. Alfred Kinsey told it, the proliferation of gay literature and bars verified it, and the presence of gay-themed tattoo joints and bars adjacent to military bases was so apparent that it was hardly necessary to “pursue” an investigation of it. How can we say that the U.S. military didn’t harbor homosexuals? One way was to change the definition. For much of Steward’s most active sexual life, a man who gave oral sex or received anal penetration from another was a “homosexual,” but he who was on the other end (so to speak) was not. (That’s the sort of logic that says one is not an automobile driver if another person pays for the gas.) Still another was to fixate on periodic gay bashing administered by uniformed personnel and sell it as the military cleaning up Dodge City. Mainly what we got instead of full disclosure was the great denial. Thus, in the name of ferreting out a small number of “deviants,” gays and lesbians were outted and discharged.

What a farce! And what sanctimonious old demagogues are those politicians who served and now say that gay soldiers and sailors are a threat. Wouldn’t you just love to hook them up to lie detectors and ask them if they ever met up with the likes of Sam Steward?

Like I said, if it were up to me our military would be much, much smaller. But I would also replace don’t ask/don’t tell with a policy suggested in a recent Boston Globe op-ed: don’t know/don’t care.