Title: Gays in the
Military |
Release Date: 2000 (September) |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 55 Minutes |
|
Distributor and Production Company: The History Channel |
Director; Writer: |
Producer: |
Cast: Mike Wallace, narrator |
Technical: video for sale |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: gays in the military |
Review: This video has the format of an extended
CBS “60 Minutes” report but has the effect of a short documentary feature
film. It chronicles the history of the military policy towards gays from the
mid 1970’s and the Matlovich case to 2000 with the
horrible crime committed at About half of the video covers
the history prior to the 1993 debate and the implementation of “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell.” Most of the material in
this segment comes from Randy Shilts’s Conduct
Unbecoming (St. Martins, 1993, updated in a paperback reprint by Fawcett
Columbine in 1994). However, it
provides instructive emphasis on certain details. For example, Judge Giselle, in the Matlovich case, cited the inconsistency of the military
and the tendency for commanders to keep gay soldiers that they wanted and
then use homosexuality to discharge those whom they didn’t want, as
unconstitutional. The exceptions would
lead to the “no exceptions” policy at the end of the Carter Administration,
based on the notorious litany, “Homosexuality is incompatible with military
service…” Witch-hunts would take off
after 1981, and Lawrence Korb, in charge of
implementing DOD personnel policy, never imagined that commanders would use
the policy to hunt gays down. (Korb as always
struck me as a true conservative in spirit, opposed to gratuitous
governmental intrusions upon private lives.) Perry Watkins would be the first
“big case” under the 1981 policy, but Watkins had openly announced his
homosexuality when enlisting, out of honesty, and the military at the time
had remained nonchalant. Navy
cryptographer Mel Dahl would be denied a Top Secret clearance (in a manner
similar to Greta Cammermeyer a few years later) and
then be drummed out of the Navy (but Dahl would get some back pay in a
settlement, much smaller than Matlovich’s). Female sailors Robin Bruce and Chris
Russell would be publicly humiliated as they were taken off a ship as
“lesbians.” A young Army JAG officer,
Michelle Benecke, would survive a witch hunt but
soon resign in order to be able to fight the ban, and eventually start the Servicemembers Legal
Defense Network. The Navy would
try to cover up its own negligence in the U.S.S. Iowa explosion, blaming
heterosexual sailor Clayton Hartwig with a false
gay rumor, before the Navy would publicly admit its mistake in 1991 (the year
of Tailhook, and of Desert Storm). The video continues with a
history of the 1993 debate, leading to the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
“compromise” (the phrase written by The account of Barry Winchell is
particularly chilling. Soldier Javier
Torrez would report that after the murder, a drill sergeant would make the
troops sing “Faggot, faggot down the street, shoot him, shoot him till he
retreats!” And conservative military
leaders shrug this off as inevitable. Robert Maginnis,
supposedly another author of DADT, talks about the ban as an easy out for a
class of recruits physically much softer, perhaps less inclined to lead the unifocal life required by the military. The video at the very end makes
the point that gays would have a legal draft-dodge if, in the case of
national “emergency” Congress wanted to reinstitute the draft (it does not
mention that the president cannot do this alone). Maybe tens of thousands of guys would get
out this way! No kidding!! (But then
that brings up the question of how seriously the rest of society will now
take the military’s values, and the Boy Scouts seem to take these values
seriously.) There is a misleading
statement at the very beginning, however, that it was not illegal to “be gay”
in the military until 1993. It was
very much against military policy during the whole modern era, back to World
War I, although often tolerated when the military needed men. In fact, as the video points out, Julius Ceasar and Alexander the Great had male lovers, and the
military in ancient Sparta actually encouraged homosexual “couples” to fight
together (although there was no sense of freedom in that society that we have
today). The video does not go much into
detail about the legal details of DADT, such as rebuttable presumption and
the status v. conduct issue, except that it (through an interview with Benecke) maintains that Navy Lt. Zoe Dunning was the only
person ever allowed under the “new” policy to rebut the presumption that she
might engage in actual homosexual acts.
Other servicemembers would never come up to
the plate in their own hearings. The video also leaves the
impression that the military views gays as an official nuisance, whose rights
(however spelled out in the law or Constitution) can be violated at will “for
the good of the country.” In the view
of some military commanders who can “get away with it” (and these are
commanders with hands on the button, gays are Atlantean-hybrid-slaves
with no rights; that gays just disappear are part of the natural order of
things. As I’ve argued in my own books and elsewhere on this site, this is
most unacceptable in the example that the military sets for civilian society.
Near the end, Charles Moskos plays Candide, when he admits that DADT is the worst of all solutions, except for all others. There is also
an older view, To Support and Defend (1993), from Parade Pictures and the
Campaign for Military Service, produced by Julia Siminski
and Rob Wilson. The film consists largely of interviews with gay military
members who have fought the ban, with commentary also by Reagan-era DOD administrator
Lawrence Korb. The video starts with various
members taking the oath to support and defned, an
oath I took myself not only when enlisting in 1968, but also with my first
civil service job in 1963. Korb notes that gays have fought “in the trenches,” and
have actually tended to turn out to be more stable than average on
psychological tests. Justin Elzie, Michael Gray,
Jason Skerik, Dusty Pruitt, Thomas Panaccia, and Keith Meinhold
all give testimonials. Meinhold joined the Navy in
1980 in personal response to the hostage crisis in It seems to me that one could lawfully purchase the copyrights and exhibition rights to these two videos and come up with a very compelling feature film. In 1993 many saw this issue as a “small problem” of special interests. Now we have had September 11. We are no longer the same country. We can take this on again. Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) produced a 8-minute “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Documentary” in 2008, link for review here. |
Related reviews: Serving in Silence; Any Mother’s Son; Coming Out under Fire; Soldier’s Girl |
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