How Will Allegations U.S. Rep. Eric Massa Hit on Fellow Naval Officers Affect the Military Gay Ban?

Now that Congress and President Obama have made history with health care reform, perhaps they can move on to other items on their lengthy agenda, such as lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

A potential fly in the ointment is former New York Congressman Eric Massa, whose shenanigans in and out of the Navy made headlines just a few weeks ago.

The mainstream and LGBT media, including EDGE, glommed onto Massa's numerous incidents of alleged sexual harassment, both as a congressman (he admitted tickling young male aides and was accused of groping them) and during his service as a naval officer after his appearance on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, and CNN's Larry King Live on March 16.

Massa insisted to King that he isn't gay.

The media had a hard time tracking down people who served with Massa in the Navy to confirm allegations of sexual misconduct until the Washington Post published a story on March 16. It details unwanted advances Massa made towards subordinates and bunkmates.

Will Massa's brief time in the limelight have an impact on efforts to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell? Can advocates use his alleged male-on-male sexual harassment to help make the case that being closeted fosters this kind of behavior? Does it prove that all gay men are horn dogs who can't be trusted to be out of the closet around their straight service buddies? Or is l'Affair Massa just a blip on the radar?

'Not Even a Blip' or Post Child Against Repeal?
"None at all. It's not even a blip," sniffed a spokesperson when EDGE phoned the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is fighting for DADT repeal.

"What Massa shows is that misconduct is misconduct and what he did is totally unacceptable," Kevin Nix continued. "There are rules in the military that apply to gay and straight alike to deal with the kind of behavior displayed by Massa."

Told that a conservative group called Massa the poster child for not repealing DADT on the same day that a U.S. Senate committee held a hearing on the issue, Nix disagreed: "What he is is the poster child for having a zero tolerance for misconduct."

To find out if there's any research that supports either side of the DADT argument and Massa's potential impact, EDGE spoke with a leading authority on gays in the military.

Nathaniel Frank is an adjunct professor at New York University and senior research fellow at the Palm Center, a think tank at U.C. Santa Barbara that studies gender, sexuality and the military.

Frank broke the news a few years ago about the Army's firing of gay Arabic-language specialists and wrote the book "Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America."

Researchers face a challenge studying the issue because of DADT, he explained. "The very nature of the military policy prevents researchers from determining who is gay," he said.

Frank maintained that there's never been any research justifying the gay exclusion policy. "The military has done studies and every time they have documented the studies, they hide it," he contended.

Studies that have been made public refute arguments that gays in the military commit sexual misconduct, according to Frank.

"The research certainly does not bear out the stereotypes of gay men being predators or being any more prone to abuse or sexual harassment than straight men," he said.

The research, Frank explained, shows that straight men commit the vast majority of harassment and abuse in the military. "They are notorious for creating disturbances that the military has spent enormous time addressing." Examples he mentioned include the Tailhook sex assault scandal in 1991 and prisoner abuse at Abu Graib in Iraq in 2004.

Even when there is male-on-male harassment, it's not clear that gays do it, Frank said. "The military is what sociologists call a homo-social environment or even a homoerotic environment," he reported. Frank mentioned what animated cartoon philosopher Homer Simpson once said to his wife Marge: It's a place where men who prefer the company of other men go.

The researcher said that those who argue that keeping the ban on gays serving openly is necessary to protect service members from harassment or misconduct "are living in an alternate universe. [DADT] doesn't keep gay people out. It just forces them to lie. That is not a sound way of managing concerns about harassment or other misbehavior."

The researcher said that those who argue that keeping the ban on gays serving openly is necessary to protect service members from harassment or misconduct "are living in an alternate universe. [DADT] doesn't keep gay people out. It just forces them to lie. That is not a sound way of managing concerns about harassment or other misbehavior."

Making the Case for Don't Ask Don't Tell
James Bowman, a film critic, writer and editor with whom Frank has debated, is among those who contend that allowing gays to serve openly would destroy unit cohesion.

That argument "is something that has been asserted so many times that it has the ring of truth even though it's false," according to Frank.

In an article in the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Bowman wrote that the 1993 law banning gays from serving openly in the military has been "erroneously" labeled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

He quoted the statute: "The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability."

In the article, Bowman went so far as to lump gays serving openly with other groups considered unfit for military service: "the very young and the very old, the sick or disabled, violent criminals or, in combat roles, women."

He contended that allowing gays to serve openly "cannot by itself be considered an injustice."

Perhaps the most controversial part of Bowman's article questioned whether gays are manly enough to serve.

"We know that soldiering - I mean not training or support or peacekeeping or any of the myriad of other things soldiers do, but facing enemy bullets - is inextricably bound up with ideas of masculinity," Bowman wrote. "We also know that most heterosexual males' ideas of masculinity are inextricably bound up with what we now call sexual orientation. In other words, 'being a man' typically does mean for soldiers both being brave, stoic, etc., and being heterosexual."

In a phone interview with EDGE, Bowman said the military should discourage gays from serving openly. "I don't think their sexuality is important," he emphasized. "Only the public nature of it constitutes an objection in my mind."

Bowman further explained that lifting the ban on gays serving openly would introduce "an element of mistrust into a relationship that depends on trust. Those who are themselves heterosexual may have a different attitude towards close colleagues. That's why I think in the past gays have served successfully. But it is a potential problem and that would be more likely realized if they were public about their homosexuality."

How Serious is the Charge of Sexual Assault?
Bowman agreed with Frank that there's little research into how gays interact with straights in the military's close quarters:

"How can you do research? The only way would be to have a straight unit and a unit with open gays and straight mixed together and put them in the exact same battlefield situation. That's not practical. I don't think it could happen."

He also agreed with SLDN that Massa's misconduct will have zero impact on the debate over repealing DADT.

Is there any evidence that gays do commit male-on-male sexual assaults in the military? If you believe Robert Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an evangelical who once worked for the Family Research Council, the answer is yes. Maginnis was a member of the military working group that helped draft DADT.

In a March 19 story on One News Now, part of the American Family News Network, Maginniswrote that the number of such assaults is "alarming."

He cited an annual Defense Department report that while 87 percent of the assaults were male-on-female, a whopping seven percent were male-on-male. The report doesn't say whether gay service members were involved in the assaults. But that didn't stop Maginnis from implying that they were.

He maintained that the DoD report isn't going to help those who favor DADT's repeal.

"They may dismiss it as just an aberration or [say] this is not indicative of gay behavior, but their own statistics are pretty self-evident," Maginnis said. "Seven percent is not something to dismiss lightly. If you're going to have that much homosexual assault, that's just the tip of the iceberg."

Maginnis did not respond to EDGE's e-mail request for an interview.

Nor did Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, who also did not respond to interview requests. Donnelly's organization bills itself as a nonprofit educational organization "formed to take a leadership role in promoting sound military personnel policies in the armed forces."

Donnelly evoked laughs at a July 2008 House Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee hearing on DADT when she testified that lifting the ban would cause rampant "lesbian assaults" and contorted gay sex on submarines.

In a news release coinciding with a March 18 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on repealing DADT, Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, called Massa the "new poster child" for upholding the ban.

"If the Congress overturns the 1993 law banning gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military, lechers like Massa will have free reign to aggressively stalk and conquer young subordinates," Lafferty said.