One of the major policy disputes of 1993 bears the label "gays in the military." But this label is misleading; gays are not the main issue. When advocates of letting avowed homosexuals serve in the military argue that gays and lesbians are just as loyal, able, and brave as their "straight" counterparts, opponents rarely dissent.
The issue is not the military competence of homosexuals, but the fears of heterosexuals in the military. Officers fear a breakdown of morale and good order, but most of the grounds they cite are easily dismissed. They say that they fear the unpredictable effects of love affairs between soldiers (but homosexual love affairs already happen in the military); they fear the open practice of sex in the barracks (but President Clinton has reaffirmed the ban on such behavior); and they fear harassment of soldiers by gay and lesbian superiors (but experience in other settings shows that if the military had a clear, well-enforced sexual harassment policy, it could minimize such incidents. Further, in the wake of the Tailhook scandal, there are signs that the military may be getting serious about opposing sexual harassment.)
Still, there is one concern that is not so easily dismissed. That is the fear that many servicemen will behave in a hostile and disruptive fashion toward gay and lesbian colleagues. As if to prove the point, three marines savagely beat a man at a gay bar in North Carolina this winter, claiming that they wanted to send a message to President Clinton. The problem of "gays in the military," then, is not so much a matter of what gays will do, but what non-gays will do and how they feel about homosexuality. The problem is homophobia.
To those of us who have grown up in the mid- to late-20th century, homophobia seems to be a given. So does homosexuality as we know it. Yet these are time-bound phenomena. The work of scholars in two new fields-men's studies and gay and lesbian history-provides a context for the current debate over military policy.
Some of us who study the history of male roles are trying to understand the part that homophobia has played in defining manhood. We are heavily influenced by scholars such as Jonathan Katz, Estelle Freedman, and John D'Emilio-pioneers in the study of homosexuality in United States history. Research in both men's studies and gay and lesbian history has turned up some surprising facts that show that homophobia is not biologically driven, but prompted by learned cultural behavior.
First, we should remember that the ban on homosexuals in the military is only have a century old. This fact is vitally important, because it suggests that the ban derives from the fears of recent generations of men.
The relevant historical context goes back well beyond 50 years, though. Scholars have shown that open, affectionate, loving, same-sex relationships existed in the military through much of American history. When Alexander Hamilton was serving as an aide to George Washington during the American Revolution, he wrote to another member of Washington's inner circle: "I wish . . . [to] convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that 'till you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you" (The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Columbia University Press, 1961).
We do not know whether Hamilton's love for this friend was platonic or erotic, but we do know that such intimate friendships and romantic words were acceptable within military culture. There is 19th-century evidence that such relationships existed openly in settings as different as the United States Military Academy at West Point and Civil War hospitals.
These same-sex relationships were not limited to the military. Historians working in a wide variety of fields have found them throughout the historical record of early and middle 19th century. Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among the men who enjoyed variants of romantic friendship with other men. These ties were socially acceptable, and they certainly did not undermine good order in the military or anywhere else that they existed. Nor were such relationships unique to men. This form of friendship was first brought to wide attention in the historical profession by the women's historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, who found that these relationships were very common among women in the late 18th to the middle 19th century.
Historians often use the phrase "romantic friendship" for such bonds, for it makes clear that these relationships had an element of infatuation that is not an accepted part of friendship today. But the term is deliberately ambiguous, because the sexual nature of these bonds is unclear. For most of these relationships, we lack the evidence to say whether there was a sexual dimension, and if so, what kind.
More to the point, 19th-century people did not ask whether these were sexual liaisons. They knew that people of the same sex might engage in erotic acts together, but the prevailing view held that these acts were isolated instances, expressions of sin that could be repented. Historians of homosexuality tell us that people of that era could not imagine that such act were the results of a lasting sexual orientation, much less that such an orientation could be the source of a social identity. The very words "homosexual" and "homosexuality" did not exist. Men and women could indulge in romantic friendships with people of the same sex without worrying that their embraces or words of love made them homosexual.
The conditions that would produce the modern concept of homosexuality were taking shape during the 19th century, though. As more and more Americans clustered in large cities, immigrants from the countryside who felt a continuing attraction to their own sex discovered that they were not alone. The anonymity of city life enabled these gays and lesbians to form their own social groupings during the middle and lager years of the 19th century. From this experience, a sense of common social identity began to form.
But such a sense of identity was not enough to spread a concept of homosexuality abroad in a society. That happened as a generation of heterosexual men in the late 19th century observed or came into contact with these gay and lesbian groups and developed a kind of folk wisdom about their meaning. For instance, these heterosexual men viewed males with "feminine" mannerisms as homosexuals, but did not label "masculine" men homosexual regardless of their sexual behavior. Such beliefs were formalized in medical thought and social-science theory by scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The same men who helped to shape our modern concept of homosexuality at the turn of the century also created the form of homophobia that we know today. Their homophobia grew out of their redefinition of manhood. These men-scholars, politicians, businessmen, and artists-found little value in inherited concepts of manhood. Earlier generations of elite men, bred in the pre- industrial era, had emphasized certain traits such as individual autonomy, self-reliance, and a refusal to bow to a power or position as marks of manliness. But, at the turn of the century, when great corporations and large bureaucracies were emerging, men felt threatened as these traits became hard to practice. Men of privilege also felt threatened by women's public demands for suffrage and other forms of power.
These men turned to elemental concepts in their attempts to root their sense of manhood more securely. Their turn to the primitive reassured and invigorated them by providing a feeling of connection to mighty, "natural" forces at a moment when they felt threatened. Toughness, aggression, and the vigorous expression of primal energies became signs of manhood. Whereas earlier generations had viewed "effeminacy" as a matter of dependence, laziness, and addiction to luxury, men of a hundred years ago conceived a more physical meaning of effeminacy-a soft voice, a weak frame, demure manners, a gentle disposition. They turned "sissy" from a little-used word for sister to a popular term of contempt for male who lacked hardiness and toughness.
As the 20th century began, this new scorn for men who seemed like women began to form the basis for our modern homophobia. While there were many kinds of men in gay communities, the ones who drew the attention of "straight" observers at the turn of the century had feminine manners or feminine tastes or like to dress in women's clothing. Thus, society came to see male homosexuals as people with women's souls trapped in male bodies. In the same manner, lesbians were typed as mannish women. The new generations of social and medical scientists explained to the rest of the world that homosexuality represented an inversion of the sex instinct (which they assumed was naturally heterosexual) and that, in social terms, homosexuals inverted the standard sex roles and gender types.
In an era when men were especially sensitive about their own toughness and masculinity, the male homosexual provided a particular focus for men's anxieties, a negative referent whose existence clarified the manliness of those who were not like him. Homophobia became a vessel for men's fears about their own "feminine" needs and traits and a vehicle for enforcing the new, demanding code of manhood.
The new manhood-and the new homophobia-had countless implications. For the current debate over gays in the military, an important outcome was the same-sex love, whether erotic or platonic, now produced intolerable anxiety for many men, especially in all-male settings such as the military. As historian George Chauncey, Jr., has demonstrated in a landmark study published in the _Journal of Social History_ in 1985, this anxiety was expressed in a series of investigations of homosexual behavior at the Newport Naval Training Station in 1919 and 1920. For example, a prominent minister, accused of soliciting homosexual contacts among sailors, replied that he was offering them chaste Christian love and brotherhood. Although he was eventually exonerated by a Senate committee, his name and behavior were help up to public scorn-a stern warning to others who might be tempted to pursue the old form of single-sex, romantic friendship.
The homophobia that created these investigations did not abate. According to historian Allan Berube, the armed services began to screen out homosexuals shortly before Pearl Harbor. Although the screen was easy to slip through and gays and lesbians served in large numbers in World War II, the military began a major purge of suspected homosexuals right after the war.
This effort quickly became caught up in the hysteria over domestic Communism that accompanied the start of the cold war. The search for an obscure, faceless "enemy within" U.S. society drew on an imaginary foe who was a concoction of political paranoia, homophobia, and the class anxieties of the men who led the search. The result was a series of locality acts and executive orders that made this stew of cultural fears into a code of rules and directives. It is the part of this code banning military service by avowed homosexuals that President Clinton seeks to undo.
The cold war is over now. Most people do not think that homosexuals are less loyal to their country than is any other social group. What threatens to hold the ban in place is homophobia. As long as it is connected to feelings of manhood, homophobia will be a significant cultural force-especially in an institution, such as the military, that is widely viewed as an arena for testing and building manliness.
Yet history offers us some glimmer of hope. Our own national past is enough to show us that homophobia as we know it is not permanent, universal, or biological. It is cultural and therefore learned. If homophobia is learned, then it can be unlearned-not easily, not overnight or in a year, and perhaps not completely in a generation. But the homophobia that lies at the root of the "gays in the military" problem can be uprooted.
Those of us who have studied issues bearing on homophobia have an obligation to speak out about what we know and to urge members of Congress to take our knowledge into account when they consider President Clinton's recommendations later this year. We cannot allow learned fear to dictate the personnel policy of a major public institution. We should not let an acquired prejudice deny to the armed forces the full measure of talent from which they might draw if gay and lesbian Americans could serve without denying who they are.
E. Anthony Rotundo is instructor in history and social science