The Dictionary of Homophobia (18 page)

In authoritarian or totalitarian societies, the issue of prestige is important to the army, which must serve as both a school and a model. For example, we can note that evidence of Heinrich
Himmler
’s extremely violent homophobia in Nazi Germany was linked to his concern that the army’s morals would rub off on German society in the case of a general mobilization, to the (paradoxical) discovery that the warrior society of the Third Reich risked separating the sexes, defeminizing women, and, in short, forgetting “Nature.” In all, between 1939 and 1944, roughly 7,000 Wehrmacht combatants were imprisoned for the crime of homosexuality.

Generally speaking, in Western military circles, the homosexual threat was more often related to the theme of
treason
, as demonstrated by the Redl Affair in 1913 Austria, or the Kiessling-NATO Affair of 1983–84. Whether homosexuality was considered an element of the perverse
psychology
of impulsive and spineless men, as it was seventy years ago, or if it made men thus afflicted vulnerable to blackmail, the end result has been the persistent belief that homosexuals are unsuited for fighting (although André
Gide
, in his book
Corydon
, fought for opposite argument).

Military homophobia is also sociological in origin. In most countries, officers are mainly recruited from the population’s most traditionalist (i.e. reactionary) sectors, notably the Catholic right (such as in France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America), and the more conservative Protestant milieu (as in the United Kingdom and the United States). Such recruits are not in the habit of questioning social conventions, sexual roles, or the Christian
symbolic order
, and it is quite significant that the great Western homophobes of the twentieth century include such notables as Marshal
Pétain
, General Franco (who was obsessed by the danger of homosexuality among young officers), General Pinochet, General Eisenhower, and Field Marshal Montgomery (who incidentally has been outed in recent accounts about him).

Further, in nations where a draft for required military service is in place, the military aims to construct a perfectly virile, heterosexual identity for itself among the conscripts called up for national service. In France, a speech by World War II officer Marcel Bigeard that referred to the “little boys” who, thanks to him, became real men (i.e. “not queers”) is significant. And as sociologist Henning Bech notes, the harshest insults in the homophobic arsenal “are necessary ingredients in the relation between the instructor and the recruit, like that between the torturer and the victim.” Since the end of the nineteenth century, the work of turning military recruits into homophobic “real men” (based in part on a general contempt for all forms of male delicateness) has traditionally been passed along to junior officers. For recruits, it is difficult to resist such indoctrination, as one’s refusal is immediately seen as suspicious. The offensive label “fag,” which has become commonplace, owes much to the barracks during the two World Wars. And the leap from verbal to physical
violence
against homosexuals in the military is a short one; those in the military have traditionally been encouraged to exact violence against those caught cruising, or worse. Such homophobia relies on the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual who is the perceived opposite of the military man, and vice versa. In this sense, the “virilization” of the gay male image since the 1970s has been extraordinarily destabilizing for the homophobes in uniform, who are thus deprived of their stereotypical points of reference: as a result, hyper-masculinity, long considered as belonging to the arena of the military as a heterosexual trait, instead becomes a perceived threat.

Homophobia has a long-standing tradition in the army. It appears first in a number of military regulations in numerous countries, which in turn have served as models for more general anti-homosexual restrictions (this was the case in Russia: homosexuality was first forbidden for servicemen at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and then later or the general male population in 1832). That being said, in the Ancien Régime in France, punishment was relatively “benign”: the 1689 edict on the navy stipulated that “indecent actions will be punished with six lashes of the winch rope, performed by the provost marshal; doubled in case of repeat infringement,” which was not too severe in comparison to other contemporary regulations. The most famous examples of military homophobia can be found in the regulations of English-speaking countries, however. In the United States, an anti-homosexual clause was put into place between 1918 and 1943 (as early as 1919, the US Navy set traps for its personnel in order to weed out homosexuals). What followed was a veritable witch-hunt against homosexuals in the military, notably at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, when the Pentagon charged psychiatrists with the task of “locating homosexuals, first by their airs or their effeminateness, and second by watching their reactions when homosexual jargon is pronounced in their presence.” Expulsions from the military reached a height of 3,000 people a year in the early 1960s before slowing down to an average of 1,500 expulsions per year during the 1980s (51% of whom were from the Navy), and then to 1,000 expulsions per year during the 1990s. In 1982, an official Pentagon document reminded personnel that “homosexuality is incompatible with active service,” insisting that it affects “discipline,” “order,” “morale,” “mutual confidence,” “rank hierarchy,” “operational efficiency,” “recruitment,” “the public image,” and “security.” In this, we can see that the supporters of the prohibition of homosexuality essentially have three major fears: (1) that the showers and barracks will become area of promiscuity; (2) that relationships will develop between servicemen of different ranks, resulting in
scandal
and demonstrating a lack of discipline; and (3) that breaches of security will be created due to all manner of blackmail. The anti-homosexual rule was also applied to women when they became eligible to sign up, which had a notable effect on them, in particular those who entered into undesired heterosexual relationships in order to protect themselves from being labeled lesbian (women, who made up 11% of US soldiers, constituted 22% of the cases of expulsion for homosexuality).

Though presidential candidate Bill Clinton had stated during his 1992 election campaign that he would completely remove the ban on homosexuals in the army, he later backed down when confronted by the powerful military lobby, which was in a favorable position following the revelation of Clinton’s refusal to serve in Vietnam. As President, Clinton settled on the now-infamous policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue. The Clinton doctrine, which had been established in 1993, revealed itself to be unsatisfying in its applications: those in command were no longer to look for gays and lesbians in the military, but neither were they to recognize their existence. In short, this policy conferred no dignity upon homosexuals equal to that of heterosexuals, and it prohibited any effective fight against the still-prevalent homophobic atmosphere in the military (in 1999 alone, 968 anti-gay incidents in the US Army were reported, including one murder). Gay and lesbian service personnel were still to be dismissed if, in one way or another, they divulged their homosexuality (the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force affirms that, in 1999, the Pentagon carried out three dismissals per day on such grounds).

A similar ban in the British armed forces was lifted in 2000. But for over thirty years, the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality did not apply to those serving in the military because British authorities, just like the Pentagon and for the same reasons, considered that the open presence of homosexuals in the armed forces would create an untenable situation for heterosexual personnel. From 1967 to 1999, British military police, based on the even the smallest suspicion (such as a tip from a blackmailer or a young woman whose advances had been rejected), carried out inquiries, interrogations, and searches of those personnel suspected of being homosexual. Even if the officers in charge of such investigations were not homophobic themselves (in fact some, as would be later discovered, were closeted gays placed in situations where conscience and duty conflicted), British respect for the law eliminated any room for compromise: dismissals from the British military averaged sixty per year and, as it became more gender-inclusive, women were targeted as often as men. Over the years, however, protests multiplied and those dismissed formed an association, Rank Outsiders. In 1999, the European Court of Human Rights, having taken up the case of four former army personnel (Jeannette Smith, Duncan Lustig-Prean, Graeme Grady, and John Beckett), found the British government guilty of violating Articles 8 and 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and, by this decision, obliged Britain to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military. Certain high-ranking opponents expressed themselves through the British media, recanting the arguments of 1967, but the opinions published in the November 1999 issue of the British magazine
Gay Times
clearly showed that the ban was not supported by a majority of army and navy personnel. After his dismissal for being homosexual, despite a shining service record and a brilliant future in the British Royal Navy, Lieutenant Commander Duncan Lustig-Prean was flooded with expressions of sympathy from his superiors, his colleagues, and the men under his command, many of whom admitted they had long guessed his sexual orientation and that they could not have cared any less about it. For the rest, there was no mistake: the lifting of the ban did not signify that homosexual relationships were now authorized among those serving in the British armed forces (the same applied to heterosexual relationships); it only meant that one could now be openly gay and a member of the military. However, this trend among English-speaking countries does not eclipse the fact that, as recently as in 2001, many countries that had decriminalized homosexuality, such as Greece, Portugal, and Russia, still did not allow homosexuals to serve in the military.

Military homophobia, however, is not only manifested through law. The French armed forces offer many examples of homophobic practices in a country where, for the last two centuries, homosexuality has been neither a crime nor an offence—at least in theory. But the French military has had a checkered past regarding its homosexual members, as demonstrated by certain notorious court cases implicating military personnel (the most recent, and also one of the worst, being the Chanal Affair, in which French army veteran Pierre Chanal killed himself shortly after his trial began for the sexually motivated murders of three men in the 1980s). In the nineteenth century, most of these scandals dealt with prostitution involving soldiers or navy personnel; authorities were worried about the corruption that “anti-physiques” (those “against nature,” according to eighteenth-century discourse) would introduce in the elite forces, threatening their health and morale, and they sought to reintroduce a
de facto
ban by way of police surveillance and ridicule in the media. For example, soldiers who attacked two Chartres homosexuals in 1805 were vigorously supported (the issue reaching all the way to the Emperor); the 1824 beating of the Marquis de
Custine
on the road to St-Denis by a group of soldiers, with one of whom Custine allegedly had attempted to have a sexual encounter, was applauded; Captain Voyer was caught “red-handed,” fondling an artilleryman in the woods near Vincennes on June 18, 1880, and was then arrested and tried for public indecency; and during the years between the World Wars, the streets and squares of Toulon were combed in order to find sailors out for a good time and prostituting themselves (the guilty were subject to disciplinary sanctions and some were dismissed). It is quite clear that military authorities used these events to affirm the dishonorable character of homosexuality.

Military authorities also received the backing of the French medical establishment who denounced homosexuality as a menace that threatened the nation’s colonial troops (in 1907, according to Dr René Jude, first-class medical officer in the hospitals of Tunisia, two-thirds of the soldiers in the “battalions of Africa” were pederasts). It also received the support of civilian authorities who associated homosexuality in the military with every form of subversion that threatened the nation’s power (including opium addiction, antimilitarism, anarchism, and
communism
). And when the “guilty” was an officer,
esprit de corps
demanded his resignation (as was the case for a lieutenant commander from Lorient, at the end of the 1920s) drove him to
suicide
(such as that of General MacDonald by the British in 1903, after he was caught masturbating in a train car with Singhalese soldiers) or forced him into situations that would cause his death (in 1824, Custine was advised that he be killed with weapons in hand, or enter
La Trappe
[a Cistercian monastery]; in 1915, French military officer Maxime Weygand sent Robert d’Humières, a liaison officer to the British army, to his death because he had had a weakness for a Hindu soldier). Also, for homosexuals in the French military, social threats replaced legal ones: even General Hubert Lyautey, whose homosexuality was widely discussed and who had a great number of friends in high places, was forced to marry at the age of fifty-five in order to quell all rumors. This social pressure was alleviated somewhat, but not entirely, due to the political and ideological specifics of the military, the recent affair surrounding Christophe Carrion being a good example. In 1998, this gendarme stationed at the French embassy in Addis-Ababa fell in love with a young Ethiopian, set him up in his home, and divorced his wife; as a result, he was repatriated to France eight months before the end of his mission. It is important to note the strong, heterosexual social model that the military expected its personnel to follow, manifested in trips to the brothels while young and, later, marriage. It is understandable that, in France, many gay servicemen were compelled to extreme
discretion
or to lead a double life. Perhaps things are changing, however. At least, that was the impression that General Alain Raevel hoped to give by granting a rather benevolent interview to the French gay monthly
Têtu
in 2000.