Gabriel Arana says the fight over DADT was always about the normalization of homosexuality.
As Judge Virginia Phillips noted in striking down the law this past September, for all the talk about “homosexual behavior” and the comfort of straight soldiers, DADT was always primarily a restriction on speech. Very few discharges involved a colleague or superior walking in on someone in bed, or — despite the bizarre paranoia of some critics — gay service members molesting a colleague. (Of course existing military codes already prohibit this sort of behavior, but in the minds of “don’t ask, don’t tell” supporters, DADT was the only thing protecting virginal straight soldiers from rapacious homosexuals.) Most discharges were carried out based on statements that demonstrated one’s “propensity” to engage in homosexual behavior, chief among them a verbal admission of being gay. In a sense, this is what made DADT such an abhorrent and fundamental assault on individual freedom: Like being forbidden to speak your own name, it denied gay people the simple right to identify themselves. As queer theorist Judith Butler pointed out in a well-known 1997 essay, the 1993 law was primarily concerned with giving others extensive guidelines for determining who counts as gay, “a homosexual is one whose definition is to be left to others, one who is denied the act of self-definition with respect to his or her sexuality, one whose self-denial is a prerequisite for military service.”