The repeal law mandated another 60
days for Congressional review, so DADT's big epitaphs will appear closer to
September 20. That will be the time to consider not the shift not just in
anti-gay but also anti-feminist attitudes behind the policy. Some gay and lesbian
advocates considered the 1993 "gays-in-the-military" (said as one word)
hearings to be a big dude feelings-fest. We learned that men in Congress feared
that gay men would treat non-gay men the way too many straight men treat their
female colleagues: as fresh, available meat. But over a decade with two-and-a-half wars, women have moved steadily farther into combat -- and the military still
functions. The masculinist bias that suggests that the military is all about a
certain ideal of manhood -- one that necessarily includes turning men into
predators -- has been forced to fade. (Military sexual assault -- of women, not men
-- remains a serious problem, but that's another topic entirely.)
Meanwhile, an anecdote -- which as the
social scientists say, can be the singular of "data." Early in the 2000s, I
interviewed a young straight woman, a whip-smart lawyer, who was working for
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network to help repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Back
then, a few non-gay folks were just beginning to work in gay organizations,
which startled those of us who had come up when putting "gay" on your resume meant
stamping a big scarlet "Q" on your forehead, potentially ruling you out of any
ordinary job ever again. Who would willingly take that on if she didn't have to?
When I asked her, she told me that
she was a former military unit commander. Under her command, someone had
accidentally stumbled upon two young men going at it. Talking with the two, she
recognized that neither had been sure he was gay until well after boot camp.
They were just being teenage boys, high-spirited, letting off steam in a
military theater, not even completely conscious that they were gay. She was
appalled by the injustice of what came next. No matter how she tried to protect
them, once the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" machinery started to grind, there was
nothing she could do: her hard-working, well-liked boys were needlessly discharged.
She was so outraged that she and her husband, both on track to be career
military officers, declined to re-enlist. She saw a policy that shocked her
conscience, spoiled two young men's lives and disrupted a unit for no good
reason. And so she went to work to end it.
According to the Servicemembers
Legal Defense Network (SLDN), the military has discharged more than 14,000
lesbian and gay servicemembers over the course DADT's existence. A
disproportionate number of those were women, investigated for lesbianism when
they rejected (or reported) a superior's unwanted advances: Defense Department
numbers showed that "women
accounted for 34 percent of the discharges but were 14 percent of the military" in 2008,
according to USA Today. But who knows
how many more -- gay or non-gay -- left in disgust or declined to enlist because
of it?