Nice Time! Pentagon Finally To Fix Records Of Vets Dishonorably Discharged For Gay!
Oh no the military is woke again.
After years of legal wrangling, the Pentagon has finally reached a legal settlement in a 2023 civil rights lawsuit on behalf of 35,801 LGBTQ military veterans who were dismissed because of their sexual orientation under previous anti-gay military policies, including “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which was repealed nearly 14 years ago.
All the vets had been asking for was to streamline the process of updating and re-issuing their records, which seems like not much of an ask, and yet in the year of our Lord 2025, here they were still asking.
Many of the veterans were denied an honorable discharge, making them ineligible for benefits like loan programs, VA health care, the GI Bill, or re-enlistment, and had their privacy violated by putting the reason for discharge on their separation papers. It cost people jobs when their forms ominously made them sound like criminals with wording like “misconduct commission of a serious offense.”
The Government had conceded both the discriminatory nature and the harmful effects of these discharges and the resulting paperwork. Yet it was still demanding a process that took months or years to correct the forms, and forcing the veterans to individually prove that they were discriminated against, and only about one in three were actually successful in getting their paperwork changed.
A truly insane number of people have been discharged from the military just for being gay, about 100,000 since World War II, according to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. In 1942, the military sought to avoid recruits with “psychiatric disorders” after so many veterans returned from World War I with serious mental health issues, and back then homosexuality was labeled as a kind of psychopathy. It couldn’t be that “shell shock” came from fighting with bayonets in disease- and vermin-choked muddy trenches, it had to be that “imaginative,” “poetic” and “molly-coddled” men were pre-disposed to “grand hysteria,” you see.
In World War II, recruiters were warned to look out for men with “an effeminate flip of hand,” and men who drew pictures of other men with feminine characteristics. Even in the middle of the war, when every person was needed for the effort, a gay witch-hunt was going on. Soldiers were interrogated about their sexuality, and court-martialed for things like writing or receiving affectionate letters to people of the same sex, or being named as belonging to a “homosexual ring,” and imprisoned until they signed confessions that they were gay. Oddly, though, drag shows were very popular, go figure, they called them “girly” show choreography and “pony ballet numbers.”
Here’s a fascinating documentary about gay soldiers in World War II, “Coming Out Under Fire,” which is free on Kanopy with a library card.
“Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue” was a Clinton administration directive that was supposed to end the witch hunt part, though it didn’t always, and the military still discharged about 13,500 people just for being gay. In 2010 the Log Cabin Republicans filed a lawsuit that the policy was a violation of rights, they won, and military recruiters were told they could begin to accept openly gay applicants. Yes, those Log Cabin Republicans once did something besides defrosting Melania for that one campaign appearance!
This settlement must still be approved by a federal judge, and presuming it is, finally this decades-long wrong will begin to get righted.
[CBS News/ Sherrill Farrell, Steven Egland, James Gonzales, Julianne Sohn, et al, v. US Department of Defense/ National World War 2 museum/ Dodman T. In: Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I]
Because where you decide you like to stick your penis (or lady parts if applicable) is totally germane to whether you are capable of gun shooting and other militaristic activities, natch. But for real, it's hard enough finding recruits for the military these days, why would the government limit the pool of applicants for stupid, non-relevant reasons?
I always have to tell this story.
Grandpa was career Navy since graduating from the academy (just a few years before President Carter--and he went on to serve on nuclear submarines too!). Anyway, while in college, around the time of DADT, a guy at a bar was talking all about how nobody in the miliary would want to serve with (word I won't use).
Fine, I said. I called Grandpa from a payphone (remember the times, all) and asked him--"Grandpa--you commanded submarines, close quarters, for 20 years--what would you think if there were gay men on there?"
Long pause.
"Well, Scout (he always called me Scout)--I assume there were. Mighty glad to have them, too."
He went on to say it was none of his business and none of my business either.
I told this story in his eulogy.