J'Accuse ...!

It is a stretch to compare the current tug-of-war over the military policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) with that of the Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century. After all, the latter case involved the brutal incarceration of an innocent man, an Alsatian Jew, on the trumped up charge of selling French military secrets to the German Embassy. Indeed, in the wake of France’s loss of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, French national honor was so diminished that the military used the Dreyfus Affair more than two decades later as a means to prop up its bona fides.

With DADT, we have a military mentality, however, that is not far distant from that of the French. Two drawn out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have done little to confirm American military superiority, and the fact that we are at still at war is being used in some quarters to argue that now is not the time to institute a significant change in the way the armed forces go about their business. Having openly gay men and lesbians serve in the forces, of which a majority of Americans now approve, is still widely discussed, especially among old guard military men, as a threat to “unit cohesion.” It hardly matters to them that some of our partners in the Multi-National Force invasion of Iraq—defense forces from other countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Great Britain—allowed openly gay troops. (There’s just no explaining what those Socialist Europeans will do!)

But if we have not incarcerated an innocent man, the military has certainly destroyed thousands of careers of young people who have done nothing more than live the truth of their own natures. DADT has been a disaster any which way you look at it. It has been enforced arbitrarily so that even gay men and lesbians in uniform doing their best to keep their homosexuality secret have been subject to witch hunts worthy of the McCarthy Era. The services have lost talented volunteers whose training cost the government substantial sums of money and whose excellence has rarely been called into question. Crucial skills, like Arabic-language expertise, have been lost through dismissals; this has compromised intelligence gathering.

When Barack Obama ran for the presidency, DADT was on his hit list. Yet in his ever so cautious manner, he is now having his Department of Justice defend the policy in the face of Federal District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’ ruling of early September that said “The 'don’t ask, don’t tell' act infringes the fundamental rights of United States service members in many ways ... In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, defendants [United States of America and Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense] faced the burden at trial of showing the 'don’t ask, don’t tell' act was necessary to significantly further the government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden."

Like me, you may remember how early on his tenure, Secretary of Defense Gates announced that he would have the Pentagon conduct a study to see how best to institute a new policy. The moment I heard this, I thought “the fix is in.” The study will find what it wants, I thought, or barring that, it will find a way to drag out a policy the Pentagon is too embarrassed to change. Then earlier this year, in February, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates said it would take more than a year to lay the groundwork for repealing DADT, but meanwhile, the Defense Department would enforce the policy “in a fairer manner.” Yet as Judge Phihllips’ opinion made eminently clear, there is no fair manner to enforce a policy whose “restrictions on speech not only are broader than reasonably necessary to protect the Government's substantial interests, but also actually serve to impede military readiness and unit cohesion rather than further these goals.”

Her opinion was based on the sometimes heartbreaking testimony of young men and women who had suffered under extraordinary psychological pressures, had private e-mail communications read without authorization, witnessed but been unable to report sadistic conduct by superiors or heard sexist and racist slurs by others in violation of the military code, and otherwise been unable to engage in daily social conversations which might tip off their comrades. Many of those who testified in her court ultimately arranged dishonorable discharges through the sympathetic intervention of superior officers who sometimes provided written testimony of the witness’s excellence while in uniform.

All right. I will vote in the current election for anyone but a Republican, despite the fact that President Obama, Democrat-in-Chief, is arguing that he must maintain the DADT policy and have his Department of Justice appeal and defend it because he does not want to have the policy changed by judicial fiat but by an act of Congress. This is a veiled allusion to satisfy conservatives who have been lamenting, ever since the Earl Warren court of the 1960s, any decision with which they disagree as an instance of “judicial activism.” That the Roberts’ court engages in conservative judicial activism is never acknowledged by the right-wing, for courts whose decisions serve their purposes, even by the most twisted logic and ignoring of precedent, are taken on faith to be disinterested and to serve the cause of, pun intended, blind justice.

So, j’accuse. I accuse the Obama administration of playing politics with the lives of young men and women in uniform whose homosexuality has no effect on their military readiness and worthiness. I accuse Secretary of Defense Robert Gates of obstructing justice by continuing to enforce a policy which has ruined careers, perhaps even lives, on hearsay evidence, rumor, gossip, and through the illegal acquisition of private communication. I accuse the Obama Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder of defending the current policy in order the grant the President political cover: Obama can always say, on the one hand, I’m personally against DADT; it is Congress that must act, not the courts. He will say this knowing full well that if a Republican-controlled House of Representatives emerges after the mid-term elections, it will place obstacles in his path on all fronts. Thus, if DADT is not repealed under such circumstances, he will say “I was ready to sign a bill repealing it, but Congress would not vote for repeal.” I accuse veteran military men, like Commandant General James Conway, retiring commandant of the Marine Corps, of encouraging defiance toward any change in policy by publicizing unreliable anecdotal evidence indicating that repeal will not work. "When we take a survey of our Marines,” Conway said recently “by and large, they say that they are concerned that it will cause potential problems with regard to their order and discipline -- that it will impact their sense of unit cohesion.” He cited no scientific study, no expert poll, only what his Marines presumably have said “by and large.”

I accuse the U.S. military of propagating a hoax on the American public. If its servicemen and women are so afraid of a chance glance by a member of the same sex in the shower, how can such a person be fit to withstand withering conditions in desert outposts and crumbling towns,in rocky outposts and parched valleys encircled by Taliban snipers or Al Qaeda operatives? How can such a military be publicized as the best in the world, the most prepared? From the Halls of Montezuma to the bathroom urinal—the Marines can fight any enemy to the teeth but their manhood is unmanned by a mere sideways glance? Is the gay marine at his side so powerful a temptation that he will not be able to resist?

The military in this country is under civilian command. The President has the power to act by not defending the untenable DADT act which has been declared unconstitutional in Federal District Court. An immediate order to end any investigation into a uniformed man or woman’s sexual orientation should go out with dispatch, making all commanders, from the highest levels on down, responsible for its enforcement. Maybe Jack Nicholson can resurrect Colonel Nathan R. Jessep from “A Few Good Men” and do a USO tour, checking up on enforcement policy. If you give orders that no one is to touch Santiago, then no one is to touch Santiago. Well, it didn’t work out so well for either Santiago or Jessep, but you get my point. The military can make this work. After all, in the face of Jim Crow, it managed to integrate blacks into the services under Harry Truman’s command.

If you reply that gays and lesbians have no business fighting America’s imperialist wars—an argument I do not dismiss, but do not find persuasive—I tell you that this is a separate matter. A volunteer army must be open to all comers. At such time as we return to the draft, gays and lesbians who do not wish to fight will have to rely on the same moral arguments or pacifism as everyone else. Conscientious objection, like volunteering to serve, must be a privilege and responsibility available in equal measure to all. Till then, I say, give these kids the honor they deserve—for the denial of the right to serve is just one more of America’s ways of keeping LGBT citizens second class. And it is a discussion in the public sphere which young LGBT kids hear all too clearly. It translates: “you aren’t worthy.” Children will listen. I accuse DADT proponents of aiding and abetting the murder of spirit and self-esteem among our LGBT kids. J’accuse ...!

Requiem for Strings

Not since the murder of Matthew Shepard more than a decade ago has the death of a young gay person attracted so much attention as last week’s suicide of Tyler Clementi. In the methods that motivated the boy’s public ‘shaming,’ the tragedy is uniquely one of our times: the video-feed intrusion into the boy’s private sex life by his college roommate; the boy’s discovery of this betrayal, and his roommate’s second attempt to peep into Tyler’s activities; Tyler’s written ruminations on a computer gay-chat site; and the boy’s final decision to jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

The ultimate agony belongs to Tyler Clementi’s parents who, with remarkable forbearance and dignity, issued a statement that read in part: “Our hope is that our family’s personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity.” They issued their remarks amid a media frenzy and outraged calls for increased legal penalties against the roommate, Dharun Rhavi, and his accomplice—perhaps unwitting—Molly Wei. To a great many people, the simple charge of invasion of privacy seemed inadequate to the horrible consequences that had been set in motion by what may have seemed to the perpetrator(s) nothing more than a prank via video-feed.

In the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, we have learned of some six recent cases of cyber-bullying against gay youth, one as young as thirteen, that also resulted in suicides, thus placing the story in a horrible national context. To my mind, this reveals less the evils of cyberspace and more the moral vacuity of our entire media culture, where nearly everyone feels obligated to broadcast every kernel of his and her existence, and nearly no one thinks this is, to use a nineteenth-century word, unseemly.

To be sure, we discuss many things publicly that no one even fifty years ago would think seemly, and that includes homosexuality. Indeed, one of the more remarkable features of the broadcast coverage of this terrible and sad story was how little was made of Tyler’s being gay, in the sense that although it was the fulcrum of the tragedy that ensued, no television reporter I saw misunderstood the horror the boy felt at being ‘outed’ against his will.

As reported here in New York City, the story I saw was always, and properly, about the terrible betrayal a musically talented and shy teenage boy felt at having his private life invaded, and no one questioned why he would, of course, not wish to have one of his sexual encounters with another man broadcast for all to see. The possibilities, though never enunciated, seemed endless: Perhaps these were his first tentative forays into his sexuality. Perhaps he was not yet out to his parents or relatives. Perhaps, as seems to be the case, he was not out to most living in his college dorm and wasn’t ready for that disclosure. He was, by all accounts, a particularly shy young person, a sensitive and talented violinist, and had not yet established a strong social network in the first week’s of his freshman year at college.

He did have the presence of mind to report this virtual home invasion to Rutgers University where he was in attendance as a freshman, although the exact nature of the college’s response is unclear. And he was self-identified enough as a gay youth to know which gay-chat site to use in order to vent his frustrations and perhaps get some useful feedback.

But it would seem he was too young, too untested and untried in life’s vicissitudes, to have the full register of perspective and fortitude to simply ‘gut out’ what must have felt like the most awful shaming to which he had ever been subjected. No one has been named or come forward as the man with whom he was intimate during that first video entrapment, and for that young man’s sake, we can only hope he will not be forced into the brutal glare of media attention simply to slake our age’s unquenchable thirst for every dirty detail.

If this story shocks the conscience of America, so much the better, but some of us are not so much astonished as deeply dismayed and aggrieved. LGBT youth suicide has long been known to be unacceptably high, and the incidence of bullying at all educational stages has only in the last few years finally been understood to have moved beyond the schoolyard into our children’s homes. I am all for youngsters in grade school having cell phones close to hand in case of emergencies, but I am equally fixed in my belief that both etiquette and the law must keep up with the misuse possible with cell phone cameras and related digital communications. Etiquette is too weak a word for what I mean; if children don’t learn ethics as they relate to private and public behavior, then we are risking the rise of a generation whose moral anomie will pervert our sense of common citizenry.

LGBT youth are and have always been all our children. We must hold the feet to the fire of those politicians who believe they can drape themselves in the flag and make excuses for the inequalities enshrined in law—“don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) a prime example, but then so many others come to mind. Young people internalize the hate messages they hear in the public square; they need to know that others, straight and gay, find them unacceptable. If it were only the outrages of a Fred Phelps with his sick demonstrations at the funerals of American soldiers, it would be bad enough. That demented devil is so over the top as to seem as hysterical as Father Coughlin was toward the Jews in the 1930s. Alas, worse are the not so subtle betrayals of our LGBT youth by "respectable" public figures like Senator John McCain, for whom DADT is merely a political football to be played to whatever goal line works best for the Republican Party.

But let us not lose sight of Tyler Clementi, a boy whose loneliness in those last hours must have felt inconsolable. Yes, we have anti-bullying media campaigns under way, like Dan Savage’s which presents queer celebs and achievers tell in a series of short videos how they were once bullied but have been able to move past it—how their adult life has gotten better and they are doing what they were always meant to do. I don’t mean to dismiss these out of hand, but ironically, they enforce the fake intimacy our young people mistake for the real thing. I wonder how effective these will be. It seems to me that in the absence of real personal support with adult authorities both gay and straight, and in the absence of institutions assuming the responsibility of in loco parentis, and in the absence of serious penalties for bullying of all kinds, lonely queer kids under extraordinary peer pressure will continue to have their self-esteem steamrolled, crushed, replaced by an overwhelming sense of shame. Their emotions will be pulled taut as a string. A violin string. And tightened just ever so much too much—they snap.