The United States military formerly excluded gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians from service. In 1993, the United States Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, a law instituting the policy commonly referred to as "Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT), which allowed gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to serve as long as they did not reveal their sexual orientation. Although there were isolated instances in which service personnel were met with limited success through lawsuits, efforts to end the ban on openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people serving either legislatively or through the courts initially proved unsuccessful.
In 2010, two federal courts ruled the ban on openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual service personnel unconstitutional, and on July 6, 2011, a federal appeals court suspended the DADT policy. In December 2010, the House and Senate passed and President Barack Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and under its provisions, restrictions on service by gay, lesbian, and bisexual personnel ended as of September 20, 2011.
According to a RAND Corporation report, a 2015 survey of over 16,000 service members found that 5.8% of the respondents identified as being lesbian, gay or bisexual. When separated by gender, 1.9% of males identified as gay and 2.0% as bisexual, while 7.0% of females identified as lesbian and 9.1% as bisexual.
In June 2024, US President Joe Biden signed a “pardon proclamation” - that formally affected thousands of military veterans with historical gay sex criminal records.
History
Early years To train the new American Army in the latest military drills and tactics, General George Washington brought in Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730–94), who had been an officer on the Prussian General staff. Von Steuben escaped Germany where he was threatened with prosecution for homosexuality. He joined Washington's army at Valley Forge in February 1778 accompanied by two young aides. Steuben became an American general, and a senior advisor to Washington. Despite rumors about his parties, there never was an investigation of Steuben and he received a Congressional pension after the war.
The first evidence of antipathy to homosexuals serving in the United States military dates from March 11, 1778, when Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin was drummed out of the Continental Army following his conviction at court-martial on charges of sodomy and perjury.
1910s–1940s The U.S. military discharged soldiers for homosexual acts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century even in the absence of any explicit prohibition of sodomy. The Articles of War of the United States of 1916, implemented on March 1, 1917, included Article 93 stating that any person subject to military law who committed "assault with intent to commit sodomy" shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. That was modified on June 4, 1920, to make the act of sodomy itself a crime. The change went into effect on February 4, 1921. It was the first express prohibition of homosexuality or homosexual conduct in the armed forces of the United States.
The several branches of the U.S. armed forces lacked a unified policy on service by homosexuals for most of their history. Before 1949, each tended to charge personnel caught engaging in homosexual conduct with sodomy, court-martial them, and issue them a dishonorable discharge. In 1940, psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan and Winfred Overholser formulated guidelines for psychiatric screening for military inductees. Both believed homosexuals should not be inducted, and neither proposed excluding all homosexuals from military service. Despite their recommendations, other psychiatrists and military officials made homosexuality a key component of the screening apparatus they recommended.Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. ?? The United States Army Surgeon General's office issued a circular in 1941 that for the first time classified "homosexual proclivities" as disqualifying inductees from military service. The United States Navy and the Selective Service adopted similar exclusionary policies.Bérubé, 12 The Women's Army Corps adopted a similar policy in 1944.Bérubé, 32 The Women's Army Corps instituted harsh screening policies for recruits, often based on physical appearance and gender conformity, in order to exclude lesbians from service. WAC policies also condoned heterosexual relationships with servicemen in order to discourage homosexual conduct.
With the mass mobilization and deployment of troops for operations in World War II, it became impractical to convene court-martial boards for homosexual conduct offenses. Commanders instead issued blue discharges – a form of administrative military discharge – to homosexual personnel. However, blue discharge holders faced difficulties in civilian life because the blue discharge carried with it a negative association. The Veterans Administration denied blue-discharge veterans the benefits of the G.I. Bill as a general policy.Bérubé, 230 In 1944, a policy directive ordered that homosexuals were to be committed to military hospitals, examined by psychiatrists and discharged under Regulation 615-360, section 8.Bérubé, 142–3
For example, staff sergeant Allen Irvin Bernstein, who was arrested in January 1944 by military police after a failed pickup attempt with another soldier, was confined in a psychiatric ward at Camp Lee, Virginia, and discharged within a month. He subsequently appealed the discharge decision, attaching a copy of his 140-page defense of homosexuality, Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), which, however, was ignored and remained forgotten and unpublished until rediscovered in 2010 by a researcher in the National Library of Medicine. Denied all veterans benefits, Bernstein continued to refile appeals with the Army until, 37 years later in 1981, the Army accepted his appeal and retroactively converted his blue discharge to an honorable discharge.
Blue discharges were discontinued in May 1947 and replaced with two new headings, "general" and "undesirable".Bérubé, 242 A general discharge was considered to be under honorable conditions though distinct from an "honorable discharge". An undesirable discharge was under conditions other than honorable, yet distinct from a "dishonorable discharge".Jones, 2 The Army also changed its regulations to ensure that homosexuals would not qualify for general discharges.Bérubé, p. 243 Under this system, a service member found to be homosexual but who had not committed any homosexual acts while in service received an undesirable discharge. Those found guilty of engaging in homosexual conduct were dishonorably discharged.
In 1945, four honorably discharged gay veterans formed the Veterans Benevolent Association, the first such organization.Archer, 110 It was primarily social in nature and its membership peaked at 100. The group disbanded in 1954,Katz, 635 and several of its members later formed the New York chapter of homophile advocacy group One, Inc.Humphreys, 51
Standard policy, 1949–1993 In October 1949, the newly consolidated Department of Defense standardized anti-homosexual regulations across all branches of the military: "Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory."Bérubé, p. 261
President Harry S. Truman signed legislation on May 6, 1950, creating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which became effective on May 31, 1951. It established a single justice system for the armed forces. Its Article 125 forbids sodomy among all military personnel, defining an offender as "any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offence."
The success of the armed forces in pre-screening self-identified gay and bisexual people from the 1940s through 1981 remains in dispute; during the Vietnam War, some men pretended to be gay in order to avoid the draft. However, a significant number of gay and bisexual men and women did manage to pass through the screening process and serve in the military, some with special distinction.
For example, in the 1950s, the Navy medical doctor Tom Dooley received national fame for his anti-Communist and humanitarian efforts in Vietnam. He was forced to resign in March 1956 when found to have participated in homosexual activities.Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 25-6 The Navy conducted the first official study on sexual orientation and the Navy regulations and rules. In 1957, the Crittenden Report found that gay-identified people were no more likely to be a security risk than heterosexual-identified people, but nevertheless recommended that homosexuals be excluded from service because "Homosexuality is wrong, it is evil, and it is to be branded as such."Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 347
San Francisco politician and gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk served in the United States Navy during the Korean War. He served aboard the submarine rescue ship USS Kittiwake (ASR-13) as a diving officer, later transferring to Naval Station, San Diego to serve as a diving instructor. In 1955, he was discharged from the Navy at the rank of lieutenant, junior grade, though whether his homosexuality was an issue in his discharge is doubted by researchers.Milk said numerous times that he was dishonorably discharged and claimed it was because he was gay, but Randy Shilts was skeptical of this claim, stating: "The Harvey Milk of this era was no political activist, and according to available evidence, he played the more typical balancing act between discretion and his sex drive." (p. 16) Scholar Karen Foss confirms his discharge from the Navy had no connection to his sexuality and states, "While exaggeration is a frequent campaign tactic, in Milk's case such embellishments served to demonstrate his willingness to be part of the political system while also maintain his distance from it." (See Foss, Karen. "The Logic of Folly in the Political Campaigns of Harvey Milk", in Queer Words, Queer Images, Jeffrey Ringer, ed. (1994), New York University Press. , p. 21.)
By the 1970s, a gay servicemember who had not committed any homosexual acts while in service generally received a general discharge, while those found to have engaged in homosexual conduct more often received undesirable discharges.Jones, p. 3 Gay servicemembers received a disproportionate percentage of undesirable discharges issued.Shilts, p. 163
During the 1970s, beginning with Leonard Matlovich, who was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1975 (making him the first named openly gay person to appear on the cover of a U.S. news magazine), several high-profile court challenges to the military's regulations on homosexuality occurred, with little success, and when such successes did occur it was when the plaintiff had been open about his homosexuality from the beginning or due to the existence of the "queen for a day" rule, which stated that if a service-member was caught having sex with a person of the same gender they could avoid being discharged if the "member did not have a propensity of intent to engage in homosexual acts."The "Queen For a Day Rule" stated that if a service-member was caught having sex with a person of the same gender they could avoid being discharged if the "member did not have a propensity of intent to engage in homosexual acts."