Military Called 'Anti-Gay'

The United States military systematically "hounds, harasses, jails and drives to suicide" gay and lesbian servicepeople, a journalist from The San Francisco Chronicle said Thursday night.

Speaking to an audience of 150 in the Mather House dining hall, Randy Shilts, author of the bestselling And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, focused on the issue of gays and lesbians in the military.

Shilts recounted a string of horror stories he collected while researching an upcoming book.

In one example, Shilts described a 1988 Naval Investigation Services (NIS) "witchhunt" against lesbians at a Marine Corps facility.

The NIS, Shilts said, tried to get a single mother, accused of being a lesbian, to inform on others by threatening to have her child taken from her.

The NIS's list of suspected lesbians in this investigation grew so large and so fast, Shilts said, that "somebody's cat ended up on the list as a lesbian."

The military's anti-gay policy also makes women targets for sexual harassment, Shilts said.

In 1988, Shilts said, a Navy enlisted man, whose sexual advances were rejected by the women aboard ship, posted signs reading "No Dikes." When a woman sailor complained to the captain, he ignored her complaint of sexual harassment, and instead put her under investigation on suspicion of being a lesbian, Schilts said.

Shilts said that the military's 1981 official justification for barring homosexuals from service closely resembles a similar position used in 1942 to justify racial segregation.

"Everybody now agrees that slavery...[was] evil," Shilts said, but "the jury is still out on anti-gay prejudice."