Lt. Dan Choi Speaks Out
Part Two of the Flagpole Interview
Last
week, we ran Part One of our interview with Lt. Dan Choi, a former Army serviceman who was dismissed under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy after coming out of the closet on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” In this second half of our interview, we were able to discuss with Choi the personal side of his story, as well as the broader narrative of what it’s like to be gay in the military. Flagpole: One thing I wanted to bring up that you’ve mentioned is how repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or an executive order to that effect, would not be the end of anything. There would be, as you said, many different facets to changing the culture of the military. We saw this with Robert Gates expressing… Lt. Dan Choi: “Enormous consequences!” [Laughs.] FP: Right… he’s expressing trepidation about it. My question relates to something on your website, where you put in bold letters: “The people I served with, they knew I was gay. They didn’t care; they were professionals.” Can you give us an idea of the person-to-person military culture, what it was like when you were serving, and how you think it would change on that personal level? DC: I appreciate the question because not a lot of people understand the military unless they’ve served in it, and a lot of people like Gates and others try to say “Y’all don’t understand, so just back off.” When I went back after being on “Rachel Maddow” and I served for a year and a half in my infantry unit―the infantry unit is probably what people have been pointing out, the kind of combat unit that would have the most difficulty because they’re all assumed to be homophobes. And they’re all assumed to be hyper-masculine, and
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that’s true to an extent. There’s a hyper-masculine culture there. That’s not gonna change because of gay people. I mean, it’s not going to change because you see women in combat roles now. And I think that when people term this in vocabulary couched in terms of a culture war, that’s what they’re really saying. It really isn’t the Christian versus gay thing. What scares people is that there is a clear gender norm for military servicemen. And women, for the past couple of decades that they’ve been serving in integrated units, have also acknowledged that there is an almost hyper-masculinity that’s part of the culture. But that doesn’t change because of the presence of women or the presence of lesbians or the presence of gay men. And that didn’t change in the culture in my unit. I think there’s this stigmatized view of an effeminate gay man and an assumption that they will not be able to fulfill the roles of a military person. I think, number one, that’s, on it’s face, false. I know a [great] many effeminate women that do very well in combat. When I went back to training, nobody really said anything to me about it, and I wondered if people didn’t know about it. But afterwards, at the bar and on Facebook, people were writing to me, and they were saying, “I thought I saw you!” or “That was you!” or “That was great, what you’re doing!” There were people that said “I have a gay brother,” “I have a lesbian sister,” “a gay cousin,” or “I’m gay,” and that took awhile, people coming out of the closet to me. Because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I never sought out any gay friends, I never sought out any gay military comrades, I never sought out any mentorship on how to come out. I avoided the issue and the identity and the community completely and 100 percent. So now this was weird for me, because I was very out, and didn’t understand how it really played into my role
FLAGPOLE.COM ∙ NOVEMBER 10, 2010
and my identity. I clearly know how to be Asian-American; that didn’t take too many instructional lessons. But being gay and being openly gay in the infantry unit, sometimes I felt nervous about things. I felt more nervous than necessary, because a lot of my friends were saying, you’re going to get hate-crimed, or you’re going to get harassed, or shot at, “fragged.” But nobody in my chain of command sat me down and said, “You know, you’re too gay out there. You just gotta stop being so gay.” But my battalion commander, [a] lieutenant colonel, he sat me down and said that he appreciated what I do and that he found it courageous. And the bottom line is: we’re at war. And people are looking and judging not based on your race or your orientation or your religion, but they judge based on: “Can you do your job?” That’s especially what you need in a time of war. We also have a high suicide rate in the military overall. It’s double that of society right now. So people, when they spout these messages of “you’re not alone; no soldier stands alone; tell them that they’re still part of the team,” things like that, it’s really disingenuous when you have something glaring like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which forces you to be alone. And so I made that very clear to my commanders. I made that very clear to some of my soldiers when we engaged in conversation. Being able to have those conversations was so meaningful because those soldiers were able to ask me about transgender people, ask me about marriage, what’s this ENDA [Employment Non-Discrimination Act] thing. And it was all new to me, too; I met Sharon Glass of “Queer as Folk” in Miami, and she was going on and on about, you know, how her show was this and this. I was just nodding my head; she didn’t realize that I had never been able to access that part of my identity
even so much as to watch “Queer as Folk,” or to understand those things in pop culture, in the gay community subculture. To say, “Okay, well, what does it mean to be gay?” was such a new thing to me. A lot of my friends that I served with in combat wrote letters of recommendation for me in my trial, testified, wrote letters of support, encouragement—and that was what was really surprising. It was some of the toughest guys, that you wouldn’t expect, that did that. We’re serving with NATO countries in coalitions, so technically we do have open services in our units in the coalition units. We have Great Britain, Australia, Canada and Israel. There are some 28 that allow people to serve openly. Israel gives partner benefits to their gay soldiers, and Great Britain has transgender reassignment operations that they pay for. So, to say that America can’t deal with the “upsetting of the norms,” this gloom and doom that has Secretary Gates, as a Secretary of Defense, going into some of this childish, boorish behavior, saying there’s going to be enormous consequences, and getting his talking points from Tony Perkins, just seems ridiculous. I think President Obama should have replaced him at the outset and now with this new commandant he’s placing in for the Marine Corps who is also homophobic [General James Amos], I think there are certainly failures of leadership. And here’s what it comes down to: they need to realize that in the process, it takes leadership from the top. That’s the missing element here, that the president’s not able to say forthrightly, firmly, “This is what I’m going to do” and “You have to get on board.” …You’ve got the secretary, who’s clearly filibustering in his own way, having to study about the impact… which, if you take a poll of soldiers on anything, you’re gonna get a fragmented view, and you’re never gonna have