An American Inquisition : CONDUCT UNBECOMING: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military, <i> By Randy Shilts (St. Martin’s Press: $27.95; 784 pp.)</i>

In 1978, several gay crew members of the Nathaniel Greene lived, as did their fellow sailors, in an apartment complex the Navy had rented for them. The gay roommates had fixed up their house in “high House & Garden style, and took turns preparing gourmet meals for one another.” They got used to unannounced visits around mealtime from their unmarried, straight shipmates, who lived student-style and ate frozen dinners. The gay sailors got talked into hosting a Tupperware party for the whole complex. Two dozen sailors and their wives and girlfriends crowded the apartment for cocktails and Tupperware. Thanks to the wives’ talk (“Those guys just had to be gay, they agreed. The apartment was far too tasteful for them to be anything but . . . “), the news of the party and the sexual orientation of the hosts was all over the complex. One of the group, Gene Barfield, a nuclear training expert on his first assignment, was called in to see his captain.

“I heard you had a Tupperware party on Friday,” the captain said.

Barfield was petrified. “Yeah, it was fun,” he replied.

The captain had heard as much and was concerned that no officers had been invited and that all the enlisted wives were talking about what a good evening it had been. After this, the captain said, he wanted invitations to go out to officers, too. The gay men were included in the social life of their mates and were welcome to bring dates, so long as the men were “good looking.”

Randy Shilts’s new book, “Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military,” abounds in such revealing vignettes, although few are this happy. Nonetheless, the history of homosexual people and the movement for gay and lesbian equality in the United States can nowhere be more clearly told than in the history of lesbian and gay service in the military forces.

The outlines of the story are relatively straightforward. Gay men and lesbians have not only always been warriors for their countries but archetypal in the forging of our civilization’s understanding of the committed warrior: Just keep the Alexanders and Fredericks the Great in mind through all the contemporary discussion of what erotic preferences the proper soldier may profess. American military history properly began with the Prussian disciplinarian Baron Frederick Von Steuben, to whom historians have given credit only second to that due George Washington for training an army that could win the war of independence (Washington agreed). Von Steuben was also famously, notoriously, a lover of men. Then there is the story of Dwight Eisenhower’s asking WAC Sergeant Johnnie Phelps, during World War II, for a list of the names of lesbians in the WAC battalion. She reminded him of how highly disciplined, decorated and efficient that unit was and concluded, “I’ll make your list, but you’ve got to know that when you get the list back, my name’s going to be first.” Case closed, on this particular purge anyway.

During the Cold War, the homosexual scare added alarm to the red scare. Ironically it was J. Edgar Hoover who made persecution of other homosexuals a high priority. And it was Eisenhower who instituted the executive orders that defined homosexuals as security risks. Ike was playing politics; Hoover was playing Torquemada. Gays served as easy targets. Americans had grown up beating up fairies and tomboys. The gay man and lesbian had no recourse, the tiny homophile movement offered no protection, and the sudden glare of attention could isolate and root out servicepeople on the basis of rumor and intimidation. In a time when the debate over homosexuality is, at last, out in the open, it is important to remember how complete was the silence that surrounded the subject until the 1970s.

Shilts’ book shows that homosexual women and men were randomly victimized in an almost parodic version of the images of tyranny the military claimed to be fighting. The shock of this book is its detailed revelations, based on government documents as well as hundreds of interviews, of how every principle of freedom, fair play, judicial correctness and basic loyalty were made mockery of by a U.S. government inquisition acting against members of our own military. It is worth remembering that the human rights to which former President Jimmy Carter was so devoted did not extend to the human rights of the American citizens who happened to be gay and who happened to be serving in the nation’s armed forces.

“Conduct Unbecoming” takes on a new urgency as its story approaches the late ‘70s when, it is now clear, the gay movement and women’s movement had developed so far as to challenge the fundamental organizing structures of American society. Shilts’s gay-soldier’s-eye view of the Vietnam war is one of the book’s most moving and revisionist sections. The military, already weakened by the conflict over the war and changed by the conversion to an all-volunteer army in Vietnam’s wake, became a site of social mobility in a society already experiencing that constriction of the American Dream with which we are too familiar. The gay and lesbian soldier challenged a military already fed up with a new kind of recruit. The thriving gay subculture, which Shilts elaborately documents, was but one of many illicit subdivisions in a service that still laid claim to universal obedience and hierarchy but was as beset by raucous individuality as every other aspect of American society.

With Leonard Matlovich, Miriam Ben Shalom, Perry Watkins, “Copy” Berg and the other challengers to the military regulations, the hunting and purging of homosexuals appears to have become an administrative obsession. Evaluated in dollar cost and destroyed careers and even ruined lives, the anti-homosexual purges were a disaster.

If there is one element in this book that will stick in the craw of all readers, it is how little the persecutions and purges ever had to do with gay soldiers’ conduct. The accounts of lawless, senseless and secret persecutions of lesbian and gay soldiers are chilling. In case after case, Shilts shows malicious prosecution, vicious and brutal abuse of individuals, rights and careers, and what amounts to systematized torture as part of a witch hunt. All this in support of a restriction that the government’s own commissioned studies (such as the Crittenden Report of 1957) considered indefensible. The studies were suppressed.

What is even more chilling is the sense that the military was doing society’s work. Despite the gains of the 1970s, the 1980s witnessed a backlash, and a systematic movement to replace the closet door with an outside lock. The onset of AIDS but deepens and saddens the story, giving rise, as it did, to new paranoia, lunacy and reckless disregard of ordinary human and civil rights.

An inescapable understanding that emerges from “Conduct Unbecoming” is the clear failure of scholars and journalists to register what was happening. The systematic deprivation of human rights documented here went largely unchallenged, unnoticed and unrecorded except by the heroic soldiers, sailors and air force personnel who just said “no” and their lawyers and activist support.

Like Shilts’s book about the AIDS epidemic, “And the Band Played On,” “Conduct Unbecoming” is about what happened to individuals: about their being rousted out of bed, informed against, punished without trials, hounded, set up, brutalized, brought to nervous and physical collapse and rewarded for loyal and able service with disgrace. The book narrates the heroics of the extraordinary Americans who are its protagonists, but it is not sentimental about them or about the ins and outs of gay politics, legal wranglings or anything else.

Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is Shilts’s essential sympathy with the plight of the homosexual soldier who wants to serve his or her country and does a fine job of it. He does not disdain military or patriotic service. The story is a bitter one, but Shilts does not absorb that bitterness. Rather, he assembles an irrefutable indictment of unconscionable government behavior in a cause that the military seems still unable to explain.

There are, and always have been, and always will be, lesbians and gays in the military. What seems to spook the military is its lesbian and gay soldiers being open about their sexual preference--not anything they actually have done, but fantasies about what they might do. And since, as Shilts points out, the men who run the military were socialized in a time of rampant sexism and homophobia, we shouldn’t be surprised at their resistance to ending the ban on gays in the military.

This is gripping reading and it is very important reading right now, not only because the issue of gays in the military has at last surfaced publicly, but because Randy Shilts has shown how brutal the betrayal of a nation’s principles of equality and tolerance must be, and how specially disgraceful when that betrayal is visited upon its loyal military defenders. “Conduct Unbecoming” lays it all out for us, leaving little to the imagination except how this country will manage to salvage its honor from the betrayal of all of the thousands of lesbian and gay soldiers. The only way, of course, is the way this country has best paid its debts of honor: by giving the rising generation of gays and lesbians the equality it shamefully denied their elders.