Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Challenge Anything The national LGBTQ movement’s Politics of Exclusion

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In the national pantheon of lesbian and gay history, President Obama will have a special place for
his accomplished effort to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) regulation in the United States
military. DADT, a controversial measure since its inception seventeen years ago, officially allowed
lesbian, bisexual, and gay people to join the ranks of this country’s most revered institution, only if
they did not reveal their sexuality. On December 22, 2010, President Obama, after a majority vote in Congress four days earlier, finally signed into law the revocation of this discriminatory measure.

Many in the media and including friends and associates of mine understandably applauded this act for its human rights contribution and the potential momentum it could offer to a national LGBTQ movement. However, another message was also sent that day – one in which for some is an oversight, while for others is the crux of a malicious agenda: if LGBTQ people want any sort of recognition or civil rights, it is done by including ourselves into this society, not by challenging it. The end result will not be true societal transformation or liberation for LGBTQ people, but the promotion of politics of assimilation that do not represent or address the interests of much of the “community.”

It does not take a fool to recognize that DADT was unconstitutional, as ruled by California JudgeVirginia A. Phillips on October 12, 2010 in response to a lawsuit by the Log Cabin Republicans.

However, it would be too easy just to say that the military is discriminatory and should be more open and not inquire if we should be validating such an institution in the first place. There lays a problem.

The voices that advocate for LGBTQ social justice and do not accept current institutions for all of their violence and inherent exclusionary power, are left out of the dominant discourse. It is our responsibility to ask the question: when and how does an issue become a “LGBTQ issue?” In other words, who has the power to mark an issue as representing a particular group identity? Who has the resources to make something important at the national level? How inclusive is a civil rights campaign? More importantly, which issues are deemed more important and for what reasons and what compromises are made and at whose expense? It is no coincidence that a conservative organization, whose Board of Directors are made up of all homosexual white men – the Log Cabin Republicans – were the ones who filed the successful lawsuit presided by Judge Phillips.

The repeal was passed as a stand-alone bill because it was taken out of a large Pentagon policy bill that Republicans were filibustering. The reason? The bill included Democrat-sponsored last minute provisions, most notably one that would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented peoples who came to the U.S. as children. Without coincidence, the Dream Act had been defeated again around the same time of the DADT debates. The successful lawsuit by members of a conservative elite and the belligerent refusal to pass any sort of comprehensive immigration reform speak to what is the national LGBTQ movement. It is about polishing or should I say, “whitening” the image of LGBTQ people into a non-threatening package. In other words, “dirty, brown Latina/o immigrants” are threatening this country’s institutions, while the “clean, white, gay man or lesbian down the street” are playing by the rules even if they are a “little different.”

We should have a much more open society, without a doubt. However, nowhere in the call to remove DADT was there a call to the end of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. The discourse has been: include us in society and not reshape it to meet the needs of everyone. In very few prominent places is there a call to reshape an institution in which people learn to kill and conquer foreign lands. Imagine a world in which the resources used to dismantle DADT were put in – with LGBTQ people at the forefront – to change U.S. foreign policy and the devastating mission of the military all together. The immediate
and long-term results of dismantling DADT will be the swelling of the ranks of a massive military industrial complex, making it a more effective fighting force of death and destruction. When there are those that say all this was a success for the movement, one must ask, for whom? For transgender people who still cannot serve? For people of color, who enlist in higher numbers, who not only suffer
homophobia and transphobia, but housing discrimination, income inequality, and everyday racism?

For us, the military becomes an only escape out of poverty and lack of opportunities. For the millions of people around the world who become causalities of war and colonialism? Now that DADT is repealed, a new kind of policy has emerged, one which says don’t ask questions, don’t tell any truths, and don’t challenge anything too much. As LGBTQ people, that is not the kind of movement we should be applauding or building.

This article has been condensed and edited.
For the full article, go to:
www.xaviersrevenge.blogspot.com

Xavier “Xavi” Luis Burgos

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