Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (25 page)

There were several reasons why I considered my compromise preferable to the status quo. First, it would constitute an official acknowledgment that LGBT people were valuable members of the military. Second, allowing LGBT people to socialize and enjoy intimate relationships with each other would clearly improve the quality of their lives. Finally, I believed that even if LGBT soldiers strove to maintain a bright line between on-base and off-base behavior, some of their comrades would learn who they really were. Getting to know their gay colleagues as individuals would gradually erode the prejudice that upheld the ban.

There were two very strong reactions to my proposal.

President Clinton was pleased. Congress was still threatening to attach the ban to a bill he would have to sign for other reasons. He did not want to participate in his own repudiation and was eager for a way out. The evening my proposal appeared in the newspaper, he called me at home to thank me and to promise to work as hard as he could to achieve the best possible result.

The LGBT community responded with outrage. I was taken aback. I had not expected my plan to be warmly welcomed, but I was troubled that many movement leaders seemed eager to blame me for a defeat that was already inevitable, thanks in large part to their own ineptitude. I was especially disappointed in my colleague Gerry Studds, with whom I had previously worked in complete harmony. Earlier that spring he had dejectedly told me it was obvious we had lost. At that time I told him I thought it was too soon to give up and that we should try to find some better approach. But when I publicly acknowledged we were not going to triumph, he joined those who blamed me for conceding prematurely.

I was even more disappointed in those leaders of LGBT organizations who knew as well as I did that we had lost the all-out fight. They were afraid to tell their most activist supporters the truth. As I frequently told them, I found this ironic: The very people who criticized elected officials for putting political expediency ahead of moral courage found it hard to stand up to their own constituents when they knew it was desirable to do so.

In the spring, I began working with the Clinton administration to see if a version of my proposal could be adopted. At Clinton’s direction, Les Aspin spoke with generals and admirals about my idea. General Powell, Aspin told me, had expressed a willingness to support a version of it, but only if other members of the Joint Chiefs also supported a meaningful compromise. Unfortunately, the other chiefs flatly refused any such accommodation. Given the political situation, it was clear that Congress would not approve anything over the brass’s objections. We had lost.

At President Clinton’s urging, the military did then grudgingly agree to the face-saving proposal that came to be known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It differed sharply from the provision I had advocated. Under the new proposal, LGBT service members would face dismissal if they were discovered in any activity that exposed their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if it had no connection to their military duties. Any expression of their true selves, anytime, anywhere, anyplace, could have harsh consequences.

To my disappointment, Clinton put the policy forward as if it were an advance. The harm was not only rhetorical. The fact that the president, who’d been our champion, was calling this discriminatory measure a good thing would make our efforts to get rid of it harder. And so we needed to counteract the impression his words created. Working in close agreement with LGBT leaders, I pushed for votes in both the House and Senate that would at least allow sympathetic members to register that the fight was not over. My Massachusetts colleague Marty Meehan introduced our amendment in the House, and Barbara Boxer did so in the Senate. We lost in both houses, but at least we received Democratic majorities. This allowed us to keep alive the argument that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was being adopted in opposition to our desires and legitimate needs.

Though it made no sense to say so at the time, DADT was not entirely meretricious on paper. Had it been properly applied, it could have been of some benefit to some service members. As the policy was articulated, service members who took great pains to conceal their sexual orientation should have been protected. But to their great discredit, many commanders interpreted our political defeat as a mandate to root out gay, lesbian, and bisexual members. Some were expelled after others read their private mail or looked into their computers. Others were victimized by former lovers who decided to inform on them. In none of these cases could it be said they had “told” their status. Sadly, Clinton allowed these witch hunts, as they were accurately called, to go forward unhindered.

Years later, I got a vivid glimpse of how the policy might actually have fostered some improvement. I was speaking with Steve Morin, a police officer in the town of Raynham, Massachusetts, who worked in his off-hours as my driver. Steve was a veteran of the first Iraq War and remained in the reserves as an MP. One night, someone saw him at a gay club in Providence, Rhode Island, and reported this to one of his superior officers. She summoned him and began to ask about the sighting. As he reported to me, she said it had come to her attention “that certain establishments that you have been seen entering and leaving are quite undesirable to our organization.”

As a police officer, Morin was well aware of how to use his rights when he was being questioned—he had frequently been on the other side of the transaction. He told her he did not know “quite where you are going with this.”

Her response was to ask, “Are you a homosexual?”

He said, “Ma’am, are you asking me if I am gay?”

Aware now that she was on dangerous ground, she replied, “No, no—that would be against the law for me to ask.”

Morin then responded, “Ma’am, then you also know it would be against the law for me to answer that question, and I am not to lie to an officer.”

He reports that there was then a long period of silence in which they stared at each other until he stood up and asked, “Ma’am, is there anything else?”

She said, “No, Master Sergeant, that will be all for now.” That ended the matter.

*

Despite Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’s deleterious impact, I did not regard Clinton as an enemy who held out false promise but as a friend who had tried to help us and failed. I knew that Clinton was genuinely opposed to anti-LGBT bias and wanted very much to diminish its impact. The magnitude of our defeat on the military ban—which I believe he understood, despite his claim that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a partial victory—greatly increased his incentive in this regard. This was due to an important political principle: compensation. No politician long survives without understanding it, instinctively if not explicitly. It governs an official’s relations with both his elected colleagues and his constituents. There will inevitably be occasions when you disappoint people whose goodwill you need. Sometimes, as in Clinton’s case, it’s because of an inability to deliver. In other cases, you made a conscious choice, either due to policy differences or the stronger competing claims of another group.

There are two possible ways to repair the resulting breach. One is to explain yourself, as patiently and sympathetically as you can. On the basis of my own experience, I do not advise this approach. In 1985, the House was struggling with the results of a too-close-to-call election in Indiana, and Speaker O’Neill appointed a special committee to preside over the final count. I greatly admired the Democratic candidate, Frank McCloskey, but as the proceedings went on, I came to believe it was impossible to know who actually had won. I voted against the Republican bid to seat their candidate, but I also voted against the committee’s recommendation to seat McCloskey.

Hoping to alleviate O’Neill’s anger, I sought him out and began to tell him why I felt so deeply about the issue and had voted as I did. He exploded. As I later told a colleague, “Tip was mad at me until I explained myself, then he became furious.” Deeply disappointing someone with your vote, and then taking pains to explain exactly why you were right and he or she was wrong, is a perfect example of adding insult to injury.

As Clinton knew, the more effective alternative is compensation. Immediately after both houses voted to enact Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I began an effort to educate the president and his aides about how we could jointly invoke the principle.

The biggest single item that we wanted from the federal government was still unachievable—a law banning job discrimination based on sexual orientation. But I knew there were several things the president could do without Congress that would improve the quality of our lives as well as repudiate the intellectual underpinnings of homophobia.

Our biggest target was the forty-year-old prohibition on security clearances for LGBT people. No federal policy had done us more damage. Symbolically, it was a declaration that we were inherently flawed. It said that simply because of who we were, absent any sign that we had misbehaved in any relevant way, our government—indeed, our society—could not trust us. While the fear that we were vulnerable to blackmail was one justification for the order, the policy plainly assumed that we were bad people who corrupted those around us. (The Senate report that preceded Eisenhower’s order by a few years was titled “The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in the Federal Government.” I later posted a copy of the title page in my congressional office.)

From the time I came to Congress and became known as a strong defender of LGBT rights, I regularly received calls from frightened people who had been told by their employers that they would now be subject to a security clearance review because their company was seeking a government contract. It wasn’t only the State and Defense Departments that required security clearances. Employees of Treasury and Justice, as well as engineers, architects, accountants, and others working for private companies seeking government contracts, often needed them as well.

These reviews were thorough and intrusive. People who had been living discreetly—or openly, as they had a right to do—with a same-sex partner suddenly faced the prospect that friends, neighbors, and relatives would be questioned in ways that would reveal their sexual orientation and cost them their jobs. When asked direct questions, their friends and neighbors were equally afraid of lying or telling the truth.

In fact, the pattern was so widespread that Frank Kameny, one of the great leaders—and characters—of the LGBT civil rights movement, made a reasonable living as a defender of people facing such inquiries. Kameny was not a lawyer. He was an astronomer who had been dismissed from federal service in the 1950s because he was “a homosexual,” and who, unlike almost everybody else at the time, decided to fight back. Using his own experience and sharp analytical mind, he was able to defend many people successfully in these circumstances. But few people had assistance of that caliber.

On August 2, 1995, Clinton issued an executive order revoking the ban on security clearances. It was a historic moment. But even though the ban had been imposed and now rescinded by executive order, Congress could still codify it into law. And after Clinton acted, one rightwing homophobe, Congressman Robert Dornan of California, threatened to do just that. The situation paralleled that of the military ban, but this time the circumstances were more favorable to us. Colin Powell had rejected the traditional argument for the security clearance restriction. Even more helpful to us, so had Dick Cheney when he’d made his “old chestnut” remark to me. Not even Sam Nunn, who’d invoked the order in firing two of his own employees, was ready to make the case for it. When Dornan persisted with his bill, I got the chance to revive my I’ll-out-the-Republicans ploy. This time my logic was irrefutable. If the House were to assert that gay men are security risks, I announced, I would consider it my patriotic duty to provide a list of gay members to the appropriate authorities. Dornan backed down, undoubtedly at the urging of his own party leadership, and denounced me for my threat.

Ironically, a year later, Dornan became the first member ever to out another when he lost his cool—of which he rarely had much—and berated his Republican colleague Steve Gunderson for going in and out of the closet. (Gunderson, to his credit, had provoked Dornan by criticizing another Republican, Mel Hancock of Missouri, who was offering a homophobic amendment to penalize schools that were supportive of LGBT students.)

While some in the gay media quibbled about the wording of Clinton’s order, it has proved to be a strong barrier to any further harassment of LGBT individuals. In 2000, I remembered my part in this affair very proudly when I spoke at the first Gay Pride Day in the history of the CIA. As George W. Bush entered office the next year, it would also be the last CIA Gay Pride Day for eight years.

Clinton also delivered what I requested on two other important matters. At his urging, Attorney General Janet Reno promulgated a rule adding people who’d been persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity to the list of those eligible for refugee status. The most vocal opposition came from an anti-immigration organization that called itself FAIR. They were not homophobic, but they predicted that the rule would become a convenient dodge for the hordes seeking to come to the United States. This was, of course, entirely unfounded. The policy has worked well, providing safety to the endangered in very moderate numbers. Not even FAIR has claimed that we suffer from a glut of African, Asian, and Latin American lesbians.

Finally, Clinton and his director of the Office of Personnel Management addressed the problem of employment discrimination in the government. They sent a letter to every federal agency emphasizing that under existing law, hiring was to be on the basis of merit, and that this excluded any discrimination based on other factors, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

To my enduring frustration, Clinton has received little credit for these steps. For me, at least, he honored the principle of compensation impressively.