Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (24 page)

It soon became clear that we did not have the majority necessary to block this amendment. Dole had successfully turned LGBT rights into a partisan issue. Just as important, Senator Sam Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was, we discovered, a strong opponent of LGBT equality. Several years earlier, I learned, he had fired two staff members when he found out that they were gay, on security clearance grounds—demonstrating that the 1954 executive order was more than symbolically damaging to us. A few years later, when Ted Kennedy forced a Senate vote on a bill protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, Nunn was one of only five Democratic senators out of forty-six to vote no. And in a very revealing statistic, he was, at fifty-eight, the only one of the Democratic opponents of the bill who was under seventy. His homophobia was too deeply rooted to be weakened by his generation’s changing views. To make matters worse, Nunn was a respected authority on military affairs and highly influential on his fellow Southern Democrats.

Nunn made it clear that if Clinton removed the military ban, he would support Dole’s amendment to the FMLA reinstating it. Clinton was in a box: He could allow us to serve in the military only by vetoing the FMLA, depriving his allies in the women’s movement of the achievement of their number-one goal.

In the end, Nunn did yield to the claims of party solidarity to some degree. He agreed to oppose Dole’s ploy if Clinton promised to hold off on abolishing the ban for several months, and to consult with Nunn and the military leadership. At that point, White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum asked me my opinion about how Clinton should proceed. My answer was as obvious as it was painful. I told him that I agreed with postponing the repeal, assuming that the administration would work with us to build support for another try. Nussbaum assured me that they were committed to doing so.

Nunn helped defeat Dole’s amendment in a partisan vote—and the family leave bill was signed into law. It has since been a great benefit to working people, especially women.

Over the next several months, I was in continuous discussions with administration officials as they worked to win the support of military leaders. I also sought to change the political equation in Congress. I had good relations with Les Aspin, Clinton’s secetary of defense. He’d been an important liberal House member and was totally committed to the success of our effort. I had less confidence in my allies in the LGBT community. They were getting the politics wrong.

Given the left’s vision of itself as the tribune of the people, it’s a bitter irony that conservatives have proved so much better at grassroots advocacy. They are likelier to forcefully inform members of Congress of their policy preferences; liberals are more inclined to hold public demonstrations, in which like-minded people gather to reassure each other of their beliefs. Writing or calling your representatives and senators, and organizing others to do so as well, is not inherently exciting and relies on the implicit belief that representative government works as it should. Applauding speakers who denounce the unfairness of a particular situation and rail against the political system is more emotionally satisfying—but very much less effective. After years of pleading with allies to favor the first course over the second, I formulated a rule: If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.

While our side held rallies, our opponents were flooding Congress with messages. I hoped that this disparity would galvanize LGBT leaders into effective action, but it did not. “You’ve got to get your people to contact us,” lamented one of our strongest allies, Senator Dick Durbin. He said this not because he was wavering in his support but because he knew how the absence of constituent pressure would affect many of our colleagues.

The unwillingness of the LGBT community to act effectively in its own interest manifested itself most dramatically in April 1993, when hundreds of thousands of us gathered in Washington for the community’s third mass demonstration against homophobia. It was called “The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.”

I was looking forward to the march. On the personal side, it was an opportunity to alleviate the deep regret I felt over letting my fear of exposure keep me away from the first march, in 1979. When I reminisced about that event to Gerry Studds, who was also closeted in 1979, he told me that he had changed the route of his daily jog that day so he could at least pass by the Mall, where the march was being held.

On the day before the 1993 March, Speaker Foley visited the house where Herb and I lived for a widely advertised reception kicking off the weekend. I was deeply grateful. Foley was courageously refusing to be intimidated by the rumor that had been spread about him in 1989. His political risk didn’t end there. After he’d accepted my invitation, he learned that an event was scheduled in his district celebrating a major project he’d helped to fund. His attendance there was politically very important. I told him that I would be deeply disappointed—indeed, embarrassed—if he didn’t attend my event, because I had made so much of the historic significance of his doing so. He agreed to stay in D.C., sending his wife to represent him in Spokane. I could not have been happier, especially when so many LGBT people showed up, and Foley spoke from our steps to a crowd that overflowed our home and filled a full block of the street outside. But this story had an unhappy ending, which still troubles me. Foley was defeated in the next election, ending an extremely valuable thirty-year career. He lost for several reasons: his brave support for a gun control bill, his lawsuit against his own state’s term limits law, and the strong anti-Democratic tide that gave the Republicans their first House majority in forty-two years. Foley lost by a narrow margin, and I continue to regret pressing him to miss the event in his district—especially as my own ego was a factor. In all honesty, my demand that he attend my event was issued not only for the good of our cause. I also wanted to demonstrate my effectiveness to my critics on the left.

At the time of the march, the military ban still awaited congressional action. Seven hundred thousand marchers had come to town, but as Tim McFeeley, the executive director of the leading LGBT organization, the Human Rights Campaign, notes in
Creating Change
, “Only a few hundred of the marchers bothered to lobby their members of Congress.” To my deep disappointment, the march confirmed my impression that many of my allies preferred undisciplined self-expression to serious participation in the political processs. There were eloquent appeals to allow us to serve our country. But their impact was substantially diluted, if not obliterated, by the antics of those McFeeley describes as “foulmouthed entertainers and bizarrely costumed revelers.” One prominent lesbian comedian exulted that there was finally a first lady she would like to “fuck”—her remark was carried live by C-SPAN and widely cheered by the march audience. If Nunn and Dole were watching, they must have been grateful.

I take credit for preventing what would have been an even greater disaster. As I waited behind the stage to be introduced, I was horrified to see nine or ten of the gay soldiers who had been victimized by the ban standing shoulder to shoulder, beginning a rhythmic kick routine, with accompanying campy gestures. Nothing could have been more devastating to our argument that LGBT people would blend comfortably into the military than a photo—or worse, a video—of these guys lined up not to march but to emulate the Rockettes. The soldiers agreed to halt their routine, though not without expressing their anger at me. Not for the last time, I was told I was too culturally restrained to be a gay leader. (In 2011, when I disassociated myself from outrageous, abusive comments made about Senator Scott Brown’s family by the comedian Kathy Griffin, she responded that I was obviously an inhibited straight man pretending to be gay.)

There were obvious parallels between the 1993 gathering and the civil rights movement’s great March on Washington in 1963. But the differences were far greater, and entirely to our disadvantage. A. Philip Randolph, the patriarch of the antiracist movement, put Bayard Rustin in charge of organizing the march and supervising the speaking program. The result was a series of disciplined, powerful messages calculated to have the maximum beneficial effect. John Lewis reports that he had to submit multiple copies of his speech to Rustin for vetting. In one case he was told that he could not say “the people demand” equality because it would sound too radical. The contrast between that great sober, moving occasion and the antics at our march could not have been greater. If a black comedian had begun to joke about having sex with Jackie Kennedy, he would have been thrown in the Reflecting Pool, not cheered.

In addition to being disappointed in the march, I was disappointed in the ad hoc organization that the LGBT community created to manage our effort—the Campaign for Military Service. The leaders of this group, David Mixner and Tom Stoddard, were talented men with impressive track records. I admired their past work, but I differed sharply with their strategy in this case. (Candor requires a personal note here: Stoddard and I had dated for a few months, but when that ended, we remained friends, and there was no ill feeling on either side—until strategic and tactical differences inevitably took on a personal dimension.)

In the aftermath of the Family and Medical Leave duel, Nunn campaigned obsessively to build support for maintaining the ban. He used his chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee to conduct a series of hearings and in a notable instance even held a session aboard a submarine. The event yielded photos of senators in narrow sleeping quarters asking young men if they wanted a gay roommate, with the press avidly recording their answers. Most of them did not. In response, I correctly noted that Nunn was spending more of the committee’s time on us than on more important military issues, such as NATO, and I unwisely accused him of being obsessed with sex. Asked about my comment days later on
Meet the Press
, he effectively thanked me for trying to make him seem more interesting than he was but deferred to me as the man more focused on sex—the Gobie incident had faded, but not disappeared, from memory.

While Nunn worked the press and the public, the Campaign for Military Service was doing very little that I could see to counter him. The CMS’s fundamental error was to act as if they were trying to win an election rather than influence Congress. In electoral campaigns, they correctly noted, early leads in the polls often dissipate, and given limited resources, the best course is to make your major push close to Election Day. But the analogy did not work. Members of Congress are under great pressure to make up their minds early and are rarely able to change them due to prevailing political winds. Throughout the late winter and spring, representatives and senators were being asked to declare themselves, predominantly by constituents who strongly opposed our position.

Meanwhile, CMS was doing little to counter Nunn in Congress. In a decision that I found especially inexplicable, the CMS leaders requested that I ask Nunn’s House committee counterpart, Ron Dellums, to cancel a hearing in which he planned to defend our position. I was appalled. We had no better ally than Dellums, a highly principled African American leader whose experience in the Marine Corps in the 1950s had deepened his own fierce opposition to bias. As a young recruit of considerable ability, Dellums told me, he had been approached by a superior who urged him to apply to become an officer. Dellums is light skinned, and with his Marine-regulation shaved head, there was no indication of his race. When he presented himself as ordered, the officer in charge looked at him closely and asked, “Private, what is your race?” Dellums responded, “Sir, Negro, sir.” He heard no more about promotion.

As one of the leading authorities in the House on the needs of the armed services, and as a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, Dellums was ideally positioned to offset both the damage Powell had done as well as Nunn’s efforts. But when I objected to asking Dellums to cancel his hearing, Stoddard explained that his group had a carefully planned strategy in which a House hearing had no place. I conveyed the message to Dellums, who complied, though he was understandably offended. I soon came to regret this decision as much as any I have made in my career. I resolved that I would never again let myself be intimidated by the demands of movement solidarity when I thought them unwise.

As the debate proceeded to our disadvantage, the time for hard choices had come. By May, after the public relations failure of the march on Washington, it was clear that we would not have the votes we needed for repeal. At that point, I did what I could to avoid the full defeat I knew was coming.

Both Nunn and Powell defended the ban by insisting that morale would be harmed if the heterosexual majority knew there were gays in their midst. Given this, I argued, it should be entirely acceptable for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to serve, as long as we refrained from conversation or activity that revealed our sexual orientation while we were on duty. According to the ban’s own defenders, there was no good reason to restrict our freedom when we were not on military bases or in the field with other military personnel. And so I publicly proposed allowing LGBT people to serve in a sexually neutral way when performing their military duties, while remaining free to express their sexuality at other times.

Admittedly, this proposal had little application to that minority of the armed services who at any given time might be engaged in combat overseas—in that context, off duty has no meaning. But for those not in combat, whether stationed in the United States or a foreign country, there would be many opportunities to be themselves in a relaxed way without in any way involving their straight comrades. Gay men who were able to live off base could do so with male partners without fear that a passing neighbor might report them. Lesbians could go to bars or restaurants without fear that they might be photographed and subsequently penalized. People could march in gay pride parades—in civilian clothes—without worrying that a TV shot would end their military careers. As I saw it, refraining from discussing our sexuality with fellow members of the military was a restriction, but not an intolerable one. In fact, it did not greatly differ from how a majority of LGBT people behaved at the time in civilian occupations.