A lot of people defended the homecoming kiss featured on a post a while ago, saying if people have a problem with it they don’t belong in the military. I’m sure it’s a pretty common point of view that if a homosexual man wants to join up and serve his country, he should be able to do so without facing any restrictions heterosexual men don’t face. It’s a natural sentiment. Fair’s fair, right?
On the face of it, this seems to be a pretty reasonable outlook. Common human decency definitely suggests it is. However, problems remain, and the acceptance of open homosexuality in the armed forces will have long-term, adverse consequences on the effectiveness and integrity of the US military.
Most of the studies that suggest the effects will be short-term and limited project only a couple years into the future. It’s difficult to make projections much farther than that; our ability to plan for and predict the future remains limited (for example, the People’s Republic of China is stretching it with its “five-year plans” and often screws up). However, there are a few examples and current trends that give us an idea of what we can expect long term.
First, let’s take a look at another mostly male institution that became notorious for having a large number of homosexuals: the Roman Catholic Church. Some time after WWII, homosexuality came to be tolerated in the Catholic Church, and within a generation or so it became entrenched. The result was a very powerful gay lobby within the church itself, rising costs associated with the proliferation of AIDS throughout the priesthood, alienation of majority heterosexual seminarians and a string of scandals, mainly involving adolescent boys, that have cost the church incalculable losses.
Why did tolerance of homosexuality in the church have this effect? Is it something about homosexuals themselves, that they are particularly bad and salacious people? No, not really. It isn’t a gay problem, but a human problem. In fact, in large part it is a men’s problem.
The problem is sex. It’s already a huge issue with straight servicemembers; fraternization is out of control. The costs in terms of health (pregnancy, STDs) and morale are already high, and will only rise as the military becomes a gender-equal environment. However, straight fraternization is self-limiting to some extent. Women get pregnant and become mothers, people get married and settle down, families of one sort or another exert some regulating behavior on the part of both men and women. This regulating factor is all but absent where homosexual men are concerned, because… they are men. And, even where straight servicemembers are concerned, the costs are probably unsustainable. Given the high costs of childcare and prenatal care, something will have to give somewhere. Taxpayers will not happily fund multi-billion dollar floating maternity wards forever.
Where gay sex is concerned, the primary direct costs will be STDs, which are cheaper to deal with than pregnancy and childcare, but there will be other far more problematic issues. Favoritism, for example, will be unavoidable. If homosexuals fraternize at the same rate as heterosexual soldiers, there will be a lot of gay sex on base. Of course, because gay men are men, and there is nothing to restrain them besides the lack of other gay men, fraternization in a military that allows recruits to serve as openly practicing homosexuals will likely be more common and frequent amongst gay soldiers than it is with straights. If straight fraternization is ignored, and it is, why would the military put any more effort into dealing with homosexual fraternization? Rather than stamp out gay sex, straight men prefer to ignore it. Anyone who has lived in a large West Coast city over the last few decades knows that straight cops generally leave gay men alone, even when they turn city parks into open-air orgies. When you’re a straight guy, it’s last thing you want to have to deal with.
Men, gay and straight alike, are often happy with a quid pro quo sexual arrangement. It’s the basis of marriage, in truth. However, for homosexuals, it’s often a much more casual arrangement. Gay marriage is an odd concept in large part because gay men in general are perfectly happy to avoid marriage, and when they are involved in relationships fooling around isn’t as much of an issue as it is for straights. Monogamy is not the gay norm any more than it is the heterosexual male norm, but for homosexuals there’s no issue of children and pregnancy to keep them in line. So, inevitably, there will a be lot of trading favors for sex, from the brass all the way down to the battlefield. Lest anyone accuse me of exaggerating the fraternization issue, I’d suggest reading about how female-staffed anti-aircraft battalions on the Eastern Front in WWII became de facto brothels. Or, if you’d like a more recent example, perhaps the disciplined Taliban’s routing of the Northern Alliance prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan.
What do the Taliban and and the Northern Alliance have to do with gays in the military? Afghanistan is notorious for a practice known as “bacha bazi.” In the extremely oppressive heterosexual environment, male Afghans find release in dancing boys, who perform songs and dances in drag. One Afghan saying goes something like this: “women are for making babies; boys are for pleasure.” Bacha bazi is a very old practice, and was rampant in the mid-19th century when Richard Francis Burton was assigned to the area as a British officer. A saying about Kandahar in particular is that “even the birds fly over the city with only one wing (using the other to cover their rear).” Burton was tasked with investigating a male prostitution ring in Afghanistan back in the 1840s, because high-ranking officers were concerned about British troops and officers taking part in the bacha bazi festivities. The current investigative reports on bacha bazi indicate that things have changed little in that part of the world over the centuries.
As for Taliban involvement, what happened was that the Taliban, being primarily a military movement, decided to ban bacha bazi to increase combat effectiveness and put an end to the corruption it engendered. The measure bore fruit: as rival commanders waged pitched battles with each other over lovers, the efficient and dedicated Taliban cleaned up in the field and conquered the country. Back in 1994, Mullah Omar himself personally intervened to save one Kandahar boy from being raped at the hands of feuding generals, who faced off with tanks to settle the matter of who got the boy. Now that the US has invaded and effectively pushed the Taliban out of large parts of the country, bacha bazi has returned in force.
The lesson is that when you allow sex to permeate a male institution, you will lose some efficiency and a lot of cohesion. We all know the story of Agamemnon and Achilles, who feuded over Achilles’ slave girl Briseis, costing the Greeks lost battles and men, and nearly the war. Men will do all sorts of things, without even realizing what they’re doing, to obtain sex. They will badmouth each other, they will procure favors for the object of their desire, they will lie, and they will fight. It makes no difference whether the lover is male or female; the impulse is the same. This is why one of the last things you want in a martial institution is sex within the ranks. It is one of several reasons women should be banned from all combat units and segregated into their own auxiliary corps, and it is why open homosexuality cannot be tolerated in a military such as ours without paying a heavy price.
It would be nice to assume that gay men are capable of controlling themselves and avoiding fraternization in the ranks, but if they are anything like straight men in that regard it’s highly unlikely they will. Given that gay sexual fraternization occurred even before the ban was lifted (a gay veteran friend of mine confirmed it was easy enough to find a willing partner), it would be very naïve, and actually quite backward, of us to assume that it will cease now that homosexuality is tolerated in the military.
Homosexual men can and have been great warriors and leaders. There is no doubt that they can fight, and countless have sacrificed themselves for their country. However, their abilities and sacrifices, as noble as they are, cannot overcome the fact that suppression of homosexuality is crucial to institutional integrity in a military context. Yes, suppression. This is what the military does. It suppresses our instincts, and sometimes our better nature, to accomplish its goals and fulfill its mandate. It’s one of those inherently unfair things about the world, and in more realistic, practical times people understood that without thinking twice. Regardless of whether open homosexuality is tolerated in the military or not, there will always be homosexual soldiers, but to maintain the integrity of the armed forces, they will have to make the extra sacrifice of silence as long as they serve under command. A hard reality, but unfortunately necessary.
However, I don’t expect us to revert to the old ways. Our society has grown too tolerant, too soft, and too short-sighted to take measures to preserve itself and restore its vigor. Rather than go back to the values that put us in the position of power we have inherited, we will simply coast along on the momentum until we are a corrupt, senile old bureaucratic state like the late Qing and Ottoman empires. This is the way of the world. In the meanwhile, at least, lots of people will have a good time.
