The issues regarding whether or not to continue “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (DADT), the military's ban on openly gay members, are complex. Any discussion of them will by definition only scratch the surface, and probably produce more heat than fire. Still, this discussion must be attempted with the people asked to live with this policy. Here, I'd like to outline what I see as some of the arguments on both sides. (I'm drawing, incidentally, from a book of mine called Sexual Ethics: Liberal vs. Conservative.) We need such discussion because we're talking about a policy largely based on a guesstimate at what the rank and file think. “Morale” is almost always a key player in justifications for throwing out openly gay members of the military, and barring the gate to new ones. If it turns out that morale isn't affected, there goes that argument.

Some people will say, it's not discussion but top-down solutions arrived at by the brass behind closed doors we need. The solution they usually have in mind is, forced integration of openly gay service members. After all, they say, the military had to be racially integrated by orders from above despite insistence that it would upset people.

The comparison between forced racial integration and forced integration of openly gay service members does seem initially plausible. In both cases resistance to integration began with individual feelings of what I call “yuk.” Share my foxhole with a black man? Sleep under the torpedoes of a sub next to a gay man? Yuk.

But the forced integration of African-American service members is not, past a certain point, comparable to the possible forced integration of openly gay service members. Sure, people get used to anything. Racists who said “yuk” to sharing a meal with a black man just get used to it. If tomorrow the gay ban were lifted, life would somehow go on. But nobody ever said that in the case of African-American service members there was any more to fear than the initial queasiness at the very idea, which I'm translating as “yuk.” Many service members do think there's more with openly gay service members.

Here's what I'd expect to get on anonymous polls of service members about their feelings regarding doing away with DADT: Let's say I sleep next to a gay guy. Or between two of them. It's not that they're gay that upsets me. It's the fact that they might do something. To me. The straight guy in the middle. So being gay is fundamentally unlike being black.

It is. The definition of “gay” for DADT purposes is based on “tendency” to do certain things. MIDN 1/C Joe Steffan was thrown out of USNA the year I arrived for saying he was gay though, he claimed, he'd never so much as laid a hand on another man. He just wanted to. (He wrote about it, in By Honor Bound. Worth reading.) So there is some notion that sexual orientation or desire is a time bomb: if you want to do something, sooner or later you will. Besides, just knowing the desire exists is unnerving to some of its possible recipients.

This is a big one for straight boys, who are typically terrified of being on the receiving end of sexual advances. (That's what all those “don't drop the soap” jokes are about.) Women put up with it all the time. But I'd say this is less of a problem than many straight boys think. Gay guys don't like all men any more than straight guys are attracted to all women, and there's no evidence I know of that gay guys are more prone to raping the objects of their desire than straight guys are. If a straight boy can learn to control his eyes, his hands, even to some degree his thoughts with a female shipmate, so can gay guys with men. I'd even bet gay guys, who have to do it all the time in largely straight society, are way better at it.

The more fundamental problem isn't gay sexuality, but the fact that sexuality of any sort doesn't jibe well with the military's mission. That's why the military is a special case, and why we can't use the solutions of civilian society for the military without looking at them very closely. Most adults, gay or straight, can share a 9-5 workspace where everybody keeps his or her clothes on without much problem. This isn't the case on a sub, or in tight conditions, or where 9-5 becomes 0-24. Here the straight boys' “yuk” becomes the more troubling “I feel uncomfortable thinking he might be checking me out,” which becomes “I don't trust him,” or “I don't want to work with him.” In short, that old “morale” thing. And can any person control his or her thoughts or eyes all the time? Is it fair to the gay guy to make him try? (Not that straight boys don't check each other out too, but that's another piece.)

The best argument for DADT is that it tries to produce an artificial version of a civilian 9-5 world by saying to gay people: you can serve, but you can't act out, or express, or even look, or even let on you're thinking. For legal purposes -- and legality is always more cut and dried than reality -- this is summed up by saying: you can neither say, nor be forced to say, “I am gay.” The reason it looks discriminatory is that the presupposition has to be the straight boys basically aren't getting too sexual with each other. If it's not an issue, you don't need a directive against it.

Will men follow an openly gay officer into battle? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. But here we must consider that relatively few situations in the armed forces are this personal, this intense. The quasi-civilian office life can surely go on unaffected. How do we make the distinction between office-like situations and the long-term tight-quarters, high stress, life-and-death circumstances in terms of DADT?

The military is already treading on thin ice by pretending that straight boys' interactions lack all hint of sexuality. The ice gets slushy with the introduction of women, who at least look different than men. I think the ice is gone with openly gay people, who look like others of their sex and so have to be identified on a case-by-case basis.

Sure, we can lift DADT. You curb the worst offenses -- groping, advances, rapes -- as we do now: by punishment. You frown on people being openly sexual on the job, and you make it clear that everybody has to sacrifice his or her sexuality to the mission. That's fair, right?

Lifting DADT is going to produce problems. Are we willing to deal with these problems openly? That's the question at the end of the day.