I am not 100% sure what the US armed forces attitude towards gays are at the moment (don’t tell, but if you do you get out?)
If there was another war, would claiming to be gay get you out of the draft? Did it in Vietnam?
As attitudes have changed so much, claiming to be gay now seems 100% better than being drafted, but the reverse was probably true 50 years ago?
I know that being gay got you out of national service here in the UK, but left a permanent stain on your record.
In the movie version of “Hair,” being gay got you out (of course we all know about Klinger from MAS*H). I dunno for sure, but I always wondered why if that were true, more people didn’t try to fake being gay. Even if it was a big stigma, wouldn’t you rather be stigmatized than dead?
Just how did you have to demonstrate your gayness that it could leave nasty stains? 
I am not gay, and neither is my boyfriend. The stains were on the record when I bought it.
I don’t think Klinger was trying to get out by being gay, but by being crazy (although they could have just been using that as a TV-acceptable euphamism). In any case, the whole Soon-Li storyline pretty well settled it.
Was Klinger a character in the books or movie?
In the Vietnam Era, homosexuality officially disqualified you from serving in the army. If you were gay, you supposedly would not be allowed to join the army (you could be drafted, but they were supposed to reject you).
However, the rule was often ignored. If you showed up at your induction center claiming to be gay, they’d probably still draft you. They knew people might make the claim in order to avoid service. Also, though the army has always had rules against homosexuality, they usually ignored them when they needed men to fight. In peacetime, it would get you court martialed, but if you were over in Vietnam, they’d look the other way (the same was true about WWII).
I don’t believe the Selectivve Service website addreses this or many other sensitive (politically) issues.
My understranding of such things (I worked for them breifly; it was disgusting) is that they would draft a gay man, provided he were not open about it… that is, were he not “telling”.
I know for a fact that they had detailed procedures as to what to do if a man claimed he was in the stages of a transsexual procedure. It depended on how far along he was; if he’d actually been “cut” and done irreversible changes to his sexuality. If a guy was to have gone in and just said he couldn’t be drafted because he was going to become a woman, then they wouldn’t have bought it. They were looking for some indication that he was into it with no going back.
Refusing to “Don’t tell” would likely get you sent into what they now call “alternative service”. It’s al ill-defined thing that all draft boards are supposed to prepare with their local communities so that all those who are physically capable but object to serving in uniform will have some service to give for a period of time approximating the time of conscripted military service. Since service in uiniform is a 24 x 7 thing, alternate service hours in the civilian community to equal a like number of hours means many more years in this type of service. Do the math. (There are 17,480 hrs in 2 yrs; that’s be 437 40 hr. weeks, if my math isn’t too far off. That’s something like 8 or 9 years, depending on vacations and sick time.)
The other side of this alternative service is that since draft boards won’t come into being until a draft is revived, no comunity contacts for alternative service service have been set up or would be until the boards were operational. So if they did a draft next Thursday, then there would be a huge scramble to set things up and (among many other things) get alternative service set up. My read on things at the time (1992) was that they really thought most guys would go in with little problem, and that this alternate service would be a small thing to worry about. Of course, this was wishful thinking. Anyway, there would in actuality be little consistency or oversight of alternative service. As long as the local board was able to say to HQ everything was good to go, there’d likely be little if any inquiries. So… if I were draftable and didn’t want to go, I’d work with my employer to get him or her to go to the draft board and ask to be designated as an alternative service site, saying it benefitted the community in this way and that. Then all I’d have to do is get the employer to let the draft board know I showed up for work and put in X hours. (Know also that it would be illegal to just plain submit fake claims for this service, and that if they found out you could get into all kinds of trouble. Theoretically.)
Gay claims wouldn’t even have to enter into it. All one has to do under the law is to say they object to military service on moral grounds. You don’t even have to be a member of what they call a “peace church” (like the Quakers) anymore, as court rulings have said that membership vs. nonmembership constitutes religious discrimination.
There are a lot of other issues that would make a real revival of the draft a huge fiasco. But they aren’t any part of the OP, so rather than drift into a rant, I’ll conclude with saying:
Gay would have got you out of the draft in the Vietnam days, but it would also have marked you with a then-unacceptable (in most places) stigma. I don’t know how this this worked; I don’t think they branded your forehead, but I am pretty sure they made the information available to prospective employers by some means.
Gay wouldn’t get you out of the draft today (were there one) in and of itself. Openly and unquietly gay wouldn’t work with the DoD now, though. The draft people would either send you to the Coast Guard if you wanted to be in the service and out of the closet, or to a yet-to-be-constituted program of alternate service if the uniform wasn’t your style.
FYI, being openly gay is no bar to service in the US Coast Guard. Their policy is that if one engages in any kind of sexual harassment (hetero- or homo-), that’s bad for the organization and unprofessional, and you get disciplined as the service sees fit. There has, to my knowledge, been no problems or inequalities with this policy.
Thanks for the replies. It is good to see that the Coast Guard is trying to uphold the Village People’s advice - “In the Navy…”
There was an episode where Klinger was given discharge papers by the ‘wise psychiatrist’. (Can’t remember the character’s name, but he had irregular cameo appearances …) The grounds listed on the papers were ‘homosexuality’. Klinger was pretty ticked, tore up the papers and went back to the unit.
That headshrinker was one sneaky SOB.
In fact, that was the story line in one of the episodes - Sidney Freedman examines Klinger, and offers him a discharge as a homosexual, warning him that he “goes through life on high heels” after this. Klinger rejects it saying that he’s just crazy, not homosexual. Of course, Freedman, who had been dragged in by Ferret Face and Hotlips, had exactly figured out Klinger’s game and was simply illustrating the fact.
Klinger was not in either the book or the movie.
FWIW
Historian/Author Steven E. Ambrose said he found little if any evidence of any homosexual behavior by American soldiers in the WWII European theater.
Little if any? I mean, isn’t he sure? And what did he look for exactly? What did he consider to be homosexual behavior?
FWIW, I have a friend whose draft number came up in 1968, when he was 18 - one year before Stonewall. Brass balls award to him: he told them he was gay and they didn’t draft him. He went on to college and an accounting career. Interestingly, for a lot of his early career he was pretty closeted (after all, this was accounting, and in the 1970s). But I guess no one ever looked at his military record or asked him exactly why he was turned down.
I can only testify what happened when I was drafted and went through the induction center during the highth of Viet Nam. There were a bunch of guys who were claiming to be gay and the guy in charge of draft physicals and the like was asking them for proof of their “gayness”. As I remember it could be a letter from one’s minister or a psychologist, but apparently without that they could not be gay (ah, for the simpler times of yesteryear).
It should be remembered that this was the same induction center that drafted a guy into the Army who was at the time serving in the Navy. He went from table to table waving his sailors cap and a letter from his commanding officer and saying, “but I’m in the Navy!”
They still drafted him.
While in the Army, I knew of only a couple of guys who were openly gay (In basic there was a theory that gayness could be beaten out of a person - so not a lot of people came “out” while in basic training). But in country I knew a couple. It is interesting to note that since then, a good number of the guys I thought were straight have come out saying that they were afraid of hassles while in.
obStripes
No, we’re not homosexuals…but we’re willing to learn.
“Ooh, sounds like fun, Sarge. Your place or mine? <wink>”
Nearly all of Amrose’s writings are based on interviews. I assume this means that the only evidence he turned up on such behavior were, at most, a small number of apocryphal stories.
He really didn’t say.
I’m not sure your source on this, but that is completely wrong. I don’t know what the DoD services policies are exactly, but I know the USCG’s, and I’ll bet they are the same. If you say “I am gay” in the Coast Guard, you’ll be shown towards the door. If interested, I can post the exact wording of the CG’s policy.
On a personal note, I’ve been in 12 years, served with at least a few gays, been on several cutters in tight quarters, and I personally couldn’t care less. Like everyone else, just do your job.