Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

is not a new development. Back in 1992, when the ban on gays in the military was being debated during an election year, the Washington Monthly weighed in decisively on the question:

      But with our policy stuck in hypotheticals, the strongest argument for gays in the military is quietly made elsewhere—in countries such as Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and to a lesser extent France, where gays have already been integrated into the armed forces. While the Pentagon pursues a policy that every year hounds 1,000 able-bodied gay men and women out of the service—wasting $27 million in training costs annually—other countries demonstrate that with the right mix of education and cajoling, a military with gays can work.⁷⁴

      Why then was a policy that institutionalizes discrimination and advances reactionary gender norms enacted in the first place? While the 1992 election campaign was marked by rabid homophobia from the podium of the Republican National Convention, the party leadership was not immune to the social upheavals taking place on the streets. As will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters, the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) crisis sparked a rise in LGBT activism from 1988 to 1992, to a level not seen since the early 1970s. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had even argued that excluding gays from the military on the basis of them being a security risk was an “old chestnut.”⁷⁵ When activists outed President George H. W. Bush’s Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams as gay, Bush responded, “Who cares?”⁷⁶

      Yet the leadership of the Democratic Party under the rising star of Arkansas governor Bill Clinton adopted an approach that has become familiar to millions of Americans since. They “compromised” with the far right while equivocating and insisting that their deal was both pragmatic and just. Clinton expressed sympathy and hosted an unprecedented personal meeting with gay and lesbian leaders in the White House to promise lifting the ban on gays in the military—as well as promising to pass gay civil rights legislation—all the while betraying his base. Exactly four days after his inauguration, Bill Clinton’s administration “declared defeat and unconditionally surrendered on the issue” on Face the Nation.⁷⁷ In a posture that was to become the standard on virtually every social and economic policy, the Clinton administration—with both houses of Congress in Democrats’ hands—insisted that if his base didn’t support a crappy deal, a worse one was sure to pass instead. The politics of lesser-evilism, that is, the presumption that accepting a bad deal is the best way to prevent something worse, became the political justification for many of Clinton’s most conservative and pro-corporate policies. As one gay Democratic Party activist put it at the time, “we elected a president and got a barometer.”⁷⁸

      Some political responsibility for the “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation must be laid at the door of the leadership of many of the LGBT groups as well, in particular Human Rights Campaign (HRC). In 1993, an estimated one million people marched on Washington for LGBT rights, yet the movement leaders diverted an estimated $3 million into the Democratic Party coffers and deflated the demands of activists hungry for change.⁷⁹ Urvashi Vaid, a former leading member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), is refreshingly honest and reflective on the decisions taken at that time when she writes:

      Electoral politics is extremely seductive to all movements for social change; it seems the shortest distance to liberation. The theory is invitingly simple: elect people who support you, and they will do the right thing. But the fact is that when broad-based protest movements—like the black civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement—shifted their major focus from community organizing to electing our own, the movements lost momentum even as they gained mainstream acceptability.⁸⁰

      In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, all the major Democratic candidates—including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—called for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in their primary campaigns. Former secretary of state and retired general Colin Powell, who helped craft the policy under Bill Clinton, called for “reevaluating” the policy in December 2008 given the shifts in public attitudes over the years since it was implemented.⁸¹ It remains to be seen what will come of this, though with wars spreading and quagmires deepening it’s quite possible that this anachronistic nod to bigotry may be swept aside out of sheer desperation for more “boots on the ground.” But if history is a teacher, without activists putting pressure on politicians, it is possible that we could see the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the creation of some other “compromise” to appease homophobes in the military and government. Nonetheless, if LGBT people are eventually deemed qualified to kill or be killed for the empire, then other legal and social restrictions would only be amplified.

      Some progressives who oppose U.S. military operations around the world ask whether the left ought to support the right of sexual minorities to serve openly in the military. What is the point, they argue, of challenging legal restrictions to the bulwark of American imperialism if one doesn’t agree with its methods and aims? While hostility to the military is certainly understandable, this approach raises the question too narrowly and ignores the wider implications of social policies advanced by the federal government in its hiring practices. In essence, allowing the U.S. government to continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual and gender behavior in its military workforce of nearly three million people⁸² gives a green light to persistent social and legal restrictions on LGBT people and continued bigotry. There is nothing incompatible with demanding an end to draconian laws barring open LGBT folks from serving in the military while opposing armed forces recruitment and U.S. imperial actions all over the world. The demand for equal access not only exposes the hypocrisy of an institution that claims to expand democracy while advancing its antithesis, but it can also have a direct impact on the lives and consciousness of millions of people who are compelled by economic circumstance or social conditioning to turn to the military for employment. In addition, it can create yet another chink in the system’s ideological armor. As with war itself, demands for equality, even inside a reactionary institution, can have unintended consequences.