Gays in the military - theory and pragmatics

I want to start off by saying that these are just some ideas I have had based on my experiences in the military. They may or may not be reasonable, which is why I am posting them in Great Debates.

First of all, I would like to see gays in the military. Pragmatically, however, I know that we cannot just open the floodgates. They would be ridiculed, beaten (probably to death in some cases), and would not be respected as authority if they were able to gain rank in an unbiased manner. I believe there would be cases of mutiny. At the very least, you would not immediately find the kind of utterly honest respect for your seniors that you currently do.

You also have to consider the kind of close quarters that you find in the Navy, Marines and Army (and sometimes Air Force). In the Navy you have men stacked three high, and on ships that have been retrofitted for women, they are completely separated from the men. Despite this separation there is a lot of sexual activity. For example, approximately 10% of deployed women become pregnant, despite a no fraternization policy. [1] If gays are to be deployed you can expect them to engage in sexual activity also. But you cannot separate the gay men and women from the straight men and women, because they are by definition mates for each other. If you leave them in quarters with the heterosexual military members, then the policy of separating men and women in general becomes contradictory - if gays get to sleep in the same quarters, why can’t men and women? This is a difficult issue to resolve pragmatically, particularly if you just open the floodgates.

Having primed some of the difficulties of the issue, let me first say that I think that Clinton’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy was a brilliant compromise. I can tell you that there are gays in the military right now. I believe around 1,000 are kicked out every year for violating this policy, giving you an idea of the number that are still in. They are not being head-hunted.

I would like to now make an analogy to some classic work done in psychology. You may have heard of the Little Albert experiment, where they were able to uncondition a fear response. A similar study was done on a boy known as Peter. Peter was afraid of a white rabbit. They were easily able to overcome this fear by slowly building up Peter’s tolerance to the rabbit [2]. This should give you the idea:

Of course, P and Q are out of the realm of our discussion :wink: However, my idea follows closely from this: Start by allowing gays to fill specialty jobs such as Arabic -> English translators. Simultaneously work on the gay marriage issue on the national level. There is something on the order of 30 million veterans and 3 million active duty, making this more than a purely military issue - it is a national issue. Start opening up more and more of these specialty jobs. Then work on opening up the Air Force. I am talking a 10-20 year time line. During this time our military will become increasingly more technology and information based, and we will have less of a need for our testosterone “manly man” tradition filled past. If you disagree with me and think that their fundamental human rights are being violated (I am more interested in their safety and being treated equal, eventually) and that ought to change right now, then keep working on that. But work on this also. That way, if you aren’t successful, at least you will have made some (and perhaps all of the) progress.

[1] http://google.com/search?q=cache:-8cAYjadWh8J:www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0536.pdf
[2] Classics in the History of Psychology -- Jones (1924)

Wait. I was in the US Navy for 6 years (during Reagan/Bush Sr.). So I am familiar with the environment, too.

As you pointed out, there are gays in the military. No official count is done (“dont ask, dont tell” still exists) on how many. I will assume your 1000/year kicked out is accurate. (There was a running joke in my work ceneter that if you finally get “fed up” with being in the Navy, just go kiss your CO. Tongues for expedited processing.) There are probably (many(?)several) gays in positions of authority.

So, what are you asking for? That no one be afraid of getting kicked out if they are “found out”? I don’t have a problem with that, in theory.

No one should be sleeping with members of the same unit. Even among heterosexuals, this leads to jealousy or accusations of favoritism. (And sometimes, those accusations are with cause…) Then, add in the knucklehead who needs to stir up trouble (based on sexual preference classification in the case of homosexuals), and unit moral hits the dumps.

For example: Let’s say my division officer, Lt. Swifty, is rumored to be gay. Petty Officer Lefty has an issue with that. Lefty “jumps” Swifty in a dark alley one night, wearing a ski mask to hide his identity, and puts him in the hospital. I found out the next working day that somebody (probably from my own command) beat the stuffing out of my DivO.

Not only do I feel sorry for my DivO (no one deserves that kind of a beat down…), but now I’m wondering “Wow! Who did it? Why are they able to get away with it? TANJ! What if I make a shipmate mad, and they start rumors that I’m gay??”

Then the DivO gets transferred out for his own safety. The new DivO is thinking “I can’t trust these neanderthals.” So, he can approach it two ways: Be a “buddy” of everybody, and lose the respect of his officer bretheren (and eventually his men under him will see him as “weak” or “spineless”), or come down extra hard, making life harder for his men than he would have otherwise.

Basically, everybodies sex life should stay private. There’s enough drama in life in general, taking small steps to prevent additional unwanted (negative) drama seems reasonable to me.

I believe that homophobia is a primarily a learned behavior, and I think it is fading with time. Until that time when Utopia dawns, we need to address this in a practical manner. It’s not fair, but there you go.

I don’t think the approach outlined in the OP would work. For one thing, it would imply that anyone working in a particular part of the service (eg, translator) was gay, and therefore give us fewer rather than more people who wanted to serve in those units. I say just jump right in… none of this dipping your toe in the water thing. If the Israelis can make it work without hurting their military, so can we-- they need theirs a lot more than we need ours.

Just to point out, in the Little Albert study the boy’s the fear of rabbits (among other white furry things) was deliberately caused by the researchers, and not something he had prior to the study. It only shows that you can remove a fear response that has been introduced in controlled conditions (and introduced recently, too), not that you can remove any kind of emotional response by gradual introduction (There are other studies which show this, I know; just pointing out that this may not be the best choice to illutrate your point).

Is it really the status quo that in today’s military, if someone is found out to be gay, there is a measureable chance that he will get beaten to death because of it, a larger chance that he will get beaten not to death, and excellent chance that he will be out of the military in very short order?

I have heard this belief stated by ex-military friends of mine and marked it down to macho braggadoccio.

I simply do not believe it.

I joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1989. At the time it was absolutely, strictly, no-questions-about it illegal to be a homosexual in the Forces. If you joined and were found to be gay you were discharged immediately.

The Forces is, obviously, a lot smaller than the United States armed services, but in terms of culture it is essentially the same; a Western mechanized professional army, mostly staffed with high school grads led by military academy grads, and very macho. I heard lots and lots of anti-gay talk. On basic, our drill instructors used “Faggot” and “homosexual” as withering insults. One of my drill isntructors, upon finding a Playgirl we’d planted on a guy as a joke, screamed “I HATE homosexuals!” and “Men, asses to the walls when in the shower! Private (name) is an ass bandit!” (No, he didn’t get kicked out of the army, the instructors knew it had to be a gag.) To be called a homo was either a dreadful insult or a very strong form of ribbing, depending on context. I heard some soldiers claim they’d been on gay-bashing expeditions, though even then I knew it was 98% bullshit because, well, I have a good BS detector.

I admit at the time that most of this did not bother me - well, the claims of gay-bashing did a little since that’s kind of nuts, but the jokes and insults did not. It was the culture, I was a kid, and it wasn’t any skin off my nose. So I’m not going to sit here and feed you some bullshit about how I stood up to it, 'cause I didn’t. I went right along with it and told my share of fag jokes.

Well, in 1992, Canada removed the ban on gays in the military. There was no “don’t ask don’t tell” transitory period. One day it was illegal to be gay in the military and the next day it wasn’t.

There was no chaos. No murders. No mutinies. No sudden drop in decorum or discipline. A few guys grumbled and whined about it, but as it turns out, (a) most of the bullshit was just bullshit, and (b) professional soldiers generally shut their yaps and do what they’re told when it comes right down to it.

This May, two gay soldiers were married by an Army chaplain at the base in Greenwood, NS. Personally, I think it’s awesome.

I can only speak to the atmosphere of the military as I experienced it (as a non-gay) in the 80’s.

Snide comments aside, most guys wouldn’t care. The military is an integrated one (racially and genderly speaking), and it still functions. They would get used to it.

However, I think that the politicians and the Admirals (who by the time they get to be an Admiral, have started to become politicians themselves :stuck_out_tongue: ) are afraid that there would be some horrendous incident that makes the news, and they are afraid of making the service look bad. (It also hurts their careers.)

From the way they fear it, it’s only a matter of time before some knucklehead does that horrendous thing…

Did the gay jokes and ‘ass bandit’ name-calling continue?

How have you established that these men in close quarters aren’t already having sex with each other now, whether-or-not they’re gay?

You’ve welded two problems together: the problem of military members having sex when they’re not supposed to, and the problem of gay men or women in the military. Addressing the latter is doing nothing to affect the former.

It certainly did not just end overnight, but it was officially discouraged, at least for NCO ranks (so you wouldn’t see instructors using that sort of thing) and seemed to die down slowly. As I left the service in 1995 I can’t tell you what the current state is.

Not that I’m not proud of our ability to integrate gays in our military, but… to be fair, remember we’re a country the size of New Jersey, and Israeli units are not deployed overseas for months at a time; in fact it’s a rare (and grumble-causing) occurrence when an enlisted person doesn’t get to go HOME (as opposed to merely being “at liberty” in some random city) at least twice a month, usually for a “long weekend” (at least 48 hours, of which typically less than 10 have to be spent en route)
Basically, your typical Israeli soldier goes home for the weekend (most of the time) once they are out of Basic Training; which makes it a lot easier to contain all kinds of sexual pressures. So I’m not sure the comparison is really applicable. Our boys and girls just get their rocks off at home like everybody else, so there is far less of a problem on base.

I don’t think i’ve welded them together. You cannot completely stop either one from happening. I did not mention gays having sex because I obviously do not have a statistic related to how much they are having sex, such as pregnancy rates while deployed.

That’s a fantastic case study and an inspiring point!

However, Canada’s millitary is 64,000 / 2,685,713 = 0.02% as large as the US’. Moreover, the US has 26,403,703 veterans as of the latest census, whereas Canada has 32,623,490 citizens. So while it is tempting to generalize from Canada’s case to the US case, I would say that such a small sample is unlikely to be indicative. Further, our large number of veterans makes this more of a national issue than a military issue. I think you can expect to see mass protest by US veterans upon opening the floodgates.

I think you mean 2%, not .02% :wink:

At the risk of bringing a lot of boring statistical concepts into an interesting thread, 64,000 people is a hell of a large data sample. (And actually, it’s over 80,000, throwing in reservists.) It’s equivalent to all three Marine infantry divisions combined. If you rolled out such a policy in the Marine infantry units and found it wasn’t very disruptive would you dismiss it as a small data sample?

Again, I simply don’t buy it. I don’t doubt a majority of veterans will be opposed to it, but there is a difference between passive and active opposition. I would think the vast, vast majority of veterans who do oppose such a move would not be sufficiently motivated to actively oppose it. People do have other things to do.

Remember, CANADA has lots of veterans too, and at the time, a number far out of proportion to the size of the Armed Forces; historically the Canadian armed services was always much larger than it is now or was in 1992, and of course at the time you still had a very large cadre of WWII and Korean veterans (and old people vote more than young people.) Most were opposed, but didn’t care enough to actively oppose it.

They had a lot of the same problems with hatred when they let blacks serve in the fighting units. Once people have enough contact with homosexuals to realize that homosexuals are not (for the most part) twisted sex perverts who are just waiting for you to go to sleep so they can fuck you up the ass. 50 years from now people will get used to it and there will be homosexuals dying in Iraq.

I meant to say:

They had a lot of the same problems with hatred when they let blacks serve in the fighting units. Once people have enough contact with homosexuals to realize that homosexuals are not (for the most part) twisted sex perverts who are just waiting for you to go to sleep so they can fuck you up the ass, people will get used to the idea. 50 years from now there will be homosexuals dying in Iraq.

I agree. Do you think I’m a homophobe? I hope not, because frankly the only sex life I care about is my own.

I don’t think that they should kick folks out for being homosexual. Clear enough?

I wish that homosexuals were not discriminated against by some bigotted people. But they are. So, the military, in it’s clumsy way, with the “dont ask, dont tell” policy, is saying “keep it private”.

By asking the members to keep their homosexuality private, the military is hoping the discrimination issue does not become a widespread problem. I realise that it can be seen as if the homosexual is being blamed for the action of the biggot, and it’s not fair.

But I think the logic is thus: If I had a lot of money in my wallet, and I had reason to suspect that there was a chance I could get mugged by going into that dark alley, shouldn’t I find an alternate path? Sure, the mugger is the one committing a crime, and I should be free to use any public sidewalk I choose, but if I can prevent a problem by taking a reasonable course of action, is that wrong?

Um. I would guess that of those of the US military personnel who lost their lives in Iraq, one or (probably) more were homosexual…

The current logic is don’t let people with a lot of money walk down a dark alley at all. Sure you can argue it might not be in the persons best interest but you shouldn’t get to decide what do that it is still their choice.

Then they try to make the arguement they shouldn’t allow people with money to walk down dark alleys because they might have to arrest muggers.

I am sorry. I dont follow. Are you proposing the likelihood that today’s military criminal investigators would “look the other way” if the victim turned out to be gay?

While that sounds like a good plot synopsis for the TV show J.A.G., I just can’t agree with that assertion.

There are individuals within the military that have biggoted attitudes, but so does the population base those members are drawn from. That doesn’t mean that the whole system is rigged.

Which brings up how a military with openly gay/bi members would be affected by the so-called Defence of Marriage Act. LGBT soldiers would be dying in combat and their partners wouldn’t get anything. LGBT servicemembers with families would be denied on-base housing.

Nope I’m proposing it might be more work for the military in general to enforce a non-descrimination policy involoving gays. So rather then accept homosexuals and allow them be out they try to sell the logic it potects gays.

Then again it’s not like there hasn’t been indcidents where military investigation did look the other way because the victim was gay(or perceived to have been)