A conservative Republican and former Eagle Scout, a Mormon by birth and a man uniformly praised by his military superiors as an exceptional officer, May is perhaps an unlikely gay-rights activist. He is certainly a stubborn one. May has vowed to appeal his likely discharge as far as possible up the military chain and, barring success there, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a recent interview with Salon, May discussed his battle against the military and how he reconciles the anti-gay policy with his support for George W. Bush, who says he will retain “Don’t ask, don’t tell” if elected president.

During the presidential primaries you supported Arizona Sen. John McCain. Now you support Gov. Bush. How can you support Bush, given his view on “Don’t ask, don’t tell?”

I support Governor Bush. I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about him yet. I don’t think he has a good understanding of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” or a good understanding of gays in the military. Frankly, I think he’s trying to avoid the issue as much as possible. And I think it’s sad.

But there are a lot of reasons I support Bush over Gore that aren’t related to gays or military policy. I think Bush will be better for the military as a whole.

But I’m extremely disappointed with Governor Bush’s position on “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” He hides behind Colin Powell’s statement from eight years ago that it would hurt morale and cohesion, an opinion that was stated without evidence. There were generals in Colin Powell’s position 50 years ago who said the exact same thing about blacks. This is a terrible part of his legacy. Twenty years from now, when gays are allowed to serve openly in the military and are treated the same as heterosexuals, this will be a terrible black mark on Colin Powell’s legacy.

Of course, I don’t think Gore understands the military either, or the problem of gays in the military. Gore said that he’s going to end “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the reality is he can’t. Congress has to change the law, and anyone who believes that electing Gore is going to change it is foolish.

Gov. Bush exhibited some strange waffling when it came to meeting with members of the Log Cabin Republican Club.

And you’ll note that I wasn’t invited to that meeting — and I’m on the [Log Cabin] board. I don’t think he wants to touch me with a 10-foot pole. I’ve heard a lot of people in his campaign say that he thinks I’m too controversial. Sorry, what’s controversial about serving your country?

Do you know Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary?

I don’t know her personally. I did send a letter to the Bush campaign trying to give him some advice about how to handle the issue, which clearly they don’t follow. Lynne and Dick Cheney have done a terrible job of handling this issue.

Lynne Cheney essentially denied that her daughter, who worked for years as the Coors Co.’s liaison to the gay and lesbian community, and who is openly gay, is gay.

It’s ridiculous. They need to acknowledge that she’s gay, acknowledge that they love her, accept her and move on. There are so many Republican families with gay children who are struggling with acceptance. The Cheneys have an opportunity to set an example of family values in embracing their gay daugher. But as long as they continue to pretend that she isn’t gay, they’re setting a terrible example.

You’ve said that you don’t want to be a poster boy for this and that you don’t want to fight the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

I feel I’m not fighting the policy. I’m just telling my story. But in telling my story, which is so absurd, the policy is fighting itself.

I went into the service at the time “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was implemented, and I think like most people in the service at the time I thought that it was probably a reasonable compromise. It seemed to make sense on the face of it: Just be discreet and don’t talk about it and you’ll be fine. But that’s not the way the policy has been applied.

So you’re against the policy as it’s being applied?

Oh, absolutely. First of all, it’s immoral. It’s Clintonian to the core. At the same time that we demand that our military service members be honest in every regard, we ask them to lie about their sexual orientation. I mean, the policy says you can be gay in the military as long as you lie about it. That’s immoral.

What do you think our policy on gays in the military should be?

Our policy should be like the policy of all the other NATO nations. Service members should be evaluated on the basis of conduct. In October 1994, I was assigned to be a leader for an all-male platoon with the assignment of integrating women into that platoon. And as I was integrating women into the unit, we had a lot of sexual problems between men and women. Well, it doesn’t mean that you ban heterosexuals from the military because they engage in this behavior that’s unacceptable. It means you purge the individual soldiers who violated the rules of conduct.

Robertson had been called to the club by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to follow up on a tip by an informant that military members were peddling ecstasy at Velvet Nation and other dance clubs in what the Navy incorrectly dubs Washington’s “rave scene.” Once inside, Robertson approached men he would later describe as having the physical appearance of those on active military duty, and struck up a conversation, talking over the deafening sound system. They chatted about Velvet Nation’s music and the theme of the club, which happens to resemble a military boot camp, thanks to the prevalence of buff, narcissistic, cargo-shorts-clad men who could easily grace the cover of a men’s fitness magazine.

After establishing rapport, Robertson and other agents, including Air Force Office of Special Investigations Agent Thomas Roach, asked the apparent service members where they could find ecstasy. One of the men was Petty Officer Eric Brady, a Navy hospital corpsman with five years in the service and three promotions under his belt, who was under the command of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. According to the Navy’s version of events, Brady was one of the soldiers who obliged agents’ requests for the psychotropic drug, and allegedly exchanged pills for money during the sting.

The agents’ visit to Velvet Nation that night — the account of which is based on interviews with those present at a recent pre-trial hearing on the pending criminal case against Brady — wasn’t the last. After a second visit and another two alleged drug transactions, Brady was arrested and charged with violating Article 112A of the Navy code, which prohibits the distribution of illicit drugs.

But that wasn’t the end of the matter. The sailor’s lawyer contacted the Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network and gave the gays-in-the-military advocacy group a heads up that the Navy was conducting a drug-sting operation in D.C.-area gay bars. And SLDN in turn began trying to investigate the investigators, to make sure that the anti-drug operation was not in fact a ruse for identifying and discharging gay and lesbian service members.

“We’re concerned that the military is selectively targeting patrons of gay-friendly establishments,” says Michelle Benecke, executive director of SLDN. But the Navy has staunchly defended its investigation, first reported by the Washington Blade in June, saying it is a clear-cut case of cracking down on drug dealing in the D.C. “rave club” scene, and has nothing to do with its targets’ sexual orientation.

“The focus of this particular undercover drug operation is and has always been on military members suspected of selling drugs in the Washington, D.C., area,” says NCIS spokesman Paul O’Donnell, defending the operation. “Neither the sexual orientation of the military suspects nor that of the establishments’ clientele is relevant.”

Washington’s non-voting representative to the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., does not share O’Donnell’s interpretation of events. “My concern is that in the hearing, the Navy was unable to indicate institutions or bars or similar establishments that were not in the gay community that they were also targeting for drug use,” Norton said in a recent telephone interview.

“Drugs [are] one of my major problems in the District of Columbia. If they want to help reduce drug distribution, the last thing they need to do is target a narrow range of gay bars. Until they come forward with evidence that they are generally interested in institutions that Naval personnel may frequent to use drugs, I am exercising my judgment against them. The armed services have been anything but faithful to the so-called don’t ask, don’t tell policy.”

Yet while the Navy insists that it focused not on gay clubs, but on clubs known for on-site drug sales, the only establishments known to be targeted cater to predominantly, though not exclusively, gay crowds: Velvet Nation, JR’s Bar and Grill, Badlands and Tracks (which has since closed). “Sting,” a Friday night party in the same space housing Velvet Nation that draws a straighter crowd, was the only straight club disclosed during the April 28 Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury).

So far, the Navy has not made public the names of any bars or clubs targeted by the investigation that do not cater to a predominantly gay crowd. But O’Donnell insists that the targets were chosen based on evidence that drug dealing went on there — evidence that included the testimony of sailors who were interrogated after urinalysis testing had indicated they were consuming drugs. He also says witnesses used in the operation had been “instructed that sexual orientation is irrelevant in any way.”

For its part, SLDN says it is concerned about the tactics used in the investigation, not with the specific charges that have been leveled. The issue has been a tough one for SLDN. Always alert to military policies that target gay personnel, the advocacy group was quick to look into charges that the sting operation targeted gays. But it’s been reluctant to align itself with a drug culture that has become a staggering social and public relations problem for the gay community.

With research showing that gay men apparently consume illicit drugs in greater proportion than their heterosexual counterparts, public health advocates worry that drugs like ecstasy decrease inhibitions to the point that users may choose to engage in unsafe sex practices and increase the risk of HIV infection. And the focus on gay clubs in the sting operation might be a result of research, not mere prejudice, since anyone who patronizes gay nightclubs knows they seem to attract more than their share of drug taking and drug dealing. (This writer, for example, recently observed a patron at Badlands, one of the nightclubs targeted in the NCIS investigation, purchase cocaine after less than five minutes of searching.)

“We don’t condone or defend drug use or the military’s right or interest in combating it,” says Beneke. “We do oppose selective use of military investigative authority in a way that contravenes” the military’s policy on gay soldiers.

Did the Navy conduct a witch hunt? It’s hard to say. The sexual orientation of the military personnel involved in the sting hasn’t been officially confirmed. But even giving the Navy the benefit of the doubt, the fact remains that the NCIS mounted a sting operation in which the majority of venues catered to gays, and its top brass was ill-prepared to answer the tough-questions — and face the culture clash — that ensued. Given the current negative climate surrounding “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the sting operation triggered a predictable backlash that the Navy is, weeks later, still trying to manage.

The drug-sting operation was brought to SLDN’s attention by Lt. Matthew Freedus, the JAG corps attorney representing Brady and a Marine (whose name has not been disclosed) who were ensnared in the probe. Freedus told the SLDN that the Navy had been investigating D.C.-area gay bars, and alerted staff attorney Jeffrey Cleghorn about the upcoming Article 32 hearing for one of the soldiers he is representing. Cleghorn attended the hearing.

According to Cleghorn, Navy Special Agent Jack O’Conner testified that the investigation had focused on Velvet Nation, JR’s, Badlands and Tracks. When grilled by the defense attorney, O’Conner said the investigation had also taken agents to city streets and military housing. But he could not name any other establishments that had been probed.

SLDN’s Benecke and Cleghorn say the gay community is particularly sensitive to the charges because of the military’s history of witch hunts and investigating gay bars, which dates back to the Korean War. Before the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was codified in 1993, it was common practice for the military to send agents out into gay bars to try to identify service members, who could then be investigated and discharged, their careers in the military brought to an abrupt end. Agents, according to Benecke, would not only infiltrate gay bars, but also walk through the vicinity, write down any military decals they could find on cars and run them through a database in order to identify people.

“The possibility that the Navy has launched an undercover investigation for the purpose of ferreting out gays sends chills down the spine of people like me, who were quietly serving our country in the ’80s,” says Benecke, who served as a captain and battery commander in the U.S. Army air defense artillery.

“The problem we have,” says SLDN’s Cleghorn, “is that all of the evidence in sworn testimony points to them going to gay bars and using this drug angle as a ruse for just trying to harass gay people or, worse, collect information about gays in the military. We have no concrete information to suggest that’s exactly what they’re doing, but the military has historically targeted gay bars for investigations as far back as the 1950s.”

And Benecke asks: “What are they doing with that information? We’re concerned that they’re targeting ‘military-looking’ men. It suggests they’re casting a wide net and fishing.”

But NCIS’s O’Donnell says the investigative unit pays no attention to the sexual orientation of the soldiers it probes. The unit, O’Donnell insists, “does not give information to commands that members of their commands are frequenting gay establishments.”

According to O’Donnell, the Navy coordinated its investigation with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Since 1997, the operation has nabbed 13 military members who are suspected of distributing ecstasy or other drugs. Four have been discharged, three have court martial proceedings pending and six are still under investigation. Two civilians observed in the operation were also turned over to Washington police. The investigation focused on six D.C.-area bars and nightclubs.

SLDN and local gay activists have requested a full list of the establishments, since those identified so far cater predominantly to gays and lesbians, but the Navy has not yet fulfilled its promise to deliver such a list, and O’Donnell told Salon only that most of the bars or nightclubs “have a mix of gay or straight patrons.” The Metropolitan Police Department did not return numerous phone calls or a faxed request for a statement about its involvement in the investigation.

“The focus of this particular undercover drug operation is and always has been on military members suspected of selling drugs in the Washington, D.C., area,” O’Donnell stated. “Neither the sexual orientation of the military suspects nor that of the establishments’ clientele is relevant. Targets are developed and pursued based on hard criminal intelligence that they are selling drugs.” According to a source familiar with the hearing transcript, the Navy obtained the tips from what investigators described as a “reliable informant” who steered them to individual suspects. The Navy would not, the source said, reveal the identity of that information during the hearing.

Between 1996 and May 2000, the NCIS’s Washington Field Office closed more than 172 narcotics cases involving service members. But the agency says it does not track statistics on the sexual orientation of patrons at establishments it monitors — agents only go into clubs where there is “hard criminal intelligence” that drugs are being sold. At press time, the agency could not provide a specific breakdown of drugs involved in previous busts.

But questions persist about the methods used by agents at Velvet Nation. SLDN has asked why investigators targeted the club, and investigators have given contradictory answers. Testimony from the Article 32 hearing suggests that agents may have conducted surveillance of Velvet Nation and other nightclubs to identify service members. But now the Navy is saying that, at least in the court martial proceedings discussed at the hearing, the Navy sailor had invited an agent to two of the bars with him.

Both SLDN and a source close to the case suggest that agents were “flirting” with suspects, but a Navy spokesperson downplayed the insinuation, reiterating that informants were told that sexual identity should not be a factor in the investigation. But Velvet Nation is a cruisy nightclub, filled with over a thousand scantily clad men on any given Saturday, and the suggestion that flirting was not one of the ways agents gained their targets’ attention seems disingenuous to some.

“My experience in the gay community,” Cleghorn said, “has been that if someone comes up to me at 2 a.m. and strikes up [a] conversation, I consider it a good sign.” While there may not have been overt flirtation in the form of physical contact, “just creating the impression that a person is gay, interested in me,” is a form of flirtation, he added.

Critics of the investigation, including SLDN, suggest that military agents acted inappropriately (and perhaps illegally) in the way they approached suspects at Velvet Nation and other clubs. SLDN argues that the Navy could, in fact, have been gay-baiting soldiers in order to nail them in its drug sting. But in the Article 32 hearing, according to Cleghorn, Robertson said he did not pretend he was gay when approaching suspects. It’s a question of interpretation that requires a cultural sensitivity that critics say the military lacks.

In testimony, according to Cleghorn, O’Conner stated that his NCIS office didn’t have enough younger agents to pull off an effective investigation in the clubs, so they brought in attractive young investigators from local Army and Air Force offices to send out to Velvet Nation and other clubs.

Once it learned of the anti-drug sting, SLDN moved quickly with local gay organizations to launch a counteroffensive and opposition research. With the local chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, it produced 1,000 handbills that were distributed at local gay bars warning patrons of the ongoing investigation, and JR’s sponsored a full-page ad in a local gay newspaper, warning of the investigation and soliciting information from patrons who might know more about the operation.

SLDN also sent a letter outlining its concerns about the investigation to Norton; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Julian Potter, the White House liaison to the gay community; Gen. Barry McCaffrey of the White House drug office; Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and a handful of others. The SLDN figured Frank, Norton and Potter would exert their considerable influence to get some answers from Danzig and others at the Pentagon.

Under pressure, the NCIS offered SLDN an olive branch in the form of two meetings with its director. On June 21, NCIS director David Brant and assistant director Tom Houston met with SLDN legal director Stacey Sobel to “clear up misinformation and confusion surrounding the undercover drug operation.” According to his spokesman, Brant also answered Norton’s concerns with a letter explaining the undercover drug operation and an invitation to meet with him that has gone unanswered. Sobel described the outcome of the first meeting and a follow-up as a “good start.”

And already some good has come out of the meetings, Sobel says. “They’ve made a number of promises about how they conduct themselves, and we want to see those in writing — we want to see that those are actually the policies of those organizations. They have made assurances to us that they’re not going into bars specifically to determine the sexual orientation of service members,” says Sobel. “If they do see information about a person’s sexual orientation, they don’t report that because it’s not relevant to a drug case. It won’t go into a service member’s record. But I want to see something in writing.”

But the military doesn’t have anything in writing — yet. “I asked very specifically whether they had any policy, guidance, memoranda or training materials on the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, don’t harass’ policy, and they said ‘no.’ I said it would probably be beneficial for them to have these types of materials. This was something we could work on together,” she says. Brant agreed to accept materials from SLDN and expressed a willingness to work on developing his own. “We look forward to working with them to give their agents information about the policy and how service members are impacted by what they do.”

“We still need some more information to make final decisions on what happened here,” Sobel concludes. “But we’ve had some very good meetings with the NCIS and they’ve definitely shown a willingness to work with us. I’m hopeful that they’ve also realized the seriousness of how investigations that are not related to sexual orientation can still affect a service member.”

It’s doubtful that SLDN’s efforts will aid the two men facing trial and discharge as a result of the investigation. The Marine has been referred to a special court martial, which is more like a misdemeanor, with a maximum of six months confinement, a bad conduct discharge, reduction to the lowest rank and forfeiture of all pay and allowance. The military is notoriously heavy-handed on drug convictions, so any sentence will probably be close to the stiffest punishment permitted.

Brady has been referred to a general court martial, the severest charge you can get in the military, analogous to a felony charge with the possibility of more than 12 months in the slammer, plus all the punitive measures given in a special court martial.

Grossi is one of the few names listed in a recent national report on the rising number of men and women who have left the U.S. armed forces because of anti-gay harassment. The report, released in March by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group for gays and lesbians in the military, details Grossi’s long ordeal at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. Last year, 14 DLI service members reported that they had been harassed and investigated. Of those, 12 women at DLI, including Grossi, said they were drawn into a “witch hunt” into their personal lives last year and were eventually discharged.

“All I was trying to do was my job, because I volunteered for that position,” Grossi says. “I didn’t realize they put you under a microscope for that position and use a different standard than for everybody else.” Now she is 21, looking for another career, one that will be her second choice.

Since the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was implemented in 1993, discharges of gays and lesbians have been on the rise. In 1999, the armed forces discharged 1,034 people for being gay — up 73 percent since the policy went into effect. One startling aspect of the SLDN report is its revelation that women were disproportionately discharged under the policy. Though women make up only 14 percent of active forces, they made up 31 percent of those discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Last year represented the highest percentage of women discharged under the military’s gay policy in two decades.

The Pentagon responds that people are leaving voluntarily — outing themselves to their command in order to obtain an honorable discharge. Advocacy groups say people are taking that exit as a last resort, when harassment becomes too much to bear.

Many see this rise as a strange irony, since the policy was designed by President Clinton and his advisors to allow gays and lesbians to serve legally, if not openly, in the military, which had officially barred them from service for many decades.

If Grossi’s experience stands out, it might be because the Air Force has the highest rate among the services of women discharged under the gay policy — 37 percent of its gay-related discharges last year were women. The Army follows with 35 percent, the Navy with 22 percent and the Marine Corps with 16 percent.

Why do women face more of a threat under the policy? SLDN co-executive director Michelle Benecke offers an explanation in the report. The disproportionate impact on women is “due to lesbian baiting, a form of anti-gay harassment where women are accused of being lesbians for retaliatory reasons, such as rebuffing men’s advances, regardless of their sexual orientation.” Turn down a male officer for a date, and there could be hell to pay.

“That happens frequently,” Grossi says. “It happened to almost everyone I know.”

Not everyone reads the statistics the same way. “I don’t think you can assume that harassment against gays has risen” based on the rise in discharges, insists Stephanie Gutmann, author of “The Kinder, Gentler Military.” Her controversial book posits that the armed forces’ efforts to incorporate women have lowered standards and opened the door to rampant political correctness. She concludes that those misguided efforts have effectively weakened the forces’ ability to fight.

In research for the book, Gutmann says, she found that the perceived problems of sexual harassment and anti-gay harassment are both overblown. “I don’t doubt that there is harassment of gays and lesbians,” she says, but military people she encountered told her that the far more important issue is whether people can do their jobs. Sexuality, straight or gay, gets in the way. “Basically, sex is a problem in many military units because they’re very small, and they live in very intimate conditions 24 hours a day. You’ve got to take it someplace else.”

That reasoning supports the premise of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the intersection of anti-gay attitudes and anti-female attitudes in the military is a difficult one to police. Sex is one issue, but it could be that women are paying for a problem that really belongs to their male colleagues, because of the way the policy is implemented.

The military is facing a bumpy cultural transition these days, from a bastion of manhood into an entity that publicly accommodates women and discreetly (at least in theory) accommodates gays.

But just as gays and lesbians are reluctant to report anti-gay harassment for fear of being investigated, women are reluctant to stand up to sexual harassment for fear they will be called lesbians.

Trickier still, as the SLDN report demonstrates, the actual sexual orientation of a woman — not to mention her sexual conduct or abstinence while on active duty — doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the rumors that are spread about her, or the kind of scrutiny she is put under.

But Gutmann offers another explanation for the high number of gay discharges. “Everybody wants to get out of the service right now — there is a rush for the doors. And people are getting out any way they can.” Telling one’s superior officer that one is gay is the quickest way to get an honorable discharge, Gutmann says.

A teenager when she joined up, Grossi found herself in a situation common to many young people, gay and straight: She had not yet figured out her sexuality. “Honestly, at the time I didn’t know … about myself. When I actually figured out what I was feeling, I realized that I couldn’t actually do anything about it.”

Grossi says she did not experiment while she was in the force or engage in any sexual conduct that would have violated the policy — while she wasn’t aware she was a lesbian at 19, she was well aware of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “Everybody realized when they came in that you couldn’t do certain things and that’s why they signed that paper. We abided by that.” Given the environment at the Defense Language Institute, she says, dating among women was out of the question. And she believes her conduct is more important than her orientation.

The details of the DLI witch hunts are strangely juvenile. The epithets, circular questioning and schoolyard-like taunts evoke a pubescent battle between the sexes. “It’s like a high school — kind of sad, actually,” Grossi explains. “The rumors go around and then they just spread and get bigger and bigger. That’s how it happened.”

First, a rumor surfaced that two women in a certain training flight group had been in a relationship that went sour — one of the women had apparently given up her seat on a flight, allegedly because her former lover asked her to. The group as a whole became known as “dyke flight” by male colleagues. Grossi was a member of the flight.

Senior Airman David Vigil and Master Sgt. Rodney Hamlet, both superiors, called Grossi into Hamlet’s office. They asked her if she knew about a rumor about “the family,” and asked if she knew about the “propensity” of student leaders on her flight. When she said she didn’t understand, Hamlet replied that there are “certain kinds of people” who like the same kind of people. He asked her if she knew about her fellow airmen’s “propensity to like the same kind of people.” Then Vigil and Hamlet began to question her more directly, asking if she was involved in “nasty rumors that were flying around the DLI.” She said no.

The two enlisted personnel started talking about the rumors openly in a common area where students and officers gathered. Grossi thinks their behavior fed the fire, creating an atmosphere where adolescent teasing became pervasive. In her language class, someone asked about the Serbian word for “rainbow” (which happens to be the gay pride symbol) and another student replied, “Oh, Grossi would know.”

Also during class, the report states, fellow student Airman Reyes “would hold his fingers to his nose as if he was smelling them” so Grossi could see, then say to her, “Let me smell your hand so I can see if you did the same thing I did last night.” The sexual comments and gestures happened in front of the whole class. Even Grossi’s civilian instructor got in on the action. He once asked her if she had “fun … with her girlfriend. Oh, I mean boyfriend.”

Another female airman in Grossi’s class reported that a male student called her and another airman “pussy suckers,” and asked them, “Why would you want that, when you can have this,” pointing to himself.

“They felt free to basically torment us,” Grossi says.

Where did the rumors come from? Grossi says she isn’t sure, and still doesn’t exactly know why she was singled out for questioning. She believes it happened because, weeks before, she had turned down Airman Reyes’ request for a date. She says he responded, “Oh, you must be a lesbian.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” isn’t supposed to work this way. The way the policy is written, superior officers are supposed to wait for a commander to authorize an inquiry before they start an investigation, and investigations based on rumors are supposed to be forbidden.

For her part, Grossi sees no problems with the policy as it was conceived. “The policy in theory is good. The problem is, it’s not being abided by. It was our commanders and our senior enlisted personnel who were breaking the rules, and it set an example for everybody below them … I don’t know how the policy would actually work if it was followed.”

In its March report, the Pentagon acknowledged a widespread misunderstanding of the policy among active forces. In a survey of more than 70,000 active service members, 57 percent said they had not had training on the gay policy; 46 percent said the policy was ineffective or only slightly effective at preventing anti-gay harassment. Eighty percent said they had heard offensive speech or jokes about homosexuals in the past year.

But 78 percent of those surveyed also said they would feel free to report harassment against gays. And the Pentagon has released the figure that approximately 80 percent of discharges under “don’t ask, don’t tell” are “self-reported” — cases in which enlisted people “told.” To some observers, this shows that the policy is working just fine.

Commentary about gays in the military tends to focus on gay men, not lesbians. Observers of military culture often say that lesbians integrate better into the military than straight women do, because sex between them and the male majority isn’t an issue; and better than gay men do, because straight men often feel threatened by gay men but see lesbians as a turn-on.

“I’ve heard a lot of military guys say that they feel that lesbians work out a lot better because the sex issue isn’t there,” Gutmann says.

Widely held is the belief that while gay men are promiscuous and flamboyant, lesbians pretty much keep to themselves and do their jobs without bringing sexuality into the mix. But if that’s true, why are women so disproportionately affected by “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

“I don’t have numbers on this,” Gutmann says, “but my general impression is that there are more lesbians than gay men in the military.” In other words, if there are more lesbians discharged from the forces, it may be because there are more of them serving to begin with.

Grossi has another possible answer. “Military men tend to have this ego,” she said, reflecting on the man who called her a lesbian when she turned down his date request. She sees his reaction as endemic of the macho culture that, understandably, is still pervasive in the military. Sexuality, it seems, is an issue no matter what.

Like many of the women who faced similar investigations, Grossi tried dating men in her class to diminish the rumors. “It didn’t help at all. It almost made things worse.” The taunting didn’t stop, she said. “They just came out with, ‘Oh, you’re trying to see if you like the other side too.’” Besides, Grossi says, “it’s not fun living as something you’re not.”

“The military is in the middle of a shift,” says Catherine Manegold, author of “In Glory’s Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, the Citadel and a Changing America.” In doing research for her New York Times coverage of the Faulkner case, she observed the awkwardly shifting attitudes toward women serving in the most elite segments of the armed forces. “The mentality is us and them by definition, because they have to think that way to train,” she explains — and there is no more stark us-vs.-them scenario than that of gays vs. straights. While women are making significant advances, “the issue of homosexuality is still the wild card in this.”

Thus it comes as no surprise to Manegold that “don’t ask, don’t tell” might be abused by people who are uneasy with women’s presence. “There certainly is tremendous residual discomfort over the notion of women in the military. If there’s still resentment and difficulty around that, the easiest way to essentially drum somebody out is to use that card. So in that way, it makes a lot of sense to me that more women would be targeted than men.”

But Gutmann insists the 80 percent self-reported figure can’t be ignored. “There is the belief out there that people have been using this as a way to get out.”

In fact, the gay policy contains a provision that it should not be used in that way — a provision that also gives the military the authority to investigate someone beyond his or her own word about his or her sexuality. Investigations often include questioning a service member’s friends, parents, spouses and former spouses about sexual matters and personal confidences. Which raises the question: When is “asking” admissible, and when is it against the code? When can private matters remain private?

Take, for instance, the case of the “lesbian CD,” which shows that supposed evidence of misconduct seems absurd at times. At one military base an officer was investigated after a rumor surfaced that she had received a chapel blessing with her alleged girlfriend. After the inquiry officer had questioned supposed witnesses to no avail, he decided to search through her things. The only evidence he found was a compact disc “labeled or marked as having music containing homosexual or lesbian content.” It turned out to be a benefit CD to raise money for breast cancer research, but no matter — the inquiry officer then searched the woman’s computer files and Internet logs based on the discovery. In the end, he turned up nothing.

Grossi also left the service after sending a letter to her commanding officer, disclosing her sexual orientation. But she says she did so only after more than two years of harassment and struggle. She managed to graduate with honors from the DLI and move on to the Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas. But the rumors followed her there.

“I was all set to conform to the rules, and do everything I was supposed to until my term was up,” she said. “But they made it impossible. I lost the urge to conform.”

So she wrote the letter disclosing that she is gay. “It basically said that I didn’t think it was right, the things that they were doing to people, torturing people for wanting to serve their country.”

The Air Force launched an internal investigation into the conduct of superior officers at the DLI, and later offered Grossi a verbal apology. “It was proven that their conduct was wrong, and that everything that I said happened actually happened. They told me they realized there is a problem at DLI, and they were sorry about what happened to me.”

Given the way women fare under the current gay policy, can it be reformed to include the many changes needed in order for women, not just lesbians, to be treated fairly? Is “don’t ask, don’t tell” not working because it makes it too easy for women to leave or because it makes it too hard to stay?

“I think that it is a wonderful policy,” Gutmann says. If people were allowed to be “open” about their sexuality, she fears it would invite disruptive behavior that could threaten unit cohesion. “What exactly does ‘openly’ mean? The whole problem is making a point of your sexuality.” A policy of discretion, she says, is exactly the right way to go. “I think that should be the military’s attitude: We don’t care what you do, just don’t drag it into the public sphere.”

But Manegold sees it differently. She says the policy undermines the core values that make the military an elite institution: honesty and personal integrity. “Once you inject a policy that very specifically states that there’s a kind of graying of the truth — in an institution that’s supposed to be about truth and honor — then I think you’re really subverting the institution itself. It essentially opens the door to lying.”

Manegold believes the policy is already failing and will eventually be scrapped. “It was supposed to alleviate tension; instead it seems in some cases to have exacerbated it.

“I think there needs to be an absolute acceptance or rejection — I personally would vote for acceptance — but I think those lines need to stay clear for all parties concerned.”

Until that happens, a lot of women might decide to stay out — or get out — of the service.

The Pentagon responded cautiously, but on the same day the report was released, announced it was considering a policy change on one key issue — whether gay service members can be guaranteed confidentiality when they confide their sexual orientation to a therapist. SLDN Executive Director Michelle Benecke hailed that as a tremendous first step.

“I’m concerned about the report,” Clinton told reporters at a White House press conference. He had just learned of its existence and promised “appropriate action” after he and Defense Secretary William Cohen read it. He expressed hope that the branches’ newly started training programs would improve that atmosphere. “If this report is accurate, I would expect to see a substantial improvement this year. Substantial.”

Over at the Pentagon, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley offered the first possible movement on service members’ ability to discuss their sexuality with doctors and psychologists confidentially. He said the current policy was ambiguous, with health care workers neither required to nor prohibited from turning in GIs who confided their sexuality. “We’re taking a look and asking ourselves is that the right policy to have in place or should we take another look at that,” he said. “So I don’t know where that will go.”

“That’s excellent!” Benecke crowed. “That is really big news. That is the first time they have ever given a centimeter on that.”

A small victory, perhaps, but “it’s a very serious issue to our clients,” Benecke said. “Medical- and mental-health people provide a real relief valve for service members in trouble. There are people who’ve been driven to suicide because there is no safe place for them to go with this secret.”

Though Winchell’s murder sparked outrage across the country and eventually thrust the issue of violence against gays into the presidential debate, the event apparently had little impact on the climate within the military. Though the murder was widely reported midway through the fiscal year covered by the report, harassment remained nearly constant throughout the period, with a slight increase in the six months after. In light of the dramatic increase from 1998, a flattening of harassment reports toward the end of the year was the most hopeful sign.

SLDN is the nation’s chief legal support group available to defend gays in the military and the leading advocacy group against prohibitions on open-gay service. Because of the prohibitions against telling, the military has had difficulty compiling reliable data on the climate toward gays and SLDN’s annual report is widely considered the leading benchmark.

Outside SLDN’s reports, hard data on the extent of the problem has been notoriously hard to come by, with service members rarely willing to talk even to academics or reporters, regardless of confidentiality assurances. SLDN is known throughout the military as a safe underground network and serves as one of the few communication links to the outside world. The data reported Thursday is based on harassment reports made directly to the group by service members around the world.

There were a few hopeful signs cited in the report. “Witch hunts, physical abuse by investigators, and criminal prosecutions of lesbian, gay and bisexual service members have all subsided,” it read. Specifically, discharges for homosexuality dropped 10 percent, after several years of steady increase. But the 1,034 discharges last year represented a 73 percent increase from before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” took effect.

And while the discharges have declined for men, they’re on the rise for women. Females account for 14 percent of the force, yet represented 31 percent of the gay discharges in 1999, the highest percentage in at least 20 years. The Air Force continues to lead all services in gay discharges.

Benecke also expressed cautious optimism at some of the changes under way in the past six months. “I’m hopeful that the directives from the heads of each service might make a difference,” she said. She offered mixed reviews of the branches’ new training programs, with the highest marks going to the Army.

Quigley said he’d only begun to review the report, but that more specific data than provided in the past could be used more effectively. “We are hopeful that they can be as specific as possible,” he said. “And with specifics, we can take action; we can do something and investigate further to verify the accuracy of their claim. In the past, they have been somewhat anecdotal in their findings. But if there are specifics, enough for us to actually do something with, we will.”

“That report is chock full of specific cases they can act on,” Benecke said in an interview later.

Quigley said the Defense Department had seen no significant increase in harassment in the figures it collects, but it is widely acknowledged that service members rarely report gay harassment.

In the wake of the Winchell murder, Cohen ordered the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct the first significant internal investigation of gay harassment, confidentially surveying 75,000 troops. The results are due back to Cohen on Monday, with a public announcement expected later this month.

SLDN preemptively attacked the integrity of that report Thursday, charging that the data would be unreliable and misleading, because many participants did not find confidentiality assurances convincing. The report specifically cited public statements by two high-ranking inspector general’s officials. “Both said that they believed they were required to turn in gay service members who in the course of reporting harassment slipped up and inadvertently revealed that they were gay.”

Charlie Moskos, author of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy and professor of sociology at Northwestern University, expressed surprise at the figures and wondered whether some of the increase could be attributed to greater reporting.

Though typically a chief antagonist to SLDN, Moskos agreed that such a stance could undermine the inspector general’s investigation. “I think SLDN is correct in that position,” he said. “That sounds very sensible to me. It’s like confidentiality with a doctor.”

The report said that harassment continued to surge because of lack of recourse and accountability. “Once a leader walks by harassment, that sends a signal to their soldiers that they pile on,” Benecke said. “They effectively send an invitation to pile on.”

Benecke predicted that harassment would continue until unit commanders began inflicting punishment. “Until leaders start to hold others accountable, [perpetrators] have absolutely no incentive to stop,” she said.

That could spell trouble for the site’s visitors — servicemen and women of all sexual preferences, along with lawyers, soldier-lovers and students. Some have expressed concern that the site could be ruined if it were purchased by anyone not sympathetic to the community. Though Perry says he’s received some e-mail questioning his sales strategy, he says he’ll sell to the highest bidder, regardless of their reasons for buying the site.

“You can only fight for so long, and I’ve done my part,” he says. At first, his part was personal. He started the site in 1995 as a tribute to his former lover, a gay Navy officer who died of AIDS.

“At that time, a search for ‘gays in the military’ produced no results,” he says. “I thought there should be something there.”

The legal advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) begs to differ. A spokesman says that SLDN launched its site, which calls itself “The sole national legal aid and watchdog organization that assists servicemembers hurt by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue policy” in 1994. But Perry insists that there is a difference between the SLDN, which is focused on legal aid, and Homobase, which is a community, a place where gays and others can ask, tell and act under the cover of Internet anonymity.

“If you’re a young, enlisted person, you feel alone,” says Chris McCourry, a gay, former Air Force sergeant and fan of Homobase.com. “So to have a resource is a wonderful thing. It gets lonely out there sometimes.”

The site began as a place to post pictures of gay service members and their lovers, but it quickly became a portal for gays in the military; it now includes links to a host of military and gay sites, as well as health, career and entertainment sites, plus news and reports about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, chat rooms and more.

The design is haphazard — a lengthy page with flickering icons — but the emotion is palpable. And not always positive.

“Get aids and die,” read a post that Perry took down. “We will never allow freaks in the military weirdo.”

Despite such hate mail, Perry has also received gushes of appreciation.

“I stumbled on your page while searching around Yahoo, and I must say that I
am impressed,” wrote a man named Anthony in late 1998. “I am currently engaged (as of Aug. 29, 1998) with a warrant officer in the U.S. Army (13 years). We’ve been together for a little over a year now, and he’s been recently shipped off to South Korea for a one year tour of duty this past October. Saying the distance is painful would be a great understatement, and I try to find things that allow me to feel closer to him for the next 48 weeks while he’s gone. Your site has helped me feel closer, and I would like to say thank you.”

Though Perry says he appreciates such comments, and saves them, he isn’t interested in putting any more of his time into maintaining the site. Besides, he hopes, someone else will be able to add more resources to the site. In the past few months, he hasn’t had time to update the news section or answer all of the requests for more information.

So now the question is who will buy it. By holding an open auction, there is, of course, the possibility that an anti-gay group could buy it and kill the site or turn it into a haven for gay-bashers. Or that no one will step forward with the minimum bid.

“I wouldn’t put it past someone to grab it and get rid of it,” McCourry says.

That’s where someone like Al Gore and Bill Bradley could come in. Both have pledged to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But we got that policy as a result of a pledge by President Clinton to end the ban against gays in the military. If these guys want to prove that they’re a little more serious than the incumbent president, maybe they could just shell out the cash and buy Homobase.com. In the absence of action, purchasing power often speaks louder than rhetoric.