SOURCE: "Uncle Sam Doesn't Want You," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XL, No. 15, September 23, 1993, pp. 18-23.

[Stone is an acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and critic who served in the United States Navy from 1955 to 1958. In the following excerpt, he examines the issues raised in Conduct Unbecoming.]

[The United States armed forces' approach to homosexuality throughout history] is the subject of Randy Shilts's long book, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. Shilts's business here is advocacy, and he writes in favor of the right of gays and lesbians to serve in the US armed forces. His arguments seem to grow more reasoned and less strident as the book proceeds, and he has a good reporter's instinct for the core of a story. He begins, somewhat irrelevantly, by invoking the Sacred Band of Thebes and George Washington's silk tights, but the cumulative effect of Conduct Unbecoming is a clear indictment of the morally confused and weak-minded policy that has prevailed so far.

If there is a single reference point against which the whole of Conduct Unbecoming may be viewed it is the report he cites, one officially entitled the "Report of the Board Appointed to Prepare and Submit Recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy for the Revision of Policies, Procedures and Directives Dealing with Homosexuals." This classified document, known less ponderously as "The Crittenden Report," might well surprise today's Congressional zealots for a 100 percent he-man heterosexual military. Shilts quotes from and summarizes it at length. The board writes:

There is no correlation between homosexuality and either ability or attainments. Whether or not public opinion holds homosexuality to be synonymous with degeneracy, the fact remains that a policy which long remained contrary to public opinion could not but have an adverse effect on the Navy.

Elsewhere the panel concluded:

A nice balance must be maintained in changes of policy to ensure that public sensibilities are not offended in any attempt to promote a forward looking program in recognition of the advances in the knowledge of homosexual behavior and treatment, nor can there be any intimation that homosexual conduct is condoned. It is not considered to be in the best interests of the Military Departments to liberalize standards ahead of the civilian climate; thus in so far as practicable it is recommended that the Navy keep abreast of developments but not attempt to take a position of leadership.

Drawing on testimony from a variety of experts, the report generally refutes every truism behind the ban on homosexuals: There are "many known instances of individuals who have served honorably and well, despite being exclusively homosexual." The notion that gays were security risks was "without sound basis in fact … No intelligence agency, as far as can be learned, adduced any factual data" (to support this conclusion). In fact, "there is some information to indicate that homosexuals are quite good security risks."

The report goes on to recommend that discovered homosexuals no longer be less than honorably discharged. It refers to the concentration of homosexuals in certain specialties—the medical services, the women's branch—as known facts of life, and it ends by suggesting, Shilts writes, that the Navy "'keep abreast' of social attitudes toward homosexuality."

This extraordinary document was prepared not, as might be thought, in preparation for a Clinton presidency but during the second Eisenhower administration, in 1957. Like all those bottles of ketchup we heard about but never saw, a crucial part of this wisdom was apparently tucked away somewhere in one of the Navy's sub-tropical depots and forgotten. The absurd homosexual purges, which continue to the present day, very often have more to do with perception than with discipline. They concern the way the services see themselves as being seen, rather than the way in which they really see themselves or the way they actually are. Years later the military would indignantly deny the very existence of the Crittenden Report and only persistent application of the Freedom of Information Act retrieved it from the caves of the Pentagon.

There are many personal stories in Conduct Unbecoming, maybe a few more than the reader can keep track of. One of the saddest occurs over and over again, the pattern repeating itself as names and precise circumstances change: A young person, often a teenager, joins the service. In the course of enlistment that person discovers himself or herself to be gay. Service conditions provide the opportunity for an affair, not infrequently the first. Discovery follows and arrest and then terrorizing interrogations by the squalid keyhole cops of the military investigative services. There are the usual threats of disgrace; the prisoner's parents will be told, her home-town neighbors, his high-school coach, the boyfriend or girlfriend back home, and so on. And as often as not it seems, even after the victim destroys the remains of his or her own self-respect by naming names, the threats are made good. Then, the Crittenden recommendation notwithstanding, the subject is usually released into civilian life with a bad discharge, humiliated, sometimes traumatized for life.

This comes about, Shilts demonstrates, as a result of a routine procedure, the turning over of suspects to the military investigative services, whose livelihood has always been charges of homosexual behavior. Like the medieval church remanding heretics to the secular arm, commanding officers have dispatched accused personnel to the mercies of these agencies, of which the civilian-manned Naval Investigative Service is the most notorious. Shilts records an observation current in the fleet.

Call the NIS [Naval Investigative Service] and tell them you've got a dead body and the agents may show up in the next week or so Call and say you've got a dead body and you think the murderer was homosexual and the agents will be there in thirty seconds.

The stories Shilts marshals about the NIS are harrowing. Most harrowing of all is its attempt to blame the explosion in the USS Iowa gun turret on a fabricated gay relationship, in support of which it ruthlessly doctored circumstantial evidence and posthumously blackened the name of a sailor killed in the explosion.

The Navy could have done with a better, wiser, and more humane investigative service because its ships were not without problems. In recounting the case of a 1980 antilesbian purge aboard the USS Norton Sound that was instigated by the complaint of a female sailor, Shilts describes post-Vietnam War conditions at their nadir: a ship utterly out of control, undisciplined, rife with dope dealing, loan sharking, violence, and tension between every identifiable group, racial, sexual, or otherwise. Anyone who has ever served aboard a US Navy ship will know the sort of floating hell such a vessel can be. The USS Belleau Wood, an amphibious ship whose admittedly gay crew member Allen Schindler was murdered last year, seems to have supported similar conditions.

Until the middle of the 1970s, the military succeeded in living with the kind of contradictions that only a prestigious bureaucracy, with good public relations, can resolve. It was well aware that its ranks contained homosexuals, whose presence it often tolerated out of expedience. From time to time it would arrest and sacrifice one, pour encourager les autres, a process of culling meant to demonstrate that the armed services were still part of Middle America.

During the Vietnam War, the numbers of homosexuals the military was shocked to detect in its ranks mysteriously diminished. Shilts asserts that during that war, draft boards were instructed to demand "proof" from inductees who claimed to be homosexual, proof which would not only be embarrassing but would make anyone who supplied it criminally liable in almost all of the United States. In other words, like society in general, the services dealt with homosexuality in an inconsistent, arbitrary way, entirely on the military's own terms.

But the world was changing, and after the Vietnam War the military was no longer so prestigious nor were its public relations so effective. A wave of activism was washing away old arrangements. In March 1975, a career Air Force sergeant with twelve years' service named Leonard Matlovich, Jr. wrote a letter to the secretary of the Air Force via his commanding officer. Matlovich had an outstanding record; he was the kind of senior noncom who makes the services work, a wounded veteran of Vietnam, a wearer of the Bronze Star. One can only imagine the foreboding that ascended the chain of command with this document.

"After some years of uncertainty," Matlovich wrote, "I have arrived at the conclusion that my sexual preferences are homosexual as opposed to heterosexual. I have also concluded that my sexual preferences will in no way interfere with my Air Force duties, as my preferences are now open. It is therefore requested that those provisions in AFM39-12 relating to the discharge of homosexuals be waived in my case."

The US military had been overtaken by what might be called the American Factor. The most moralizing and legalistic country on earth, the land where everybody is responsible for everything although nobody is responsible for anything, was about to quarrel with itself. With its customary moral valor, the military looked wildly about for a moment, then sided with what appeared to be the respectable element. Its instincts were conservative and it wanted nothing more than to appear respectable. The Air Force initiated discharge proceedings against Matlovich, invoking AFM39-12, the very ordinance he had challenged. But as of March 6, 1975, the days of arbitrary punishment and arbitrary tolerance were numbered.

Any story whose subject is social change in America will consist in large part of legal detail, and Conduct Unbecoming is no exception. The book sets forth scores of cases and describes scores of proceedings and procedures, from discharge hearings to sessions of the Supreme Court. The case of Leonard Matlovich is one of many. Yet it is an informing thread running through the period under discussion, and there are few accounts in the book more poignant. Shilts sentimentalizes Matlovich to some degree but the sergeant's naive idealism and his unhappy fortunes are actually the stuff of drama. In 1980, discouraged by Reagan's election, he accepted a substantial cash settlement from the Air Force, failed to prosper in civilian life, and died of AIDS in 1988.

Shilts also describes a case with a happier outcome, that of Perry Watkins, an African American who told his Tacoma draft board in May 1968 that he was gay. It being 1968, his draft board told him otherwise: there were no gay blacks of military age in Tacoma in the year of the Tet offensive. Watkins went into the army and liked the life. His female impersonations became the hit routine of every Army entertainment, and each time he was presented with a form demanding that he state his sexual preference he declared himself gay. So it went for sixteen years of Army service until finally, during the Reagan years, his status was challenged and he was discharged. Watkins sued. In 1990, the US Court of Appeals ordered his reinstatement and the administration appealed. Finally, in November of the same year, twenty-three years after his surreal visit to the Tacoma draft board, the US Supreme Court found for Watkins and ordered him all pay and allowances.

Press accounts of gays in the military have tended to concentrate on homosexual men. In reality, the impact, both in numbers and on the military ambiance, has always been greater on the female side. On the whole a greater proportion of lesbians than male homosexuals have sought military careers. As Shilts makes plain, many have served with particular success. His narrative follows the paradoxical fortunes of a number of lesbians who, while turning in above-average professional performances, have run afoul of the military's social instincts. In some cases, trouble developed as a result of tension between lesbians and male personnel; sometimes there were complaints from non-gay women who felt intimidated by lesbians. But the most famous case recounted here is that of Miriam Ben-Shalom, a lesbian who openly revealed her sexual preference upon graduation from drill-sergeant's school and was discharged from the Army reserve in 1971 as a result. After literally decades of litigation, Ben-Shalom's administrative discharge was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1990.

By then there were many cases in the courts and the legal situation continued to see-saw. At one point in the Matlovich proceedings Judge Gerhard Gesell of the Federal district court in Washington called on the military to take "a more discriminating and informed approach" to the issue but found against Matlovich on technicalities. The judge added: "It seems to the court a tragedy that we must confront—as I fear we will have to unless some change takes place—an effort at reform through persistent, insistent, and often ill-advised litigation."

But persistent litigation is the American way. By the Nineties the services had tried to tighten the courtworthiness of their regulations. The armed forces had seen their first in-service AIDS case at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco in July 1982, a factor that would alter both the arguments and the underlying reality. But it was plain by the election of 1992 that the services' traditional and irrational methods of dealing with homosexuality had worn away. President Clinton's compromises may be less than the total vindication some activists have called for, but no amount of resistance will bring back the old system.

Various foreign military establishments have their methods of dealing with gay personnel and Shilts approvingly cites some of the more reasonable. But foreign examples are not necessarily useful. The United States has the largest and most active gay rights movement in the world, one completely committed to the right of gays to serve. Gay rights organizations in most other countries—even countries with civil rights laws that protect gays—are not as prominent. In Europe most gay rights organizations are ipso facto antimilitary and inhabit a different world than their armed services. Military service is not one of their priorities.