James Bowman writing in the Weekly Standard suggests that there are unbigoted reasons for maintaining “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
Perhaps even critics of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” have an uneasy sense that they cannot simultaneously say–as much of the commentary about the film Brokeback Mountain seemed to suggest–that the homosexual relationship is simply friendship carried to a higher power and, as the advocates for gay marriage imply, that it is exactly the same as the erotic love between men and women. Those who are not homosexuals have always resisted any simple equivalence between sexual love and friendship, not out of bigotry but at least partly because to grant it would be an abdication of their own right to love. Characteristically, the robust heterosexual, if told that close friendship with another man is only a degree away from homosexual relations with him, will back off the friendship. He knows, or believes, what it seems the homosexual cannot know or believe, or doesn’t want to know or believe, namely that the two sorts of love are different in kind and not just in degree.
The resistance from military men to the idea of gays in the military seems to be due to this perception. In their minds there simply is no continuity between brotherly and erotic love. Indeed, the power of the former would be not just diminished but destroyed by any confusion of the two. When that other kind of love, eros, gets mixed up with the very different kind of love appropriate to siblings or parents and children, we call the result incest, which has been banned, often with extreme prejudice, in almost all cultures known to us. This is because eros is so strong that it corrupts and destroys the other kinds of love which, accordingly, simply cannot coexist with it. Eros is the gray squirrel, the kudzu, the zebra mussel of emotions: When it moves into an environment, it crowds out all its competitors.
Of course it will now be said by our new breed of political moralizers that I have compared homosexual love to incest, thus identifying myself–assuming that I had not already done so–as a bigot. I have done no such thing. I have said that homosexual love, like heterosexual love, must admit of certain human relationships, based on other, nonsexual kinds of love, where its presence would corrupt and destroy those more delicate types of love. I merely ask those who wish to do away with the prohibition of open homosexuality in the armed services to consider that the more than 1,100 flag and general officers who recently declared their support for the existing law were motivated, as they claim, by genuine concern for national security and not by bigotry. Wouldn’t any refusal to do so be tantamount to -bigotry itself?
The key idea here being that gay people are incapable of loving another man in a non-sexual way. Which is, of course, an utter crock. Perhaps what he’s really suggesting is that a gay man and a straight man cannot have a relationship based upon non-sexual love. Or maybe he’s saying that straight men cannot imagine a gay man loving a straight man in a non-sexual way.
Mr. Bowman is guilty of the classic straight man bigotry against gay men: he thinks he is so desirable that how could a gay man NOT be attracted to him erotically! And then, he projects that corrupt line of thinking onto all straight and gay men.
Gay men, by the very nature of their sexual orientation, are blessed with the ability to feel both brotherly love and erotic love for men. We know the difference between the two. But just as not every straight man is sexually attracted to every woman, not every gay man is sexually attracted to every man. And just as straight men sometimes have to deal with an unavailable woman (she’s married, uninterested, whatever), gay men have to deal with that unavailablility among men, too. In a world where there are few of us, navigating that particular obstacle course becomes second nature to us, as so much of the world is unavailable.
At the same time, some of my deepest friendships are with straight men. There is not sexual component between us, and our love is non-erotic. My friends know I am gay, but it is unimportant to our friendship. Or maybe it is important to it in ways that do not include sex. Seeing the world through the perception of homosexuality is a beautiful and wondrous thing. Having friends who appreciate that is priceless.
But that brings us back to the question at hand. Are straight men capable of having non-sexual love relationships with gay men? Are gay men capable of having non-sexual love relationships with straight men? And if the answer is yes, then why does it matter if openly gay men serve in the military?
Oh, right, it doesn’t matter. End the ban on openly gay men and women from serving in the U.S. Military.
