Secret Handshakes and Decoder Rings: The Queer Space of Don't Ask/Don't Tell

Abstract

Don't Ask/Don't Tell (DADT) prohibits gays and lesbians from openly serving in the US military on the basis that out gays and lesbians will decrease the military's ability to function by harming the military's strong levels of camaraderie and cohesion within its ranks. Based on interviews with gay and lesbian military veterans, I find that DADT is a site of multiple paradoxes around both gay identity and the military as a whole. Rather than protect or strengthen the camaraderie and cohesion in the military, these bonds that connect members of the military are weakened by requiring gay and lesbian personnel to hide part of themselves from fellow soldiers. Further, in prohibiting gay identities from being openly expressed, DADT actually creates a queer space in which military gays and lesbians interact with one another and create their own form of military gay identity.Keywords Don't ask, don't tell . Military . Gay identity . Queer theory . Queer space Under the US military's Don't Ask/Don't Tell (DADT) law, 1 gays and lesbians are allowed to serve on the condition that their sexual orientation remains private; in other words, when it comes to a person's homosexuality, the military won't ask, the service member shouldn't tell, and no one is ever supposed to find out. DADT mandates this exclusion of apparent homosexuality on the basis of protecting military functionality. This mandate of privacy (which really is a mandate of secrecy, as the issue is not so much about homosexuality as about the management of information around homosexuality) is justified as a matter of public concern and can be thought of as a furtherance of the military as a total institution (Goffman 1961); however, the effect of the law works in opposition to its intent. Rather than enhancing military performance and protecting the military's strong levels of camaraderie and cohesion, the mandated silence of gay and lesbian identity under DADT instead weakens these very connections. Drawing on interviews with gay and lesbian military veterans, I will show the double binds that this privacy-secrecy mandate creates for gay and lesbian personnel and the ways in which it actually harms military cohesion. Further, I argue that while DADT expects gay people to stay silent about their sexuality, it also disrupts the total institutional aspect of the military by creating what I will call a "queer space" in which allegedly hidden gay identities are created and expressed, and this mandated silence is rarely kept. This queer space is a disruption to the supposed uniform identity production at the heart of the military as total institution process and is instead a space in which a supposedly not allowed gay military identity can be articulated. At its core, this is a story of the ways in which DADT is played out through social interaction.I will begin with a review of my methodology and a very brief overview of the content (and context) of the DADT law. I will then explore the interrelated themes of privacysecrecy and camaraderie and the contradictory and pa...

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