In which the subtext becomes text.
“Vocation is the place where your greatest gifts meet the world’s greatest suffering.” – Frederick Beucher
I caught this article over at On The Issue Magazine; it argues against the importance that many in the queer community have placed on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Considering how unpopular the current wars are, I question why the right to serve openly in the military is at the forefront of LGBT activism. Why are gays and lesbians eager to join an institution that has traditionally upheld the rigid gender roles against which the LGBT movement has been rebelling? Why seek membership in an institution that takes advantage of the poor to fight battles that serve the goals of the elite? And what of the civilians whose rights are infringed and cast aside by a U.S. invasion? – are we trading their civil rights for our own?
I have a lot of concerns with this article. My primary issue is the way that the author seems to be arguing that there is only one way to be gay. The kind of “gay” (or QUILTBAG) person who conforms to all of the culturally-defined characteristics of the queer community. Call me crazy, but that seems about as as rigid as boot camp.
Ironically, the author of this article argues that queer folks who support the repeal of DADT and/or the military are trying to “assimilate” into heterosexual culture. As opposed to the assimilation one’s political/cultural opinions into the author’s own? Are we on an episode of “the right way to be gay?”
I’m attracted to sentiments from queer liberationists, who are against the repeal of DADT because they are anti-military. Queer liberationism teaches that queer issues should be examined not just as they relate to the LGBT population, but to all aspects of social justice. This view is in opposition to gay assimilation, which seeks to normalize queerness and codify LGBT people as the same as their heterosexual friends and family. By striving for blanket acceptance, gay assimillationists fail to analyze the implications of participating in certain institutions — achieving sameness is the most important goal.
It seems to me that “gay assimilation” is working both ways. It also, of course, assumes that queer folks couldn’t possibly have legitimate reasons for joining the military. I would say that a queer person joining the military is about as far from “achieving sameness” as you can get.
One of the most glaringly flaws in this article is that the author FAILS TO INTERROGATE WHY PEOPLE JOIN THE MILITARY. Yes, it is about honor and serving one’s country, and those are reasons I very, very much respect. But guess what? It’s about money, too. And here we get into the realities of “gay assimilation” – the notion that all QUILTBAGS folks are middle-to-upper-class. Guess what, they’re not! You heard it here first – the gays can be poor! Joining the military is a way to escape poverty and has been for years, in poor communities it can often be the best choice available. Guess what? The military pays for you to go to college! And I know a lot of people who chose it for that reason. Not everyone can pay for college or take on crushing student loan debt. Guess what else? The military trains you in incredibly well in many, many fields – training that will make you a VERY competitive candidate when you reenter the civilian job market.
I know a lot of people in the military. I know gay people in the military and I know QUILTBAG folks who support the military. I know gay people from military families. I know gay people with aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, oh, and friends who are active duty military. I also know aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and friends who have loved ones that are gay and in the military.
I guess what it comes down to, in my mind, is the cruelty of double exile. And what I mean by that is this: lots of QUILTBAG folks are without the community that they had from birth. Some people retain relationships family and old friends… lots don’t. People make new, chosen families…how terrible to reject them once again because they believe in the wrong causes, work for the wrong people, or in some other way transgress the fluid boundaries of their chosen community.
I’m not going to get into how I feel about the military. And my point is that no one has the right to tell you how to feel about it either. My legitimacy to claim any type of expression, self-indentity, or community as my own is not and should not be dependent on me choosing the “right” political views, the “right” career, the “right” faith, or the “right” life. My hope for the QUILTBAG community(ities) is that it will never be a gated one and no one will have to provide their credentials upon arrival.
Image Via.
Cross-posted at Oh my sainted Aunt!
But isn’t this more of a question about “why the right to serve openly in the military is at the forefront of LGBT activism“?
It seems to me that the military–like marriage–is an oppressive institution. Why should ANYone fight for the privilege of being a member of an oppressive group? If you consider the military inherently oppressive–and I do–then it makes sense to criticize the activism that fights to make such oppression queer-friendly. And the fact that poor kids can join the army is just proof that the military is oppressive–just as oppressive* in America, oppressive of Americans, as it is in other countries. Why not redirect the activism–instead of fighting for access to oppressive institutions (marriage, the military), we should fight to reform society in such a way that gays DON’T need to get married (because nobody should need to get married, nobody should need marriage because the state oughtn’t be regulating marriages at all) to stay in the country, to get health care–marriage should not confer benefits, so why not obliterate marriage instead of participating in it? People should HAVE to join the military to get an education, a job, an escape from poverty. That people join the military for these reasons is mind-blowingly disgusting (not the people, obviously, but the fact that in our society sometimes the only route out of poverty is a route that requires you to potentially kill, to put yourself at high risk of getting killed, is seriously fucked up) and we should fight to shift the culture–instead of widening the group who “benefit” from participating in oppressing others, why not just shift the culture so it stops oppressing people?
I mean I get that what I’m saying is entirely wishful thinking. And that’s why I obviously support gay marriage and the repeal of DADT. But while the sad reality is that participating in the oppression of others should be a right that’s open to everyone regardless of their sexual orientation, it’s a legitimate argument to make, that these are fucked up priorities.
*I mean “just as” as in quality, not quantity; obviously the military’s structural enforcement of class hierarchies in America isn’t as oppressive as, say, dropping a bomb on someone’s house. Because death is the ultimate oppression, so…
Oh and all of this is not to say that people who join the military or get married are Bad Guys or anything. I don’t think that everyone who joins the military is looking to oppress others (I’m sure there are plenty of people who join to liberate or help other people), but I think that a lot of people join the military to help themselves (which isn’t necessarily bad) at the expense of, in all likelihood, hurting others. And I understand that that doesn’t make those people bad.
Ah, yes, it’s the same argument as being against same-sex marriage, and it’s just as thorny.
On the one hand, I think it’s ridiculous to say that queer people shouldn’t want to get married or join the military anyway, so why fight for that right, because regardless of whether you or I think that’s the right choice, it’s not a choice at all if you’re legally forbidden from choosing it. It’s hard to see not having a choice as a liberating position.
On the other hand, as Cimorene touched on, as much as technically I believe having a choice in this matters is more liberating than not, queer activism (or, more accurately, white, upper-class, cisgender, gay male activism) has out a huge amount of time, energy, and money into fighting for these causes. Regardless of how I feel about marriage and serving in the military, any way you look at it, we have some other issues that should at the very least be getting as much attention. For instance, the huge amount of homeless queer youth in America. According to the Kicked Out anthology by Sassafras Lowrey, 40% of US homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. Keeping our youth safe should be where we as a community are putting our time and money, but DADT and gay marriage take the majority of both of those. Maybe they’re still fights worth having (I don’t mean to dismiss their importance to people who need the military to support their family, or people who need marriage to keep their partner from being deported, for instance), but they shouldn’t be our main–or at the very least, our only–priorities.
Lola, I’m with you on this one. I don’t agree that a military has to be inherently oppressive, either to its members or to those it might encounter in battle. Discipline and order don’t have to be oppressive. And the necessity of a military is only a consequence of other human failings. We have to solve those before we can eliminate our armed forces.
I work for the VA and, believe me, the people we see are anything but privileged. Although in our area, the vets are still predominantly white, they tend to be older, poorer, less educated, and have less access to computers than the kind of people Danika and Cimorene are talking about. And some of those people are gay. I don’t see the choice of a military career as one usually made out of privilege. Our people aren’t officer class and didn’t go to one of the academies. People like them still make up the bulk of the military-people who want a job, want to go to college, want to learn a skill, maybe even see the world. Making sure that working-class gays have the same rights and opportunities as straight working class people sounds pretty important to me.
I think that anyone in the US army is more privileged than, say, the people the US army are sent to “discipline.” And I don’t think you need to be privileged to participate in a system of oppression. The individuals in the armed forces may not be particularly privileged, but they are members of a force. An armed force, and one that has the power to oppress, and does.
I agree that working-class gays should have the same rights and opportunities as working-class straights. I just don’t think the military should be the only opportunity for so many people.
I just don’t think the military should be the only opportunity for so many people.
I’m with you on that Cimorene … I think what we’re talking about here is the gap between what we might ideally be aiming for (no armed forces? as a believer in nonviolence, that might be my ultimate goal) and what we’re living with in the moment: a United States military that is the way-less-than-perfect alternative to (even worse) poverty for many people.
And given that non-straight folks are found in all segments of society, they’re found in the military. And I don’t think they should be denied human rights just because we believe they made poor career choices.
I was thinking about the question of why it’s one of the most prominent issues in LGBT activism right now. I think it is a useful civil rights issue (like gay marriage) that is translatable to the broader public, and has useful analogies to desegregation of the armed forces and overturning anti-miscegenation laws. It’s about equal treatment under the law, equal treatment as U.S. citizens. Changing the culture of citizenship is then another (equally if not more important) strategy entirely.
Given that joining the military is one of the few ways that the poor in the US have of making a better life for themselves, I find the original post (the one The Harpies are responding to) very disturbing.
There is a reason why the bulk of the military ranks are made up of people of the working class and the poor, typically from the poorer states. Ignoring that these people may also be LGBT would be very shortsighted.
I really agree with wondering’s take on the original post. For a lot of people, the military is one of the very few, if not only, ways to get a decent education and job training, particularly as our educational system becomes increasingly broken and the cost of higher education soars beyond the reach of all but the already-affluent. Military service is also a way for immigrants to get on a faster, more secure track to US citizenship, which often goes unmentioned in these discussions. Gay people deserve to have all those same options, full stop.
To Cimorene’s point, I believe that gays should not be accused of becoming oppressors simply for insisting that they are entitled to the same rights as straights. Although Patriarchy is oppressive to me as a woman, I’m not automatically becoming an oppressor when I insist on having the same social, political, and economic rights as men. I think Anna put it very well when she said that even if we don’t approve of the military as a career choice, that doesn’t mean they should be denied their rights in order to prevent them from making it.
One idea that seems to get overlooked in these discussions is the fact that the law has symbolic effects on society. Changing the laws to promote equality can help make people view prejudice as less acceptable.
Here is a lengthier explanation of this point and others which I (re)wrote in the context of marriage for a university publication last year.
http://seburke.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/marriage-is-still-not-assimilation/
I’m not sure I agree that being a member of the military automatically gives you power over others. It certainly doesn’t if you’re deployed stateside, unless you’re being used in an official capacity, in which case that’s the point.
Military abroad are often treated with hostility by locals, who resent the policy that puts foreign troops in their homelands. That’s understandable, but if you don’t like the policy, complain to your government. In those countries with whom we have active hostilities, I wouldn’t say that US troops are always the ones wielding the most power. Since Vietnam, we’ve learned that relatively poor countries can be extremely effective in war.
However, when any troops commit atrocities, rape, or acts of brutality against civilians, it’s wrong and inexcusable. That’s not the kind of behavior I’m talking about here.
@MM: And let’s face it, the stereotypical heavily armed “boots on the ground” soldier or commando of popular imagination represents a small percentage of US military personnel overall.
For starters, if you are in the Navy or Air Force—and even the Army or Marines, depending on your assignment—it’s highly unlikely that you will ever touch a firearm or weapon of any kind after basic training. The intelligence, logistics, chaplaincy, medical, clerical, and support groups within the US military are not committing acts of violence or oppression. Hell, there are even full-time musicians in the military who do nothing but play music at official events.
People who see every person in the military as armed oppressors are hardcore ideologues pushing a specific agenda (or just poorly informed). A closer look at the reality of who works for the military and what they actually do would not support their dogma.
Apologies for how long it’s taken me to respond…I’ve been working long hours at work and subsisting mainly on coffee, cheese, and chocolate-covered pretzels.
I think what really struck me about the original article was the idea that a gay person should be against a career choice that is often seen as “oppressive” or just wrong simply because they are a gay person and should be held to a “higher standard” (and a subjective standard at that).
I am not always a fan of the military or its actions, but like mischiefmanager, in my work I tend to see other sides to military life and the people who have chosen it (being deliberately vague here). My job has changed the way I view the military, in that I no longer see it as a monolith, but as very complex system. Often the faces of the military that we see in the media are those of privilege, but the “boots on the ground” people are often quite different.
I don’t agree with a lot of the political rhetoric that surrounds the military, or many of the conservative views that military people often support. But getting back to some of the original questions, such as “should this be at the forefront of gay rights?” I think that part of what makes it seem that this issue is at the forefront is the media, since this story generates a lot of discussion and news coverage. And as Sara said, the symbolic import of a repealing DADT is important because the military is so often portrayed as a bastion of conservatism.
I would love it if the military was not the only or best option for poor people, but until that is something we can remedy (and I strongly believe it should be, in a myriad of ways – don’t get me started on education reform), it is unfair for people of condemn it as a career choice by assuming that people have the privilege of other options. I’d like to think that repealing DADT is a better solution, even if it can’t be the best one. I have some thoughts percolating about the folks (gay and not) that choose to join the military and are not in the “poor subset.” But 1) I haven’t met (m)any and 2) my thoughts aren’t fully formed quite yet. Though I did have some vague ideas about the concept of “discipline” and how those of us who thrive within the confines of academic discipline are often unaware of how difficult it can sometimes be to find elsewhere, if you’re not academically inclined (…and how some alternatives have faded in popularity – the military, religious orders?).
I especially like BeckySharper’s point regarding the demographic of military personnel – it was something I wanted to say, but could not have said it so well or succinctly.
[...] Another example of the dynamic might be the question of DADT and queer service members, which Lola wrote about a couple of weeks ago. When you’re a person whose core passion and issues doesn’t line [...]