FOR THE LAST SIX YEARS, sociologists Charles Moskos of Northwestern University and Laura Miller of UCLA have conducted periodic small surveys of Army personnel's attitudes about letting gays and lesbians serve in the military.
In June 1992, before gays in the military became a contentious national issue, 67 percent of the Army men "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly in the military.
By August 1998 however, the survey found that only 36 percent "strongly disagreed" with letting gays serve openly. That represents a nearly 50-percent decline in strong hostility to gays
Here are the results for those who "strongly disagreed":
- June 1992: 67 percent
- June 1993: 61 percent
- July 1994: 57 percent
- Oct. 1994: 49 percent
- June 1996: 44 percent
- Aug. 1998: 36 percent
Total anti-gay sentiment (combining "disagree" and "strongly disagree") actually peaked in mid-1993, near the conclusion of the vigorous campaigns by the Pentagon and U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) against letting gays serve. In the June 1993 survey, 78 percent of the Army men opposed or "strongly" opposed letting gays serve; only 11 percent of the men (and 27 percent of the women) favored including gays.
Since then, however, there has been a steady decrease in overall hostility and a steady increase in support for gays. As of August 1998, only 52 percent of the men opposed letting gays serve (16 percent opposed and 36 percent "strongly" opposed); and 26 percent favored allowing gays, an all-time high.
Interestingly, more than one-fifth (23 percent) said they were "not sure," the highest that number has climbed. That may mean those men have not thought much about the issue, or do not care, and are simply less judgmental about such things. Equally likely, they are simply waiting for the Pentagon to tell them what to think.
It is important not to place too much stock in these figures. The surveys are small, ranging from 200 to 400 men and even fewer women, and they are "convenience samples" not random samples. But the data do show a reasonably consistent trend.
The data also gain credibility because the findings for men and woman run a parallel course.
Women have long been more gay-accepting than men, in the military as well as civilian society. Even at their least supportive point, during the Pentagon's 1993 anti-gay crusade, 27 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve in the military; only 42 percent opposed the idea.
Since then, anti-gay passions have declined and pro-gay views have steadily increased. In August 1998, 52 percent of Army women favored letting gays serve and only 25 percent disagreed. And as with the men, more than one-fifth (22 percent) of the women said they were "not sure" about gays serving.
How can we account for these changes and what do they mean for us?
The simplest explanation is that attitudes in the military are influenced, at least somewhat, by attitude changes in civilian society.
Over the years gays have become a more familiar part of the social landscape, more people have come to know gays as friends and co-workers, seen gays on television, heard gay issues discussed. Particularly for young people, gays are part of the world they have always known, so gays do not seem new or bizarre or threatening. Thus, we have seen anti-gay attitudes among college freshmen drop rapidly in the last decade.
Young people presumably bring those same attitudes with them when they join the military. With the gradual turnover of military personnel between 1992 and 1998 newer recruits brought the more recent set of attitudes in from civilian society.
This effect may be being supplemented by a second: that under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy some military personnel are quietly becoming more open about being gay, only without making the formal declaration. If that is true, then more military men are discovering that those men and women do not cause the tensions or problems the Pentagon predicted and are, in fact, pretty good coworkers.
It is hard to imagine how to test that possibility, but with "don't ask, don't tell" the military is certainly acknowledging that gays are now serving and that very fact may be helping personnel get used to the idea of gays.
That growth in acceptance of gays suggests that even if we cannot have a direct effect on military policy, we can have an indirect effect by continuing to work in civilian society for public acceptance of gays.
As our work influences public attitudes, new enlisted men will continue to bring those more accepting civilian values into the military with them and they will find the military's ban on open gays to be unaccountable, unfair, and bizarre. And we should continue to denounce the gay ban at every opportunity as unjustified, hypocritical and superstitious.
The question then remains whether there is a point at which military opposition to gays sinks so low that the military hierarchy can no longer plausibly use the excuse that its personnel will not accept gays and that gays threaten "unit cohesion" and "mission readiness."
Many of us think that is not a very robust argument to begin with, but at some point the decline of intolerance will render it laughable even to those who find the reasoning persuasive.
That point may already have been reached for women. Since only 25 percent of Army women oppose letting gays and lesbians serve (and only 16 percent object "strongly"), the rationale exists for urging that we should now at least let lesbians serve openly in the military.
Such a policy would largely eliminate the egregious lesbian-baiting that now occurs in the military and the disproportionately high discharges of lesbians over gay men. It would also further chip away at the remaining homophobia.
The Pentagon will inevitably be slow to acknowledge the fact that its new recruits and enlisted men are increasingly comfortable with gays. The upper echelon military has less contact with civilian society and little recent contact with its evolving values. Most military men probably hold roughly the values of civilian society at the time they joined the military, which may be decades ago. In addition, the officer class is disproportionately from smaller towns and suburbs, less tolerant places to begin with.
They may see growing civilian acceptance of gays as signs of decadence and social collapse, and may dig in to oppose such trends all the more strongly.
At this point, changing military policy looks both more reasonable but, for political reasons, less likely than it did six years ago.