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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A Salon special report examines the real-life impact of "don't ask, don't tell."
Jun 6, 2000 | To many gay rights advocates, 1992 felt like the "Year of the Queer." Newly elected President Clinton had promised federal workplace protection and a repeal of the ban on gays in the military. In activist and longtime Clinton-supporter David Mixner, the gay community even had its own F.O.B. (Friend of Bill). "We deeply believed this would be a turning point in our history," Mixner later wrote in his memoir. Indeed, Clinton's public embrace of gay supporters had never before been seen in a modern presidential campaign.
It was against this backdrop of optimism that Navy midshipman Keith Meinhold came out on ABC's "World News Tonight" in May 1992, and Naval Lt. Zoe Dunning outed herself publicly at a rally to end the gay ban in January 1993.
But the euphoria that came with the legitimization of gay rights as a political movement blinded the movement's leaders. Most failed to predict the coming backlash, especially against Clinton's plan to issue an executive order lifting the ban on gays in the military. Ultimately, few political issues have been as divisive in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill as the question of whether or not to permit lesbians and gay men to serve openly in the armed forces.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called Clinton's planned repeal of the ban on gays in the military "prejudicial to good order and discipline." Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn, then-head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said removing the ban was "not simply a presidential prerogative," and he spearheaded legislation in Congress that codified the ban on self-identified gays and lesbians.
Gays had one powerful argument in the widely publicized stories of witch hunts that led to the discharge of 15,000 gays in the 10-year-period leading up to the Clinton presidency, investigations which the General Accounting Office estimated were costing $27 million a year. But money clearly wasn't an issue, since more than $130 million has been spent on the implementation of "don't ask, don't tell," according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and the witch-hunt argument wasn't enough to stop the legislative steamroller. The "don't ask, don't tell" statute became law in 1993, allowing closeted homosexuals to continue to serve in the military, so long as their sexual identity was kept concealed.
Though Meinhold, Dunning, and later Col. Grethe Cammermeyer and others prevailed in the courts and got their discharges overturned, the policy was a devastating blow to the gay rights movement. Paired with the Clinton-backed "Defense of Marriage Act," which prohibits federal recognition of gay marriages, "don't ask, don't tell" was the greatest setback to gay rights in a decade.
But gay intellectual and political leaders can now take a pragmatic look back at the failure to lift the ban. "Rightly or wrongly, many of us in the movement felt he was going to get rid of the policy," reflected Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and author of "Virtual Equality," an influential treatise on the gay movement.
"What people didn't think through," Vaid holds, "was the reaction that Congress would have. I don't think we spent enough time plotting out how we were going to deal with it. Most energy was still going into health policy. [Gays in the military] was a small issue that very few people focused on. There weren't lobbyists spending time on it. There were only a couple of organizations that had worked on it. It didn't get the same priority as hate crimes or AIDS and health, next to which we were also seeking a comprehensive gay rights bill."
