Air Force Allowing Gays to Recant

The Air Force has adopted a new approach to handling declarations of homosexuality that appears to be reversing a five-year surge in discharges of gay recruits.

Alarmed about a high rate of forced departures at the service’s basic training center at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Air Force officials have begun permitting recruits to recant statements that they are homosexual.

Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy adopted five years ago, recruits who publicly declare themselves to be gay must leave the service, while homosexuals who keep their orientation concealed may continue their careers.

Now, under a procedure put into effect in March, Air Force recruits may take back statements that they are gay as long as they do so within a few days of declaring their homosexuality.

They are also given an opportunity to explore the details of the “don’t ask” policy with Air Force lawyers in confidential discussions that cannot legally be used against them. Air Force officials are then giving them a few more days to reconsider their statements before beginning formal discharge procedures.

The change grows out of concern that some recruits might be declaring they are homosexual because of misunderstandings about the “don’t ask” policy and in response to the stresses of basic training.

In the first seven months since the new approach was adopted, the number of discharges of Lackland recruits went from 195 to 31.

The change is dramatic, said Jim Wolffe, special assistant to Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters. Now, “almost no one is being discharged for being gay at Lackland.”

The Air Force has had a higher rate of such discharges than the other services because of the relatively large number of cases at Lackland.

The number of discharges for homosexuality from other Air Force bases has been flat or declining since the “don’t ask” policy was instituted in November 1994, officials said.

Wolffe insisted that the changes at Lackland are procedural in nature and are consistent with the restrictions contained in the “don’t ask” policy.

“There’s no intention of having openly gay people serve at Lackland, or anywhere in the Air Force,” he said.

He said that recruits are allowed to recant only in circumstances where they have made statements in private settings to individual training instructors or officers. The policy is not meant to apply to cases where recruits have made their declarations in a more public way--by holding hands with a member of the same sex, for example.

Officials of Service Members Legal Defense Fund, a gay-rights advocacy group in Washington, praised the initiative.

“This process appears to be a genuine effort to reduce the number of gay discharges,” the group said in a letter sent Monday to Secretary Peters.

At the same time, the group said that it had found in a study of Lackland several shortcomings that could explain the training base’s high numbers of discharges.

It faulted the base, which handles 30,000 recruits a year, for failing to explain the “don’t ask” policy fully, allowing harassment of recruits for supposed homosexuality, neglecting to provide safe ways to resolve problems arising from the policy and for fashioning a system that had resulted in “virtually automatic discharges.”

The new changes may come under critical scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Stephen E. Buyer (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee, said that he will withhold judgment on the changes while he awaits an Air Force briefing.

But he said he is “almost dumbfounded” that the Air Force seems to be counseling recruits who say they are gay to lie subsequently about their orientation “so that the discharge numbers look better in the eyes of the gay community.”

News of the Air Force’s policy change comes as the Clinton administration is making several moves to improve the treatment of gays in the military.

Amid an outcry over the murder of a soldier in Kentucky believed to be gay, the Pentagon is instituting new procedures that place additional restrictions on investigations of suspected gay service members.

Only this month, President Clinton signed an executive order amending the military criminal code to add stiffer penalties to crimes motivated by hatred caused by the victim’s sexual orientation, race, religion or ethnicity.