Limited Tolerance

To hear Rob Hicks tell it, you can't swing a cat around the US Army's Defense Language Institute (DLI) without hitting a gay soldier.

"On my hall of 14, I knew nine men that were gay," says the 28-year-old Korean language student, who was discharged from the Army in October after a late-night barracks inspection found him in his boyfriend's room. "In my class of 27, seven of them were gay -- and those were just people I knew in my company who I had close contact with."

Maybe "gaydar" is adding a few percentage points to Hicks's evaluation of the gay-to-straight ratio at the Presidio, but if so, he's not alone in his assessment. Collin Smith (not his real name), a first-year Russian language student at the Monterey, California military graduate school, concurs.

"I've only met maybe four or five hundred people here, and of that, maybe 120 were gay or bi," Smith figures. "Surprisingly enough, it's very prevalent in the military."

At DLI, where some 3,000 men and women from various branches of the service, are studying 19 foreign languages in intensive training programs, the Army discharged nine students last month because of their homosexuality. That's in spite of what former student Alastair Gamble describes as a very gay-friendly culture there. Gamble, 24, was more than halfway through the school's Arabic program when he and Hicks were discovered in his barracks last April. He received his discharge in the summer and now lives with Hicks in Beltsville, Maryland.

"There are a lot of gay soldiers and airmen and seamen at DLI," Gamble says. "I don't know if they're represented more than in any other given unit. But certainly there are more who are out. You're dealing with people who are typically older, more mature, more intelligent, so you get higher degrees of tolerance, and within that, people who are more open about their sexuality."

Hicks agrees that DLI is exceptionally tolerant. "When I was pulled from class for this, the person who had to give me the message was a Marine sergeant who'd been in for six or seven years. He knew a long time before I was kicked out, and he never even blinked. And he was a Marine. We actually saw him at Disneyland when we went to see Alastair's aunt."

None of this comes as a surprise to Chris Lewis, who is gay and served in the Navy from 1982 to 1986. He says that's how it's always been. He recalls the situation aboard his ship, the Mobile, which he says was nicknamed "The HoMobile." "I had 331 people on the ship I was on," he says. "Of the 331, a good 40 were gay and everybody knew it. There were some flaming queens. The whole admin ops was gay. You'd go in there and it was like -- pardon me, but a bunch of women. Cologne, chewing gum, they'd be laughing and talking, the whole thing."

"Everybody" might have known those sailors were gay, just as "everybody" might have known that Hicks and Gamble were a couple even before they were caught. But proof of homosexual activity is still enough to get a person kicked out of the U.S. military. The military's policy toward homosexuals has enjoyed an uncomfortable moment in the spotlight since the story broke last month about the nine discharged students, six of whom were studying Arabic. Two of the nine, Hicks and Gamble, were caught by their superiors. The other seven, all acting independently, voluntarily declared their homosexuality to their commanding officers and got their walking papers soon afterward.

In a time when soldiers fluent in Arabic are considered vital to national security, the Army's decision to expel Arabic students because they are gay has been attacked as absurd. The story has also called attention to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which allows the military to look the other way unless presented with irrefutable evidence of a soldier's homosexuality. (In Gamble's and Hicks's case, the evidence wasn't the fact that they were in the same room at 3:30 a.m., but rather that the inspectors found photographs of them together in affectionate poses.)