Magazine: The Journal of NIH Research Issue: September 1993 Title: Fear And Loathing In The U.S. Military: Psychological Explanations For Homophobia Author: Rachel Nowak When President Bill Clinton promised to ban the ban on gays in the U.S. military, the military became superdefensive. Claiming that "the presence of homosexuals in the force would be detrimental to good order and discipline," Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed lifting the ban. Colonel Frederick Peck of the Marine Corps added pathos to the debate when, in May, he told a congressional hearing that his son Scott, whom he loves, should not be allowed to join the ranks of the military. Scott is gay, and he simply would not be safe in the armed forces, said the officer. Peck's opinion gained instant credibility from two recent, highly publicized slayings. An 18-year-old U.S. Marine stands accused of fatally beating a Japanese carpenter who allegedly put an arm around him outside a bar in Japan. And a 21-year-old U.S. Navy airman apprentice is sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a gay shipmate in an attack so ferocious that the dead man's injuries were said to resemble those suffered by airplane-crash victims. In a July policy statement, Clinton backed down. He proposed that homosexual men and women be allowed to serve in the military only if they hide their sexual orientation. To aid them in this subterfuge, Clinton proposed that the military cease investigating active-duty personnel and questioning new recruits to determine if they are gay. The long-standing battle over gays in the U.S. military--it dates at least to the end of World War II, when thousands of gay service men and women were summarily discharged--has not passed unnoticed by the research establishment. Rather, a small band of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists have examined with increasing vigor--and rigor--the pervasiveness of anti-gay sentiment in America and the psychological factors that underlie it. First, the researchers surveyed the territory and found--not unexpectedly--that the vast majority of Americans condemn homosexuality. Men tend to be more homophobic than women, and more homophobic about male homosexuality than lesbianism. Consequently, psychologists and psychiatrists tend to direct their attention to male homophobia toward gay men. Among their hypotheses: Outwardly heterosexual men who harbor intense homosexual yearnings may hold the most vehemently anti-gay attitudes of all. Psychologists dub this a "defensive reaction." And, some speculate, men who hold such defensive attitudes are likely to join the military in disproportionately large numbers, drawn to the bastion of traditional masculine virtues--strength, aggression, and heterosexuality--and to authoritarian outlawing of homosexuality as a means of quelling their homoerotic impulses. Opinions vary on whether the anti-gay sentiment that permeates the military can easily be transformed. Some psychologists argue that the military, based as it is on unquestioning submission to authority, offers the ideal environment in which to change homophobic attitudes. Others point out that defensive attitudes can be the most difficult of all to alter. In 1988, a national telephone survey sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, intended primarily to gauge attitudes toward AIDS, also probed attitudes toward gay men. The survey, which used random-digit dialing to select a representative sample of American men and women, confirmed that the vast majority of the 937 participants who agreed to be interviewed (47 percent of those who were asked) find homosexuality offensive. Sixty-four percent considered homosexuality "just plain wrong." Fifty percent believed that "male homosexuals are disgusting." Confusingly, 45 percent felt that homosexuality "should not be condemned." A demographic breakdown of survey participants, due to be reported by Gregory Herek and Eric Glunt of the University of California at Davis in the August issue of the Journal of Sex Research, reveals that politically liberal, young, highly educated, or female Americans are less likely to hold negative attitudes about homosexuals than are conservative, older, less well-educated, or male Americans. But the strongest predictor of positive attitudes toward homosexuals was that the interviewee knew a gay man or lesbian. The correlation held across each demographic subset represented in the survey--sex, education level, age--bar one: political persuasion. Conservative men and women (but not liberals) who had had contact with gays did not differ significantly in their attitudes about homosexuals from those who never knew a gay man or lesbian. No such in-depth studies of attitudes toward homosexuals among military personnel exist. But a widely cited Feb. 28 Los Angeles Times survey of 2346 enlisted servicemen and women concluded that 74 percent of the current members of the armed forces oppose lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military. Sixty-three percent of the 74 percent who opposed lifting the ban did so because they objected to sharing quarters with homosexual men and women. Forty percent, because they believed that homosexuality is immoral. Homophobia, both in and out the military, bears many of the hallmarks of phobias against other minorities. For example, gays, like blacks and Jews before them, are often accused of having a predilection for child molestation--a reflection, explains Herek, of a "general cultural tendency to portray disliked minority groups as threats to the dominant society's most vulnerable members." "Xenophobia has been characteristic of human societies, as well as lions, wolves, hyenas, and other social animals," says evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles. "Basically, it's competition for space and resources." Most psychiatrists, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists agree, however, that the evolutionary "competition-for-resources" argument does not adequately explain homophobia. "There is something added," Diamond says. "One could speculate [that] people become outraged that someone should transgress what we have been taught, from childhood on, not to do. Maybe we are outraged that someone is doing something that all of us have felt some inclination to do at some time. The explanation is to be sought not in sociobiology, but in psychology," he says. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that every child starts out as bisexual, then during the Oedipal stage of development (4 or 5 years old) learns to suppress sexual feelings toward the same sex. Male homosexuality occurs when this sexual development is arrested by an overly domineering mother or an absent father. Few people still subscribe to Freud's theories about homosexuality, in part because recent evidence indicates that homosexuality can have a biological basis (see October 1992 issue, page 53, and box, page TK). But, the psychodynamic theories derived from Freud's teachings are frequently used to explain homophobia. For example, some Freudians reason that excessive hostility toward homosexuality occurs when a person with strong homosexual leanings finds his or her desires unacceptable and "projects" that self-contempt onto people who are openly or apparently gay. Alternatively, homophobia may be a projection of individuals' insecurities about their gender identity, says Patrick Suraci, a Manhattan clinical psychologist and author of Male Sexual Armor: Erotic Fantasies and Sexual Realities of the Cop on the Beat and the Man in the Street. Gender identity denotes not biological sex, but male or female physical and psychological characteristics--in other words, how masculine or feminine a person appears. Asked to define "masculinity," the 134 New York policemen and 1,392 civilians interviewed for Male Sexual Armor "commonly responded, not being homosexual," says Suraci. The tendency of men to define gender in terms of sexual orientation may explain why more men than women are homophobic. That men tend to be more phobic about gay men than gay women could be explained by the cultural taboo against anal sex. Finally, some psychologists speculate that the disgust some men feel toward male homosexuals is rooted in fear and hatred of women. "Gay men are often perceived as feminine [by heterosexual men]," says Richard Isay, clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College in New York, and author of Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development. But not everyone is happy simply to invoke Freud in order to explain homophobia. "One of the problems with psychodynamic theories is that because it is not possible to observe unconscious processes directly, it becomes very difficult to test them empirically," says Herek. Nor is that the only problem facing the study of homophobia. "To characterize the attitudes towards a particular group as being a scientific problem for study implies it is not perfectly acceptable or understandable to have these attitudes," says Herek. "That is not a scientific judgment; that's a value judgment." Despite those misgivings, Herek has attempted to inject some objective reasoning into the study of homophobia by looking not at subconscious processes, but at the attitudes those processes create. To do this, he refashioned a 40-year-old psychological theory postulating that attitudes enable people to meet psychological needs. In a 1987 paper in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Herek contends that a homophobic attitude may meet at least three different emotional needs or, put another way, have three different functions. The first, Herek dubs the "self-expressive function." In this case, the attitude helps meet the psychological need that people have to conform, or to define themselves according to a set of values--Christian ethics or libertarian philosophies, for example. Thus, an anti-gay attitude may be primarily a bid for peer approval, rather than an expression of deep-felt hostility toward gay men and lesbians. Alternatively, "[for some people] being a good Christian means condemning gays. For others, being a good Christian means they must love everyone, including gays," says Herek. "A person's sense of self-esteem may be very tied up with how well they live up to those values." The second function is termed the "experiential-schematic function." In this case, the attitude is forged by a person's tendency to organize the world on the basis of past experiences. According to Herek, "This is often considered the most rational reason for holding a particular attitude." Finally, an attitude may serve a "defensive function," that is, give the person the means to deal with psychological conflicts that he or she cannot address directly. Thus, intense homophobic attitudes may indicate people's anxieties about their own repressed homosexual tendencies, or concerns about how masculine or feminine they consider themselves. The defensive function--which Herek calls the "methinks-thou-doth-protest-too-much function"--is firmly rooted in the traditional Freudian concept of projection. To test his hypothesis, Herek asked 205 male and female college students who identified themselves as heterosexual to write a short essay beginning, "I have generally positive [or negative] attitudes toward lesbians and male homosexuals because ...." After scrutinizing the essays for the occurrence of 28 predetermined themes--ranging from statements about emotional reactions to homosexuality to expressions of stereotypical beliefs about homosexuals--Herek divided the students on the basis of their attitudes toward gays into the three categories. Forty percent of the respondents' answers fell exclusively into the self-expressive category, 12 percent fell exclusively into the experiential-schematic category, and 11 percent, exclusively into the defensive category. A battery of psychological tests--ranging from the Defense Mechanisms Inventory (to test defensiveness) to the Religious Ideology Scale (to test adherence to religious principles)--confirmed that the cause of the students' attitudes had been correctly categorized. Based on his results, Herek constructed the Attitude Function Inventory (AFI), a relatively rapid measure of the types of attitudes a person holds. The test volunteers were all college students, so the findings do not necessarily reflect attitudes in society in general, says Herek. "My guess is that, in society, relatively few people would fit into the experiential-schematic category," he says. "Most [people's] attitudes [toward homosexuality] would fit the self-expressive function because that is how the society's debate on homosexism is defined." Many psychologists believe that the pattern of attitudes in the military also differs from society's, in general. Homophobia aimed at gay men will be most prevalent in predominantly male groups such as the military, or certain sports organizations that, in the interests of the group image, require adherents to repress the feminine qualities that are traditionally associated with male homosexuality, says Isay. Isiaah Crawford, a clinical psychologist at Loyola University of Chicago, suggests that men with strong homosexual desires who believe that homosexuality is a transgression of accepted moral standards will be attracted to the military for another reason. "The structure provides them with boundaries in which they can limit their urges," he says. In the military, homosexuality violates not only a moral standard, but a rule, too. Herek disagrees: "In reality, people are attracted to the military for a variety of reasons--economic concerns, a desire to serve one's country, and a need to train for a career. These will be much stronger motivations [compared with the desire to suppress homosexual tendencies] for most people." There is even less agreement on whether military homophobia can be eradicated. Herek says it can be done and refers back to the telephone-survey findings. "Even in groups that were more representative of the military--men, lower education levels, younger rather than older--the experience of contact with a openly gay person seems to result in a more positive attitude," he says. Crawford is less optimistic. He believes that the homophobic attitudes of many military personnel are rooted in defensiveness. "Defensive reactions are generally the most difficult to change because people are not operating at a conscious level," he says. Crawford has empirical data to support that belief. He and Theresa Luhrs of De Paul University in Chicago, he tored the attitudes toward gay men and lesbians of 128 male and female heterosexual students after half of the students viewed excerpts from The Times of Harvey Milk, a documentary that challenges popular stereotypes about homosexuality. According to the results of Crawford and Luhrs' study, due to be presented at the American Psychological Association annual meeting in Toronto Aug. 20-24, on average, the students who saw the documentary expressed more positive attitudes toward homosexuals compared to students in the control group. However, the attitudes of the subset of students that fell into the defensive-function category according to Herek's AFI were similar between the two groups. Nonetheless, concedes Crawford, "the military is based on a hierarchal command structure, so if someone tells you to do something, you do it, regardless of how much you don't want to. That won't initially change attitudes. But over time, as people have positive experiences with [gay men and lesbians], some of those attitudes will change." This is the angle taken by the Canadian military. When, 10 months ago, it canceled its ban on the promotion of gay men and lesbians, the Canadian forces high command made it clear that transgressions of the new policy would not be tolerated. "The way we approach it is to have everyone from the top down pass on the message and live the message that individuals are to be assessed on their performance, not on their sexual orientation," says Major Ron Dickenson, a policy analyst at the Canadian forces National Defense Headquarters in Ottawa. No reports of violence or harassment have been made so far, Dickenson says. According to modern folklore, the U.S. military was instrumental in shaping the gay community into the political force it now has to reckon with. Many of the 9,000 gay military men and women who received dishonorable discharges at the end of World War II could not face returning to their home towns. Instead, they settled where they had disembarked--in the great port cities of New York and San Francisco, spawning two of largest gay communities in the world. Some of the gay veterans were crushed. Many were angry. That anger helped politicize the gay communities. If the military ban on homosexuality is ever completely lifted, the U.S. armed forces may once again have a far-reaching impact on the gay community. Not only will openly gay men and lesbians be able to fight for their country--seen by many as a high honor--but lifting the ban would also sound the retreat on anti-gay discrimination in other arenas. The U.S. military is the largest, and one of the most influential, employers in the country. As San Francisco historian Allan Berube puts it, "If they let gays into the military, they can hardly rationalize keeping them out of the Boy Scouts, can they?" Additional Reading A. Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History Of Gay Men And Women In World War Two (Plume/New American Library, New York, 1990). G.M. Herek and E.K. Glunt, "Interpersonal contact and heterosexuals' attitudes toward gay men: results from a national survey," J. Sex Res. 30, (in press). G.M. Herek, "Can functions be measured? A new perspective on the functional approach to attitudes," Soc. Psychol. Q. 50, 285 (1987). G.M. Herek, "Myths about sexual orientation: a lawyer's guide to social science research," Law and Sexuality 1, 133 (1991). R.A. Isay, Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1989). P. Suraci, Male Sexual Armor: Erotic Fantasies and Sexual Realities of the Cop on the Beat and the Man in the Street (Irvington Publishers Inc., New York, 1992).