[Below, Smoler offers a positive review of Conduct Unbecoming.]

Randy Shilts, the most prominent American reporter to have identified himself as a gay journalist, has written two previous books on American politics, one on HIV and the other on Harvey Milk. (And the Band Played On and The Mayor of Castro Street). Both were compounded of admirable reporting and liberal interpretation.

Conduct Unbecoming has Shilts's customary virtues and occasional limitations—the strengths and weaknesses of liberal American reportage. It is splendid on human interest achieved through interwoven individual biographies, but thoughts on the place of its subject in the larger American political culture are kept under wraps.

Shilts traces the lives of a number of gay men and women through the post-war American military, following them from enlistment—itself often an attempted flight from homosexuality—through sexual self-awareness, the experience of service and battle, political self-awareness, some very nasty persecutions and finally legal combat to retain the right to serve one's country.

The book is amazingly timely, since Clinton's first and damaging political defeat occurred over his campaign pledge to remove discrimination against gays in the American military. The fight recapitulates an old contest in American political culture, between the liberal middle classes and the blue collar workers, steeped in religiosity, repressive and yet authentically democratic.

It is Shilts's strength and weakness that he is so thoroughly embedded in American political culture that he writes as a simple exponent of the liberal side of this contest, and fails to see it from any distance at all. To be engaged in this fight, it helps to be sold on the merits of a classical liberal-rights theory and a classical model of citizenship. Shilts, old enough to have cut his political teeth in the anti-Vietnam war movement, recovers this tradition.

He traces the purges of gays from the armed forces from 1954 to the present, and the slow growth of the idea, first among increasing numbers of gay soldiers, sailors and airmen and then in the libertarian public, that the military had no right to do this. Although for some years sidelined by the rise of the anti-war movement, the argument for allowing gays to serve grew steadily more confident over the Seventies, and by the decade's end most observers thought it would triumph, either among an increasingly libertarian public—where it appeared to be a logical extension of the civil rights and sexual revolutions—or in the Supreme Court, where it also looked like a civil rights question.

Then Reagan won, and kept office by marrying monied libertarians to puritan yahoos, and the Supreme Court, which over the last decade had become increasingly timid, finally acquired a rightist majority. Over the course of three Republican administrations, the armed services became more and more thuggish in hounding out gays, while the educated and very unmilitary middle classes became more and more tolerant of homosexuality in élite professions, and parts of American universities—humanities and law—became almost mesmerised by gender studies.

When Clinton ran for office, his libertarian instincts prompted him to make a risky public commitment to ending the military's purges; in what soon seemed an unaccountable blunder, Bush failed to gay-bait him for his pains, and Clinton won office with an apparent mandate to abolish military discrimination against gays. He took his pledge seriously, and the rest is history: his own party betrayed him, he backpedalled furiously, and this defeat broke a President's political momentum with almost unprecedented speed. The question remains: why didn't Bush exploit American homophobia to retain office?

It was left to Colin Powell to defend the persecution of gay soldiers, using arguments virtually identical to those which had for 80 years sustained a racially-segregated army, and denied most blacks the right to bear arms in their country's service.

Shilts scants the larger politics, but is superb on the human particulars—indeed, he can use these to suggest larger points. There is a moment, both striking and poignant, when a deeply closeted seaman watches homoerotically-charged rituals on crossing the Equator—naval saturnalia and carnival can include simulated fellatio—and begins to suspect that the navy is at least as sexually confused as he is.

One young man joins the Army to purge sexual demons by proving himself a 'real' man, is gravely wounded in an heroic action that will earn him a Silver Star, and as he is carried off realises—with what seems a mixture of despair, exhilaration and bewilderment—that he is now indisputably both a real man and a gay one. Eisenhower orders a favourite clerk to prepare a list of lesbians in his headquarters company, prior to a purge, and is made to understand that the typist and her even-more valued superior will head the list (the order was immediately rescinded).

Shilts has been criticised for this focus on particulars, but in both Britain and America, where this political fight will probably be won when the human particulars become vivid enough to the electorate, that may have been the right choice.