[An American educator, historian, and critic, D'Emilio is author of Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (1992). In the following mixed review, he praises Shilts for placing his facts within an historical context, but faults the "lack of balance" in Conduct Unbecoming, which D'Emilio believes results in a limited perspective on gay life in the U.S. military.]

Social movements, in order to succeed, require hard work, perseverance, solid organization and a healthy does of mysterious good fortune. In November 1990, when some scattered local activists floated the idea of another march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, who could have predicted that a sympathetic Democrat would be in the White House or that in his first week in office the ban on gays in the military would become front-page news? The convergence of the Clinton presidency, the debate over the military ban and the media-saturated march in the nation's capital marked a watershed. Mainstream America has discovered the gay and lesbian movement, while heterosexual liberals in the media, politics and the entertainment world have raced to adopt the cause as their own.

Still, activists face an uphill battle in their quest for civil equality and in the more daunting struggle to expunge homophobia from American institutions. The military ban is the current battleground. Although the outcome of this round of debate will not decide the final fate of the movement, victory will provide even greater forward motion while defeat will slow progress significantly.

Randy Shilts's hard-hitting exposé, Conduct Unbecoming, should become a formidable weapon in the hands of those committed to overturning the military's exclusion policy. Rarely has a book's publication been better timed to achieve maximum impact. Based on nearly 1,100 interviews with enlisted personnel and officers as well as thousands of pages of government documents, Conduct Unbecoming rips the secrecy from the military's methods of implementation to reveal the policy's human—and political—costs.

This is not a book for the fainthearted. Even to a historian like myself, accustomed to lecturing about the abuse of state power from the McCarthy era to Watergate, or about the relentless surveillance and harassment of civil rights workers and peace activists, Shilts's narrative is shocking. Typically rather than exceptionally, the military has fabricated evidence, coerced confessions, bugged telephones and opened mail, invaded private homes, lied to its gay and lesbian personnel, subjected them to physical abuse and mental torture and condoned violence—and much of this has been done to patriotic working-class Americans barely out of their teens. The tactics of agencies like the Naval Investigative Service seem remarkably like those of a totalitarian state.

One of the strengths of Shilts's narrative is that it is more than an undifferentiated account of endless horrors. Conduct Unbecoming is history as well, stretching from the Vietnam era to Desert Storm. This allows Shilts to embed his story in an ever-changing context, one that includes not only the growth of a gay movement but the challenge to traditional gender roles in the wake of the Vietnam War and the rise of feminism, the shift to an all-volunteer army, the integration of women into the military, the rise of the New Right and the Republican control of the White House in the 1980s.

After a breezy introduction that takes us from the gay Baron von Steuben of the Revolutionary War to the gay doctor Tom Dooley of the cold war crusade, Shilts begins his account. Before the gay liberation movement opened a debate on the subject of homosexuality, military authorities were free to do with gay personnel as they wished. Only the rare individual resisted in any way; the effectiveness of the policy stemmed in large part from the cooperation of the victims, who never thought to fight back. Young men terrified of the prospect of imprisonment gave names, signed confessions and pledged never to mention what investigators did to them.

Although gays and lesbians have been hunted, hounded and purged in every year since the exclusion policy took hold in the 1940s, the vigor of enforcement waxed and waned. With manpower needs high in the late 1960s, and with the more serious problems of drug addiction, desertion and the fragging of officers demanding attention, commanders often ignored evidence of homosexual conduct. A gay sexual sub-culture developed among military personnel in Southeast Asia and, in the field, buddies cared more about how you performed under pressure than about whom you slept with. Nixon's proposal to shift to an all-volunteer army also helped to contain antigay pogroms as the military's brass worried about filling the ranks. But once that transition was successfully made—in part, ironically, because of the rush of lesbians and other women into the services—the gay discharge rates began to rise. And as the gay movement grew stronger and gay pride infiltrated the consciousness of enlisted personnel and officers in the late 1970s, the witch hunts recommenced. With every individual challenge to the ban came a greater determination to conduct search-and-destroy missions against lesbians and gays.

Lesbians especially suffered. Although women's discharges were fewer in number, in every branch of the service they were far more likely to be investigated and booted out. Dyke-baiting, as many early radical feminists recognized, was a weapon to keep all women in their place. To many officers and enlisted men, that meant either out of the service or in the sack. Women faced a no-win situation: If they pushed for advancement in non-traditional roles, or if they resisted men's sexual advances, there could only be one explanation. Women, both gay and straight, suffered rape and unwanted pregnancy to avoid being targeted in the witch hunt. And the ranks of accomplished women soldiers with seniority were regularly depleted by mass purges, particularly in the Marines and aboard naval vessels. From this vantage point, the Tailhook scandal is as much about homophobia as it is about sexism.

A virtue of Shilts's analysis is that it gives the lie to the military's conceit that it stands apart from politics. By the mid-1970s, even the military was subject to the influence of gay liberation. The military's gay underground grew more open. Social networks proliferated and became more dense; in some places, members of "The Family" published their own newsletters. Some personnel, caught in a purge, decided to challenge the ban rather than slink away; others chose to come out even before investigators turned in their direction. The cases of Leonard Matlovich, Debbie Watson, Vernon (Copy) Berg and others were receiving favorable publicity and court hearings. The military hated the publicity and worried about the court decisions. (If there is one lesson in this book for all gay personnel, it is that publicity is the best defense.) By the end of the decade, the widespread assumption within the military, even as the purges intensified, was that the ban was on the way out.

And then came the Reagan victory and the mobilization of the Christian New Right. With new allies in powerful places, little stood in the way of aggressive homo-hatred. The composition of the federal courts began to change, killing any realistic hope of a judicial overturning of the ban. The Supreme Court's Bowers v. Hardwick decision in 1986, which denied a constitutionally protected right to privacy for homosexual expression, only confirmed what lawyers fighting the military already knew from experience: The military had a free hand.

Official statistics from the Reagan years tell but a part of the story. The number of investigations declined, but only because each one cast a wider and wider net, sometimes drawing in scores of hapless victims scattered across the country. And the discharge figures obscure the truth as well, since the military's concern about publicity made it willing to give honorable discharges in many cases, thus masking the extent of persecution.

Another casualty of Conduct Unbecoming is the often-repeated—and enraging—claim from the top brass that the military is not a place for social experimentation. It cannot, we are told, move ahead of society. (Never mind that it did just that when it integrated its ranks in the 1940s and opened the service academies to women in the 1970s.) Shilts demonstrates that the military has, in fact, taken the lead in perfecting techniques for mass persecution, in indoctrinating millions of young Americans in an ideology of hatred and in defining homophobia. Not since the McCarthy era has there been such a concerted campaign to stigmatize and punish homosexual Americans. During decades when half the states repealed their sodomy laws, when seven states and most of the largest American cities enacted gay rights ordinances, when major corporations implemented antidiscrimination policies and some even moved to grant partnership benefits to gays and lesbians, the military has dug in its heels. It no longer just reflects the prejudices of American society. Rather, according to Shilts, it has become the main bastion of homophobic terrorism.

Terrorism is not too strong a word, as more than 700 pages of vivid examples demonstrate. While Conduct Unbecoming will undoubtedly figure in the debates over the gay exclusion policy, its significance lies beyond this one issue. Shilts has written a book about the abuse of power, about totalitarian practices and a totalitarian ethic in the midst of a democratic society. Everything about the stories he recounts is offensive—deeply so—and their implications are dangerous.

Powerful as Conduct Unbecoming is, it is also flawed. For the book feels unfinished. Shilts introduces important themes early in the work, such as the crisis of American masculinity that defeat in Vietnam and the rise of feminism provoked, but then drops them. He writes in meticulous detail about the 1970s and early 1980s, but then races through the last three or four years—the very years in which challenges to the policy became more pronounced. This is especially unfortunate because one of the minor motifs of his story is the failure of the gay movement to address the needs of military personnel. Shilts's jabs in this regard are annoying (I felt as if he was trying to prove that he was an "objective" reporter rather than an impassioned advocate), in part because he provides evidence of extensive ties between the movement and embattled military personnel, and in part because he ignores how resource-poor the movement was in the 1970s, But mostly, Shilts misses the heart of the tension between movement activists and gay soldiers. It is not, as he claims, the responsibility of antiwar radicals who are hostile to militarism. Rather it more likely expresses a divide between a movement that has been largely middle class in its orientation and a group of persecuted soldiers who are mostly young working-class men and women.

Ultimately, the most glaring weakness of Conduct Unbecoming is its lack of balance. Not, certainly, between good guys and bad guys but between oppression and resistance or even between oppression and ordinary life and survival. The essential truth about "lesbians and gays in the U.S. military," which is the subtitle of the book, is that the overwhelming majority have served their country well and completed their tours of duty successfully. Shilts, however, has given us a history of victimization. The parade of victims is legion; even the resisters succumb. Halfway through the book, I found myself losing the distinctiveness of each story. Stripped of individual identity, the gay men and lesbians who populate these pages are eventually dehumanized. They are interchangeable, each moving inexorably toward destruction.

This, of course, is what the military intends. And perhaps it is unfair to expect an exposé of injustice to do more than faithfully reflect the horrors it uncovers. But that is not the whole story.