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Lesbians and gay men have
often served honorably in their nations' armed services, and some have been
prominent military leaders. Officially-sanctioned homophobia has often made
such service difficult and sometimes impossible.
America's
Don't Ask,
Don't Tell policy and some other countries' exclusion of gay and
lesbian service members continue to devastate many lives today. |
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Frederick the Great |
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 King
Alexander the Great of Macedonia (356-323 B.C.E.) was not only
a great soldier and conqueror, he was also renowned for his love of
Hephaestion. |
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Lord
Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941), a British military hero and the
founder of the
Boy Scouts
and the Girl Guides, was probably a homosexual. |
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Miriam
Ben-Shalom (b. 1948) was the first gay or lesbian servicemember to
be reinstated to her position in the United States military after being
discharged for her sexual orientation.
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 Sir
Richard Burton (1821-1890) was knighted in 1886 in honor of his
consular service and intelligence work, though he was regarded with
suspicion because of his knowledge of same-sex sexual activity. |
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Julius
Caesar (ca. 100-44 B.C.E.), the Roman politician, general, and
writer, was one of the most powerful men of the ancient world. He was
frequently reminded, sometimes derisively, of his youthful sexual
affair with the king of Bithynia.
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Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer
(b. 1942) successfully challenged the U.S. military's policy banning
homosexuals prior to the implementation of "Don't
Ask, Don't Tell." |
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The
Don't Ask
Don't Tell policy, in effect since 1993, was a compromise
intended to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the U.S.
military, but it has failed to halt discharges based solely on sexual
orientation. |
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European military culture varies widely in its attitudes toward gay
and lesbian personnel from the acceptance of the Dutch to the laissez-faire
policy of the French to the rejection of the Greek and Turkish forces. |
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King
Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712-1786) greatly expanded his
kingdom through a series of brutal wars. His homosexuality was an open
secret during his reign. |
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 Alexander
Hamilton (1757-1804), the American Revolutionary War hero and
statesman, exchanged a series of passionate love letters with a young man,
John Laurens, who was killed in 1782. |
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Leonard
Matlovich (1943-1988) became one of the glbtq community's most
visible activists in the 1970s by challenging the
U.S. Air Force's ban on gay and lesbian service members. |
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Harry Stack
Sullivan (1892-1949), a psychiatrist and a gay man, developed the
psychiatric program used by the American military during World War II to
weed homosexuals out of the Army. |
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The relation between
U.S.
military culture and homosexuality is complex and contradictory,
defining itself explicitly in opposition to homosexuality, but nevertheless
facilitating the very behavior and identity it seeks to exclude. |
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The
Uniform Code of Military Justice, adopted in 1950, is the
fountainhead of the United States' military's discriminatory policies toward
homosexual personnel. |
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Photo Credits: Images of Frederick the Great, Alexander the Great, and
Alexander Hamilton Copyright © 2003-2004, Clipart.com. Image of Sir Richard
Burton courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. |
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