“Different than an infantry unit down in Georgia”: Narratives of queer liberation in the post-DADT military

Abstract

More than five years out from its implementation, we still know relatively little about how members of the US military and its ancillary institutions are responding to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Contrary to what one might expect given the long history of LGBTQ antipathy in the military, I found in interviews with Boston area Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) cadets unanimous approval for the repeal of DADT. When pressed to explain why there was so much homogeneity of favorable opinion regarding the repeal, interviewees repeatedly offered the same explanation: that Boston, in particular, is such a progressive place that even more conservative institutions like the ROTC are spared anti-gay sentiment. They imagined the Southern and/or rural soldier they will soon encounter when they enter the US military, one who represents the traditionally homophobic attitudes of the old military in contrast to their more enlightened selves. This “metronormative” narrative has been critiqued elsewhere as inadequate for understanding the relationship between sexuality and place; this article contributes to that critique by taking a new approach. Rather than deconstruct narratives of queer rurality, as the majority of metronormativity scholarship has done, I deconstruct these narratives of urban queer liberation. I find that such narratives mask the murkier realities of LGBTQ attitudes in urban contexts and allow residents like the ROTC cadets in this study to displace blame about anti-gay prejudice to a distant Other, outside of their own ranks.

Keywords

LGBTQ metronormativity military rural urban

Introduction

We know little about how the US military and its ancillary institutions are (or are not) changing in the wake of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) repeal, which ended the prohibition against gay, lesbian, and bisexual participation in military service. In an effort to find out more, I interviewed Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC) cadets in the Boston area about going into the post-DADT military. I had expected to hear a variety of opinions, yet almost without exception, I heard nothing but approval for the repeal of DADT. In trying to understand why there was such homogeneity of opinion, I found that my interviewees repeatedly offered the same explanation: that Boston is such a progressive place that even the more conservative institutions such as the ROTC are spared anti-gay sentiment. They imagined the Southern or Midwestern rural Other they will encounter when they enter the military: one who represents the traditionally homophobic attitudes of the old military, as opposed to their more enlightened selves who represent the new guard.

Their sentiments mirror a popular understanding of sexuality politics in the USA, one that rests on regional binaries to interpret locations of gay friendliness and hostility. This understanding perpetuates what queer scholars call metronormativity, the “conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ with living a good and happy LGBTQ life” (Halberstam, 2005: 36). Despite recent interventions to the contrary (Herring, 2010; Kazyak, 2011; McRuer, 1997; Sinfield, 2000; Weston, 1995), metronormativity persists as the predominant model of understanding the US LGBTQ experience.

Critics like Halberstam (2005) and Herring (2010) call for scholarship that adds nuance to queer lives in rural locales and a number of scholars have done just that in recent work (Bell, 2009; Fellows, 2001; Gray, 2009; Gray, Johnson, and Gilley, 2016; Kazyak, 2012). This article contributes to the deconstruction of the urban/rural binary in LGBTQ research by taking a different approach; rather than nuance narratives of queer rurality, I deconstruct narratives of urban queer liberation. While Boston ROTC cadets imagine their own ranks as free from homophobia and heterosexism, a closer examination of the interactive and institutional practices of their programs demonstrates a much messier narrative than the thesis of urban acceptance and rural resistance can account for.

Sexuality, identity, and place

The question of how place shapes individual and collective identities has long been a concern in urban and community literature (Anderson, 1983; Hummon, 1990). More recently, some urban scholars have begun to turn their specific attention to the relationship between place and sexual identities in particular. Within the USA, scholars have considered how rural (Gray, 2009; Kazyak, 2012), suburban (Brekhus, 2003), and urban (Ghaziani, 2014; Orne, 2017) geographies shape the expression and development of LGBTQ identities. Others have looked at the development of sexual communities and politics in the USA at the city, state, and national levels (Canaday, 2009; Chauncey, 1995; Faderman and Timmons, 2006; Newton, 1993), while transnational scholarship has considered how migration to the USA inflects the sexual identity formation process (Cantu et al., 2009; González-López, 2005; Luibheid and Cantu, 2005; Manalansan, 2003; Vidal-Ortiz, 2008). Moving beyond the USA, a wealth of scholarship has considered how global geopolitical processes have shaped the sexual milieu of a number of other nations and territories, including Kenya (Mojola, 2014), Indonesia (Blackwood, 1998), Mexico (Cantu et al., 2009; Carrillo, 2002), Puerto Rico (Vidal-Ortiz, 2008), Thailand (Sinnott, 2004), the UK (Evans, 1993); and Vietnam (Hoang, 2015), among many others (e.g. Adam et al., 2009).

This research is part of the emerging interdisciplinary field of “queer geographies” (Mayhew, 2009), which explores how space and place construct non-normative sexual identities, practices, and communities (and, in turn, how non-normative sexualities shape space and place). While most of US-based queer geography has focused on urban (and almost always Northern) contexts (Binnie and Valentine, 1999), there are notable exceptions. Recent ethnographic and interview work has complicated our sociological understanding of rural sexualities (e.g. Gray, 2009; Gray, Johnson, and Gilley, 2016; Kazyak, 2012) as well as Southern sexualities in both rural and urban contexts (Barton, 2012; Black and Rhorer, 1995; Gray, 2009; Howard, 1997, 1999; Mann, 2003; Sears, 2014).

In her ethnography of four US cities that have experienced significant growth in lesbian, bisexual and queer women residents, Japonica Brown-Saracino (2015) identifies place-specific “sexual identity cultures” that cannot be accounted for by traditional explanations of local difference. The places she considers are similar in size, natural amenities, proximity to higher-education institutions and major cities, and demographics. Yet the sexual communities that local lesbian, bisexual, and queer women in each city participate in are distinct from each other. Brown-Saracino’s work deepens previous analyses of the relationship between place and sexual community/identity by complicating more facile, binaristic explanations of how place and sexual identity are co-constructed.

Still, most LGBTQ place-based discourse not only perpetuates urban/rural and North/South distinctions as the primary organizing characteristics of sexual culture, it also treats the rural as the object of scorn, pity, or even revulsion (Bell, 2000; Halberstam, 2005; Herring, 2010; Howard, 1999). The politics of visibility that are endemic to the contemporary LGBTQ social movement (Connell, 2015) contribute to this process; on a national level, the rural functions as a symbolic closet – the foil to the urban’s more “enlightened” politics of gay pride (Gray, 2009). These urban/rural distinctions “subsist as structures of intense feeling that help materialize geo-representation of urban and rural queerness” (Herring, 2010: 13). Media representations of queer life trajectories further perpetuate the narrative of oppressive rurality and liberating urbanity (Anderson, 1983; Gray, 2009; Seidman, 1997).

Within the “gay imaginary,” the city “represents a beacon of tolerance and gay community, the country a locus of persecution and gay absence” (Weston, 1995: 55). Not only is this conflation of the urban with visibility and freedom inaccurate, it also devalues the rural as a space of invisibility and oppression for LGBTQs. Such narratives “imagine queer identities as a one-way trip to sexual freedom, to communal visibility, and to a gay village (or at least a studio apartment) whose streets are paved with pride.” Queer anti-urbanism, in contrast, focuses on the non-metropolitan as a way of deconstructing and challenging the metronormative account of US sexual culture (Herring, 2010). A closer examination of the narratives of rural queer life “may contain elements that disrupt the characterization of rural–urban migrations as a move from surveillance into freedom and isolation into community” (Weston, 1998: 45). Such interruptions constitute what Herring calls “paper cut politics” that counter the predominant discourse, moments that serve as “constant nuisances to the idealizations of any urbanized lesbian and gay imaginary” (1998: 23).

Several recent research projects have done just this by looking more closely at the queer rural experience. For example, Mary Gray’s (2009) ethnographic work with queer youth in the Central Appalachian Region demonstrates how they make use of unlikely spaces and allies (like Wal-Mart or a local homemaker’s association) to build “boundary publics” that sustain queer community in the absence of more formal LGBTQ institutions like youth centers, coffee houses, and bars. Likewise, Emily Kazyak’s (2011) interviews in the Midwest show how the lived experience of rural queers disputes the traditional narrative of the rural as closeted, hidden, and oppressed. In recent quantitative work, in fact, Stange and Kazyak (2016) show that assumptions about the monolithic homophobia of “red states” like Nebraska are misguided, finding that the majority of the state approves of anti-discrimination and marriage laws that would benefit LGBs, including in rural areas of the state. Similarly, Eldridge et al.’s (2006) analysis of rural anti-gay attitudes suggests that a number of factors mediate rural opinions on gay rights, including peer contact, perceptions of the cause of homosexuality, and AIDS anxieties. Further, research shows that queer people are becoming increasingly dispersed across the USA, often leaving urban contexts for more rural locales (Cooke and Rapino, 2007; Gates and Ost, 2004; Stange and Kazyak, 2016). In studies of this migration pattern, queers in rural contexts report feeling comfortable and supported in their home communities (Oswald and Lazarevic, 2011; Wienke and Hill, 2013).

Most research that has attempted to deconstruct the urban/rural and North/South narratives of gay-friendliness has focused on nuancing the rural and Southern – and Midwestern, which is often a stand-in for the rural in metronormative rhetoric – (Gray, 2009; Kazyak, 2011, 2012; Stange and Kazyak, 2016). This article contributes to the critique of metronormativity by switching the focus and deconstructing narratives of the urban as an exceptionally gay-friendly oasis. After all, Herring points out, “urbanism as well as any ruralism is as much phantasmic as it is factual” (2010: 13). Brown-Saracino’s (2015) theory of sexual identity cultures further emphasizes how place narratives, particularly those bound by an urban/rural or North/South explanation, can obscure the nuanced realities of how geographies and sexualities intersect. These binaries were evoked frequently in interviews with Boston area cadets about open LGB service in the post-DADT military. In this analysis, I will show how they not only perpetuate a metronormative account of the rural and the Southern, they also absolve the urban Northeast of any accountability for its own instantiations of bias against queer people.

Traditions of homophobia and LGB exclusion in the US military

The military is a unique organizational context for studying narratives of sexuality and place because it brings together people from diverse geographic backgrounds in a way that few organizations or workplaces do (though recruits from the Southeast are overrepresented – see Bender et al., 2014). In such a geographically diverse organization, members must, by necessity, meet and mingle with others from disparate regional backgrounds. While this offers the possibility of transforming binaristic logics of similarity and difference by region, it can also mean significant culture clash that may reinforce feelings of “us vs. them” for people on either side of geographic divides. Aside from brief encounters with cadets from across the USA in their summer training, ROTC members in Boston otherwise wait in anticipation of their future interactions with soldiers from the South, the Midwest, and less urban locales. Looking at the ways they anticipate those future encounters is useful for understanding how place-based narratives of gay-friendliness potentially allow for the displacement of fears, tensions, and uncomfortable feelings that might otherwise threaten to overwhelm queer people and their allies.

The military has recently undergone a radical transformation with respect to sexuality related policy. Sexuality is a constitutive logic of the US military (Rich et al., 2012), wherein the formal and informal rules, rituals, and day-to-day practices were, until very recently, organized along a hetero/homo binary wherein heterosexuality was prized and homosexuality was seen as a pollutant, a source of potential weakness that must be rooted out and disposed of (Burke, 2004). Scholars have demonstrated that military service inculcates in its members what gender and sexuality scholars call warrior masculinity, within which hostility to homosexuality is a primary feature (Allsep, 2013; Banner, 2012; De Angelis et al., 2013).

Until 2010, US military policy prohibited non-heterosexuals from service and held periodic campaigns to expel personnel engaged in same-sex sexual acts (Berube, 2000; Herek, 1996; Wilson-Buford, 2013). In the 1920s, the military enacted its first official policies against consensual sodomy (Borch, 2010); by 1962, the Department of Defense was authorizing the dismissal of any service member who “engages in, desires to engage in, or intends to engage in homosexual acts” (Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1962). From this point on, the military could dismiss service members not just on the basis of anti-sodomy statutes (which were incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950), but also based on the belief in a soldier’s (real or imagined) status as a homosexual (Halley, 1999).

In 1992, President Clinton vowed to end the ban on gays in the military, but vociferous resistance from Congress, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and key military decision makers made removing the ban entirely a political impossibility. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue (10 U.S.C. § 654, or more commonly, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell) was the resulting compromise; with DADT in place, the routine investigation for homosexual service members was prohibited, but the ban on service for openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual service members held fast. Under the auspices of DADT, more than 13,000 service members were separated from duty (Johnson, 2010). Victimization of suspected or known queers was commonplace (Borch, 2010; Moradi, 2009; Ramirez et al., 2013; Wilson-Buford, 2013); lesbian, gay, and bisexual soldiers were at a higher risk of violence, self-harm, blackmail, sexual assault, and negative health outcomes during Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s reign (Parco, 2014; Pelts et al., 2015). LGB veterans report serious health and mental health problems they attribute to internalized and external homophobia during their service under DADT (Ramirez et al., 2013).

Anti-DADT activists capitalized on a public opinion shift regarding LGBTQ rights in the mid-2000s to begin a campaign for its repeal (Belkin, 2011; Frank, 2013; Fulton, 2013; Neff and Edgell, 2013). After a number of false starts and close calls, the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act was passed in late 2010 and was fully implemented on 20 September 2011. At its inauguration, opinions on the possibility of its successful enactment were mixed. Some argued that the organizational culture of the military had already moved toward acceptance (Belkin, 2011; Parco and Levy, 2013) and that there would be little, if any, conflict in the post-DADT period. Others were concerned that the repeal would not improve working conditions for non-heterosexuals in the military and could even excerbate existing patterns of harassment and discrimination (Burke, 2004; Rich et al., 2012; Rostker et al., 2010). In the pursuit of answers to this as-yet unsettled debate, I began to wonder: what do incoming officers anticipate about coming into this new, post-DADT military? Are they excited or scared about these changes and how they might impact their future careers?

Methods

My interviews with ROTC cadets are part of a larger project about the shifting gender and sexual culture of the US military in the 21st century, where lesbian, gay, and bisexual (and soon, transgender) soldiers can serve openly for the first time and women are being incorporated into the last of the all-male combat positions and programs (Tilghman, 2015). Cadets who successfully complete the ROTC program enter the military as commissioned officers; a little less than half of all commissioned officers in the Army graduate from an ROTC program. As such, ROTC cadets represent a significant amount of the incoming leadership in the military. Research on LGB attitudes in the military suggests that leadership plays a key role in shaping the perspectives of enlisted soldiers (Coronges et al., 2013; Estrada et al., 2013), so assessing the opinions of incoming officers seemed a prudent start for assessing the cultural impact of DADT.

In spring of 2015, I conducted in-depth interviews with 16 current ROTC members in the Boston area. All were a part of the Army ROTC core (as opposed to Navy or Air Force ROTC programs). The sample was roughly half men and half women and included members of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year cohorts. I was interested in hearing from both LGB and straight cadets; of the 16 respondents, five identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer. All of the non-heterosexual participants were open about their sexual identities among fellow cadets. The racial breakdown of the sample reflected the demographics of both the universities they were situated in and of ROTC programs nationwide – predominantly white and middle to upper-middle class. Because ROTC programs in Boston are relatively few and small, I have taken extra precautions to protect the confidentiality of my subjects; I withhold potentially identifying information like race, physical description, university, and year in the program when not relevant to the narrative.

The key aim of the interviews was to find out if and how ROTC, as a key ancillary military institution, was educating cadets in and preparing them for the gender and sexuality policy shifts that are so radically changing the operating assumptions, traditions, and institutional practices of the military. Were they learning about DADT and the repeal? Were women cadets being encouraged to consider military career directions that they had, until very recently, been prohibited from pursuing? Were LGB cadets coming out in their program now that there were no formal mechanisms that forbade it? In the course of conducting and analyzing these interviews, the discourse of Northeastern and urban exceptionalism with respect to homophobia emerged as an unexpected but unifying theme.

Findings

Boston exceptionalism

When asked about their battalion’s climate with respect to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer cadets, all of the ROTC cadets described their programs as relatively welcoming and gay-friendly. While they attributed this in part to changing social mores regarding homosexuality, particularly among college-age young adults, they almost always cited Boston and/or their specific universities as being exceptionally liberal in terms of LGBTQ attitudes. For example, when asked what she anticipated in terms of the military’s post-DADT culture, Laura, a heterosexual cadet, replied, “It’s hard for me to say. I just don’t, yeah, I don’t know, because I haven’t experienced that much homophobic stuff in this program in particular but I do think – again – [it’s] because we’re in a very liberal city.” She felt that her time in a Boston-based ROTC gave her little basis for anticipating the military experience, because she assumed it would be different than life in her “very liberal city.” Jesse, also heterosexual, concurred, “Here at [this school], homosexuality is openly accepted. I know of several openly gay men and women in the program and nobody ever says anything.” I asked Elise, a lesbian cadet, whether she was careful about revealing her sexuality in the ROTC context. She replied:

Honestly, not at all. Again, though, it’s just, I think because it’s Boston and no one really cares. I never feel like anyone’s judging me based off of my sexuality or who I’m in a relationship with. People, everyone in the program now knows me and [my partner] are getting married and they ask me questions like, ‘When’s the wedding?’

Like Laura and Jesse, she differentiated between the typical ROTC experience and the Boston ROTC experience.

Elise went on to contrast this with her expectations of the rest of the military, saying:

It’s definitely not the same way in the real world military … You have a very large group of people that come from the South and the Midwest and the more you talk to them, you understand what their background is. A majority of them are very religious, very traditional, whatever.

As such, she was cynical about the possibilities of change in the post-DADT era:

I feel like it’s even taken a long time for society to get to the point where they are accepting so I don’t really know how long it will take the military; they’re a lot more backwards than regular society. You also have to consider that [the military has] a different – we attract Southern, deep south, white, straight men and people from the Midwest, so that’s predominately what the military is and I just happen to be lucky that my program is in Boston, Northeast, so I don’t know [what the real military will be like].

Elise’s use of the term “real world military” – a term that reoccurred in a number of interviews – reinforced the distance being put between Boston ROTC and their future service. She drew on both distinctions between ROTC vs. the military and on an imagined divide between the Northeast and the rest of the country.

When I asked Cassie, a lesbian cadet, if she also had a sense that her ROTC program was exceptional compared to others, she replied, “It’s kind of like, I would hold [my partner’s] hand in Boston but I wouldn’t hold her hand in freaking Atlanta. You never know where someone is coming from in terms of religious diversity.” Cassie’s imagined site of homophobia is equally urban to her own, but Southern. While regional descriptors such as Southern and Midwestern often served as stand-ins for rural in other narratives, Cassie’s comment demonstrates that even urban locales in the South were considered hostile to LGBTQs. Michael, a gay cadet, made a distinction between his program and others along a North/South divide: “It’s way different based on – just think where we’re located. We’re in the Northeast. Not a lot of people come from the Northeast, military wise. A lot of the people are more in the South.” He continued, “I’d say [the gay-friendliness of my ROTC battalion] is reflective of the culture that we’re in, in the Northeast, how [my university] shapes that. And the kind of people it attracts versus everywhere else. You could get a whole different experience. You could be interviewing people [at other universities in the USA] and they’re like, ‘what the F is going on?!’” Likewise, Travis asserted:

I think we have a very skewed view of [the military’s attitudes about homosexuality], because we are here. If we were like, at [Texas] A&M, it definitely would not be the same situation. I don’t know that, I’m not there, but I don’t think there would be the same kind of progressiveness that there is here. I think that … the real Army is just a hodge-podge of people from everywhere. I’d hope that people that were in programs like ours would have positive effect, but there’s no telling what would really happen.

Here, not only does Travis juxtapose his program against a university in a Southern, more rural area, but he also suggests that programs like his own might have a contagiously progressive impact on the military as a whole.

Jesse, who was himself from a rural area, discussed his initial resistance to openly LGB service in the military, saying:

Personal opinion, of course at first – and I look back on this and I say, ‘wow I’m totally irrational and had zero factual base’ because again, raised in a religious white community. I tried to convince myself, ‘oh it’s going to cause tension in the unit.’ Sadly, I think, it does when it is full of what people stereotypically think the military is – white Southerners.

While the cadets in this study reported virtually no formal training about DADT, the repeal, or how to treat LGB soldiers equitably under the repeal, Jesse reported learning a great deal from the informal lessons of spending time with gay and gay-friendly cadets in ROTC. Further, Jesse compares his own experience growing up in a religious rural community in the Northeast to those of service members in the South, assuming a shared position of homophobia across both contexts. Similarly, heterosexual cadet Warner also worried about what life would be like for his LGB friends once they completed ROTC: “The climate here at [a] liberal [Boston] ROTC program is much different than an infantry unit down in Georgia, where guys are going out to bars and are fully against [LGBs].”

Narrative contradictions

While everyone I spoke to thought of their battalions as especially gay friendly, their narratives belied that assertion in various ways. In particular, several mentioned incidents with ROTC leadership that suggested things were not quite as hospitable as they maintained. Armondo, a heterosexual cadet, talked about friction between his program’s advisors, one of whom was a lesbian, the other a straight man: “Sometimes you’d have like one of the male advisors make just very off-the-cuff, like homoerotic jokes [about the lesbian advisor].” When pressed to think of examples of such jokes, Armondo replied:

They were never offensive or derogatory, just kind of like, I don’t know. For example, [during an overnight] he’d be like, ‘We should all get naked and cuddle with each other or something. Don’t be afraid to shower together, you need help, like, scrub each other.’

While Armondo did not consider such comments “offensive or derogatory,” the woman they were directed at might not have felt quite so sanguine about such sexualized comments.

Cassie, who earlier described Boston and her program as a hospitable place, had this to say about an advisor in her program:

When I talk to him about my fiancé, he uses vague pronouns. He doesn’t even address the fact that she’s a female. [CC: How does he do that?] I don’t know, but it is so awkward! It’s just me and him in his office like this, and I keep saying “she” and “[my fiancé’s name]” and “her” and he’s just totally avoiding it. I’m like, ‘How are you doing this?’

Cassie said that this same advisor:

gave a sexual assault discussion earlier this year to the whole battalion, but he was tired of the male-on-female rape example. He used a male-on-male, but kind of used it in a joking way, which I was shocked about, because of the sensitivity around it.

I asked Cassie, “How was he jokey about it? What was he saying?” She replied, “He was talking about it in a way that it would be hilarious and ridiculous if they were gay … It’s not wrong, but it’s edging on it, if you’re somebody who was afraid of coming out, that would make you stay in the closet.” Like Armondo, Cassie backed away from saying his comments were outright “wrong,” which might invalidate the narrative of gay friendliness, but she did acknowledge that the advisor’s comments could create an inhospitable culture for less outspoken LGB cadets.

Since Cassie and Armondo’s comments indicate problems with ROTC advisors, it might be easy to dismiss advisors as relics of the “old” military and not truly representative of the rest of the program. In fact, the cadets themselves often made this distinction; Cassie explained, “The kids, I’ve never had a problem with a cadet with discrimination. It’s more the [advisors]. I think it’s an age thing. It’s also because they’re from all over.” However, later in the interview, it became clear that things were not as easy for the openly gay men in the program, from her perspective:

There’s this one [guy], he’s gay and he’s open. He over compensates with the macho-ness to try to, definitely trying to compensate for that fact that he’s gay … I feel really bad, because the guys have it really hard. I can just totally be myself and it’s fine. The guys have it really hard … It’s like they’ve got to prove something.

When asked to reflect beyond her own experience with cadets in the program, Cassie hinted at the ways that openly gay men in her program might be facing pressures from fellow cadets to compensate for their stigmatized sexual identity by playing up their masculinity.

Michael’s comments were also instructive in this regard. In the beginning of our interview he claimed, “It was very fluid and easy coming out. I think our – especially our generation, being that this an organization of just [people] our generation – it’s not, you don’t have like 40-year-olds, except officers in charge or whatever.” However, when we talked about Michael’s coming out process, I sensed it might not have been as easy as he initially portrayed it. He explained, “I would drop subtle hints here and there. [And once they knew], they’d throw jokes out. I appreciate that. If you can joke about it, I find that anything can be made a joke of.” I asked, “What kinds of jokes?” he replied:

They would make, someone would make some deprecating remark. They’d be like, oh, that thing over there. That’s gay like [Michael] … It was like, oh, well I can be the brunt of the joke, just like they’re the brunt of jokes at times. You accept your share of it. It makes you feel like you’re part of the team.

In addition to these jokes, however potentially well meaning, Michael described a couple of events that didn’t roll off his back quite so easily, including a falling out with a close friend when they were away for summer training exercises:

I’ve only had very few instances where I was actually [harassed.] … I got a care package from my then boyfriend at the time and [my friend] was like “Oh, who is that from? I had never told him before. I was like, “I’m not going to lie, it’s from my boyfriend.” He’s like, “Oh wow. I don’t support that at all” … And [I was like,] fuck you, too.

These moments threaten to disrupt Michael’s narrative of Boston’s universal LGB acceptance, but ultimately, he brushed them off as isolated incidents.

Discussion

The trends in sexuality attitudes that these cadets point out have been shown to be grounded in some empirical reality; polling data does suggest that where you live has an effect on anti-gay attitudes (Daniels, 2014; Hicks and Lee, 2006). Living in rural and Southern areas has been associated with negative attitudes about LGBTQs (Jones et al., 2014; Swank et al., 2012, 2013), while the Northeast is the most accepting US region in terms of key gay rights issues such as same-sex marriage (Jones et al., 2014). Still, some recent analyses demonstrate that the idea of the rural, Southern, or Midwestern regions as especially homophobic may no longer be true – or perhaps was never was quite the case as we imagine it (Fiorina et al., 2008; Salka and Burnett, 2011; Stange and Kazyak, 2016).

While the reality of regional differences is more nuanced than commonly believed, narrative divisions between the two continue to hold sway. They play significantly into Boston area ROTC cadets’ understandings of their experiences vis-a-vis the military more generally. Cadets narrate their ROTC experience as, by and large, free from homophobia and heteronormativity and attribute this to the Northeastern, urban context of their program. Concurrently, they imagine Southern and rural programs as gay hostile and anticipate geographically driven clashes over sexuality politics when they enter the formal military. However, a closer look into their narratives of urban queer liberation shows them to be just as much an incomplete picture as others have shown narratives of rural oppression to be.

This contradiction begs the question: why do these cadets cling so consistently to these narrations of sexuality in place, even when their own experiences often prove them false? While my data cannot speak directly to this question, we know from previous research how deeply urban/rural discourses influence our understanding of sexuality and place. Even given evidence to the contrary, the urban/rural or North/South heuristic for interpreting experience is so strong that contradictory evidence is minimized and moments that corroborate it are heightened. Confirmation bias, or the tendency to evaluate information in a way that supports one’s pre-existing beliefs or assumptions, has been shown to have a significant effect on how people understand and interpret gender and sexuality (e.g. Marks and Fraley, 2006; Ridgeway, 2011). It seems likely that confirmation bias is influencing how participants interpret their environment vis-a-vis homophobia.

Beyond its utility as a cognitive sorting device, though, the belief that anti-gay hostility is regionally bound is also potentially useful for assuaging anxieties about the murkier reality of homophobia and heteronormativity. People who live in a zone marked as gay-friendly might be loathe to disrupt that reputation because it unearths uncomfortable truths about the pervasiveness of anti-gay prejudice, even potentially from within. It is much easier to attribute threats to queer existence to a distant enemy rather than examine how those threats emerge much closer to home. Narratives of urban queer liberation create pockets of hope that might be just as important to rural queers looking to escape their circumstances as it is to urban queers and their allies who need to believe in a brighter future for LGBTQ rights. This splitting provides a kind of psychic relief for those on either side of the divide; unfortunately, it also precludes critical analysis of the nuances of local sexuality cultures.

Conclusion

While most social science research on anti-urbanism has focused on nuancing the rural, this article critically examines the other half of the narrative – that of Northeastern/urban queer utopias. Despite a near fervent adherence to that narrative, a deeper examination of cadets’ experiences uncovers much more uneasiness about queer people in the military, regardless of geographic origin. Sexually suggestive comments about lesbian and bisexual women and jokes about gay cadets’ masculinity were a not uncommon part of the culture. This finding indicates that rooting out homophobia and heterosexism in institutions such as the military will be a more difficult process than initial reports may have led us to believe (Belkin et al., 2012). It also has implications for LGBTQ research and individuals; the experiences of anti-gay discrimination faced by people in the Northeast go unrecognized, while queer people in the South and Midwest are disempowered and misunderstood as tragic victims of ignorance and hatred.

Future research might build on this finding by asking whether such narratives of metronormativity and progress help evade deeper critique when evaluating the success of gender and sexuality policy change across a number of institutions. With respect to the institution of the military, it would be interesting to see whether this rhetoric is also in circulation amongst active duty service members, who come from and are stationed across a wide swath of the globe. In pursuing such questions, this line of inquiry can move us away from such narratives toward a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the construction and management of sexualities within organizations and institutions.

Footnotes

Catherine Connell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and WGS at Boston University and the Director of BU’s Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her work focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and work/organizations. Her book, School’s Out: Gay and Lesbian Teachers in the Classroom, was published by University of California Press in 2015; her current research is about recent gender and sexuality policy changes in the US military.

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