No R.O.T.C. on Campus

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In light of the recent debate about ROTC presence on campus, we feel that it is important to examine homophobia and the role it plays in the military. Harvard has an explicit policy protecting the rights of gay students. The U.S. military and ROTC are in conflict with this policy because they do not allow gays, lesbians or bisexuals to join the services, claiming that we are more susceptible to blackmail and therefore pose a more serious risk to "national security" than do heterosexuals. Two recent studies commissioned by the Department of Defense (D O D) have shown that the claim is simply not true. The D O D has commissioned yet a third study, indicating an inability to accept this finding. If the main concern was in fact security, one would expect them to be relieved.

Ultimately, the task of the armed forces is to kill people when called upon to do so, a task which we all like to think does not come naturally to people. The main concern of military training is to prepare recruits for this by dehumanizing the enemy and dehumanizing the recruit by making her or him function as only one component of a larger machine. He or she must wear a uniform, follow orders, perform drills, honor rank and the like. Given the goals, tolerance and sympathy for fellow humans are not encouraged.

But homophobia is. Webster's 1980 "newly revised" dictionary does not have an entry for the word, so we point to Audre Lourde's definition: "A terror surrounding feelings of love for members of the same sex and thereby a hatred of those feelings in others." As you might expect, the gay community is painfully aware of homophobia when we experience it in discriminatory policies, in rejection by family and friends, in societal assumptions that we are straight, in our exclusion from mainstream culture, in censorship and misrepresentation of our culture, as well as in incidences of anti-gay epithets and violence.

The Marines' search for "A Few Good Men" does not include gay men. When the Army exhorts us to "Be All That We Can Be," they don't want us to be lesbians or bisexuals. Members of a sexual minority who are out of the closet and proud would not pose a security risk, but we are still barred from serving our country if we feel a duty to do this through the military. This is because the military plays on homophobia and pejorative stereotypes of gays in its dehumanizing process. The terror of being perceived as homosexual is used to scapegoat weaker members of a unit and to build esprit de corps in the rest. A scapegoat is necessary to militarism; the scapegoat is blamed for a bad situation and then killed. In short, the scapegoat is the enemy.

Homophobia is only one manifestation of the need to scapegoat. Xenophobia and racism are also used to dehumanize, and thus to scapegoat the enemy. Misogyny, with its unmitigated assertion of superiority and justification of violence, is widespread--witness the incidence of rape as an act of war, the harassment of servicewomen within the forces, and the exclusion of women from combat positions that give access to higher rank and higher pay. Classism is blatant in the rank system and in the economic backgrounds of people who fill those ranks. Homophobia is only one example of oppressive forces that are at work in the military. Even if the exclusionary policy were changed tomorrow, the underlying tensions and hatreds inherent in the system would still make it unacceptable for an arm, or even a finger, of the military to train or recruit on Harvard's campus. ROTC has no place here. Sheila C. Allen '93   Lily S. Khadjavi '90