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The Policy That Dares Not Speak
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UNFRIENDLY FIRE
How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America
By Nathaniel Frank
342 pages. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $25.95.
The
core message of Nathaniel Frank’s book about the American military’s
ban on being openly gay can be summed up in a single slogan: “ ‘Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell’ Don’t Work.” Mr. Frank has also been offering succinct
five-minute synopses of his argument as he makes the rounds of the talk
show circuit. So why does his book, “Unfriendly Fire,” need nearly 300
pages of text to make the same relatively simple points? Because he
makes them so discerningly, so substantively and so well.
This
book’s length would seem even more surprising given Mr. Frank’s scant
reliance on anecdotes or filler; by his not having personalized or
dramatized his nonfiction material; by the small number of major points
on which he concentrates; and by his use of the “as we shall see”
construction, which would seem to brand him as a dry professorial
writer. But to categorize him that way would be using the type of
specious reasoning on which, according to his book, American military
policy about gay personnel is based.
This is the same logic that allowed a Marine Corps corporal’s buying of Anne Rice novels to be used as admissible evidence of homosexuality at the man’s
discharge investigation. And that example is real, not hypothetical.
Mr. Frank didn’t have to make it up. Many Americans may not understand
what the military’s 15-year-old “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue”
policy about gay personnel actually means. If sounds laissez-faire, it
is anything but: this expedient-sounding political compromise,
sanctioned by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and then voted into law by Congress, has created legal means of
terminating the careers of longtime and, Mr. Frank would argue,
valuable members ofour military. No explicitly sexual act is necessary
to bring on accusations. The soldier who receives a warmly affectionate
letter from a same-sex correspondent is in jeopardy of being booted out
of the service.
“Unfriendly Fire” offers a sharp, vigorously
framed analysis of this state of affairs. Mr. Frank begins by assailing
the assumption that a gay person in the military is someone who has
chosen to break the military’s rules; that person, he says, violates
the current code simply by existing. “Is a restaurant that bans
creatures that bark not a restaurant that bans dogs?” he asks,
demonstrating a debating talent that would serve him well in a
courtroom. The main attraction in “Unfriendly Fire” is the agility and
tough-mindedness with which Mr. Frank presents his arguments.
An early chapter on the history of homosexuals and military discipline points out that there was a time — 1919, when Franklin D. RooseveltNavy — when gay sailors were entrapped by the sexual solicitations of other
sailors, then arrested, court-martialed and imprisoned. “It was not
lost on many observers, including the U.S. Senate,
which censured the Navy for its ‘shocking’ and ‘indefensible’
investigative tactics, that the military had no trouble roundingup its
own men to sleep with other men as part of a sting operation to rout
out gays,” Mr. Frank writes. was assistant secretary of the
What this wound up meaning was that
overt sexual activity would no longer be needed as proof. “It was the
beginning of the rationale for banning gay people, since the task of banning gay conduct had proven to be perilous, and had inadvertently thrown light on how
easily ‘normal’ men could end up in the jaws of a homosexual rapport,”
he says. An argument central to this book is that the assumption that
heterosexuals are fragile, modest and easily threatened by homosexuals
in their midst does a disservice to the military’s most fundamental
faith in its troops as strong and disciplined fighters.
Having
established his subject’s historical underpinnings, Mr. Frank moves on
to a political analysis of the forces that made the subject of
homosexuals in the military so important at the start of Mr. Clinton’s
first term. The gist is that the president, as a candidate, had glibly
made promises he would not be able to keep, while at the same time
overconfident gay lobbyists underestimated the combined (and, says Mr.
Frank, often overlapping) strength of top military brass and the
religious right. In the course of its intensive scrutiny of Senate
hearings on the subject, the book finds similarities between that era’s
rhetoric about homosexuality as a threat to unit cohesion and the same
arguments, used four decades previously, to resist racial integration.
The
book shows how those hearings made up in hot air for what they lacked
in hard evidence. So Mr. Frank brings hard evidence to bear. Fears
about sexuality, he says (drawing extensively on data from countries
that have less restrictive policies than ours does), do not necessarily
predict behavior.
And in passages recounting change that he
acknowledges to be “stunningly anticlimactic,” he discusses what
happened when gay soldiers could openly serve in Israel, Canada and
Australia: nothing special. When strict codes of military behavior ban
all public displays of affection, they dispel much of the imagined
problem.
“Unfriendly Fire” goes on to measure the gay ban’s cost
and consequences. Mr. Frank does not do this casually; he is armed with
budget, recruitment and expulsion statistics. Disturbing as they are to
begin with, these figures become even more so when linked to the influx
of ex-convicts and other problem recruits to replace those who have
been dismissed. The single most alarming statement, in a book that
bristles with them, is this one about the military’s moral waivers
program to admit convicted felons: “Allowable offenses under the
program include murder, kidnapping and ‘making terrorist threats.’ ”
Finally
“Unfriendly Fire” makes a claim for what “don’t ask, don’t tell” has
now become: a punch line. Gay service personnel, Mr. Frank says, have
by and large been assimilated. Homosexual attachment and unit cohesion
are understood to be different things. “I have never loved any man more
deeply than some of the men I served with in Somalia, and I never had
any sexual feelings for them,” one gay combat veteran says.
And
if popular culture provides signs of the times, as Mr. Frank suggests,
then the subject may be even further defused. “I Love You, Man,” a
Hollywood film in the newly mainstream “bromance” genre, about men who
love their attractive male friends in no-big-deal fashion, opens
Friday. It’s coming to a theater near you.