[In the following review, Todes offers a positive assessment of Conduct Unbecoming.]

This book is water torture. Drop by drop, vignette after vignette, the reader is moved by one unconscionable story after another about the treatment of homosexuals in American military service. The narrative starts from the beginning at Valley Forge, with the debt owed to the gay general Von Steuben for training the Revolutionary Army in the modern ways originated by a gay king, Frederick the Great of Prussia. This debt is elaborated against the stark background of gay volunteers being drummed out of service before the assembled ragtag band for loving one another unnaturally. The story moves briskly to the beginnings of Vietnam, and concentrates on the period from that time to just before Operation Desert Storm. If you stay with it, Randy Shilts' book may break your heart as it leads to the overwhelming conclusion that such cruelty must stop.

The power of Conduct Unbecoming lies in the vivid force of its examples. It is virtually a series of short stories on the common theme of the betrayal and mockery of the American dream for untold thousands of gay and lesbian patriots who gave their best, and in some cases their all, for our country. And woven into this patchwork quilt of individual dramas are threads of argument that tie them together.

Consider Rich McGuire. In May 1970 the 20-year-old McGuire had a batch of commendations for his work as an Air Force cryptographer and had just been promoted to sergeant. In addition, he had just driven down to Daytona Beach, Fla., and discovered its gay subculture. He didn't dare talk to anyone but found a bookstore where he bought some nudist magazines and a few copies of After Dark, an entertainment magazine marketed for gays but without any overt references to them. These magazines represented the sum total of McGuire's sex life.

Back at base in Orlando a week later, there was a spot check for drugs in the barracks. In a panic, McGuire threw the magazines out of his window. "I'll take that," said a voice outside. "What room are you in?" McGuire's ordeal started the next morning. Two agents from the Office of Special Investigation took him away in a car without inside handles on its back doors. In a remote wooden house, they took him down to a huge cinder-block subbasement, in the center of which was a small, thickly padded cell. McGuire was led inside. The cell had one table, two chairs and a very bright light. One standing in front and one behind him, the agents played good-guy, bad-guy. McGuire's homosexual feelings were spoken of for the first time in his life as the agents displayed his magazines and teased him about the pictures. They knew he was part of a network of Air Force homosexuals. Give them names and they'll go easy, they said.

McGuire couldn't name names but confessed he had once touched another sleeping man's erection without any ensuing orgasm. The agents told McGuire he was facing a $20,000 fine and life imprisonment at hard labor and that they could seize his parents' home for payment. Believing the agents, he broke down. They told him never to mention the investigation, because he could go to prison for that, too. McGuire could not eat for a week and went from 145 to 120 pounds. Twenty years later he shook uncontrollably when describing to Shilts the ordeal that led to his undesirable discharge.

Each branch of military service denies engaging in such unlawfully coercive practices but routinely resorts to them—as shown by 12,000 pages of evidence, gathered from hundreds of independent sources, from which Shilts cites.

How can such things happen? The root of the problem is that some groups are not brought under society's prevailing norms because they are not embraced in the social "we." They are resident aliens who are "there" among us without being accepted as belonging among us. This space between the appearance and the reality of membership in society is the arena in which gays and lesbians are given over to the lions of injustice.

The bar to the acceptance of gays and lesbians, and to the full acceptance of women in the military, is the idea of "manhood." "The Army will make a man of you!" has motivated enlistment for centuries. Many believe that "manhood" got President Johnson into Vietnam and delayed for years President Nixon's withdrawal from that conflict. Military opposition to women in the military was primarily driven by ideas of manliness, not effectiveness. As Gen. William Westmoreland put it, "No man with gumption wants a woman to fight his battles."

To be a "man" in this military sense, means being domineering, aggressive and tight-knit with your male buddies. That means excluding women, who are supposed to be weaklings, and excluding gay men, who threaten both to expose the implicit homoeroticism of male bonding and to make the male hunted as well as sexual hunter.

The idea of manhood was the shield with which the military warded off the intrusion of homosexuals, but it also shielded the military's eyes from the sight of the humanity of gays and lesbians. The military's own internal review had determined that the arguments for exclusion raised in the McCarthy era—national security and incompetence—should be dropped for lack of evidence. The only remaining grounds were that the inclusion of gays and lesbians would upset straights and thus undermine their morale, discipline and good order.

But if homophobia could deprive homosexuals of their military rights, why not also of their other rights? And if homosexuals, why not also other unpopular groups? For gays and lesbians in the military, justice became a farce. As Conduct Unbecoming demonstrates in numbing detail, gays and lesbians under interrogation were routinely insulted, lied to without compunction, threatened with punishment beyond the law and had the official record of their testimony fabricated. Discharged and humiliated for loving the wrong sex, tens of thousands had their careers and lives wrecked.

Women who raised charges of sexual harassment were generally ignored, but a charge of being lesbian typically endangered one's military career. Indeed, lesbians were treated worst of all, abused both as women and as gay. Military law was imposed upon them arbitrarily. Shilts tells us of Capt. Laura Hinckley, who was prosecuted for fraternization with a female NCO outside her chain of command, though heterosexuals would hardly be prosecuted for such technical infractions. Miriam Ben Shalom was discharged because she told a reporter she was lesbian. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled that this violated her First Amendment right of free speech and ordered her reinstatement. For seven years, the government refused to do so, contending it was not sure how to interpret the word, "reinstatement."

The same oppression and villification of homosexuals that spawned the injustice of their treatment also could place investigators hilariously out of touch with their quarry. Undercover agents at the Great Lakes Naval Station discovered that homosexuals there called themselves "friends of Dorothy," a code term long in use referring to Judy Garland's character in the film The Wizard of Oz. Ignorant of the phrase's origin, the investigators were convinced that a woman named Dorothy had organized a huge ring of homosexuals throughout the Chicago area. Cruising bars on Clark, Halsted and Broadway, they set out to find her.

Oppression reached a new level with a 1981 regulation that stated that anyone with a "propensity" to homosexual activity should be discharged. But unreckoned among the costs of the ban of gays and lesbians, is the cost of training and replacement of personnel. Shilts points out the many ways in which official reckonings ignore or grossly underestimate these amounts, which he calculates at hundreds of millions of dollars a year. For example, Shilts notes that the hunt for gays so decimated the Armed Services foreign language personnel in the late 1980s that there was a shortage of Arabists for Desert Storm. The National Security Agency then had the gall to ask some discharged gay interpreters to return because they were needed now.

If those are the costs of banning homosexuals from military service, they must be weighed against the costs of their inclusion. In sum, we have to weigh the comfort of macho males against the full citizenship of gays and lesbians, safe from persecution. So far, society seems to believe it more important to protect the sensibilities of the macho male; but, for the most part, that may be because the consequences of that preference are kept invisible. When publicity exposes the injustices that are inevitably produced by the vilification of any normally behaving group (homosexuals cannot be spotted by psychologists on tests or by ordinary people on the job), public sympathy is aroused against those practices and pressure builds to stop them. Publicity empowers the disenfranchised.

Sometimes political pressure has to be added to publicity. During World War II, the brass of every service insisted that military efficiency, good order and morale demanded racial segregation. It was only after candidates Thomas Dewey and Henry Wallace pushed for charge during the 1948 presidential campaign, that President Truman, needing the black and liberal vote, issued Executive Order 9981, which called for "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race." The hold of unjust stereotypes was soon broken by familiar contact with real people; 77 percent of enlisted men reported their attitudes toward blacks changed for the better once they began working together.

Though publicity has demonstrated its salutary power in weakening injustice, an even greater force against injustice in the military is need. From the adoption of the gay ban in 1943, its implementation has depended mainly on manpower needs. Shilts cites Allan Berube's research on gays in World War II, which documents that during the height of the 1945 Allied offensive, orders went out to "salvage" homosexuals for service whenever necessary. During the Korean War, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of gays who were discharged from the services. Right after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, manpower was again short, and the Defense Department told induction centers to accept non-obvious gays. Gays were wanted in difficult times because they could do the job. They were persecuted when not needed, to serve the macho ethos. If we need gays more than macho when the chips are down, why, one wonders, do we need macho at all?

The widespread practice of injustice against any group impairs good judgment about other matters. The Navy loved its World War II battleships and wanted to keep them even though they were obsolescent. When a gun blew up in firing practice aboard the battleship USS Iowa in February 1987, killing 47 sailors, the Navy went looking for a scapegoat and proceeded to blame the disaster on a trumped-up gay lovers' quarrel. Eventually The House Armed Services Committee rebuked the Navy for its unsupported charges, and the battleships were decommissioned as no longer serviceable. But in the meantime, the Navy had tried very hard, and come very close, to keeping its icons by bashing the gays and inviting another fiasco. Thus, the Navy's homophobia clouded its strategic judgment and endanger straight sailors as well. Demonization is a dangerous game for all.

Thank you, Randy Shilts, for bearing witness. One hopes that the truth will set us free.