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In the case for women and blacks, the talk is centered more on the definitions of race and gender in terms of access, identity, behaviors, etc. Gays are inevitably swept up in a public discourse that engages both cause and effect and then eventually links the two—particularly in a moment of biological obsessiveness.

Because sexual difference is not typically marked on the body, it must be uttered, performed, or enacted to make it manifest to others (and sometimes to oneself).

As one analyst succinctly said, “[p]rior to the 1940s, dismissal was based on conduct, that is, the commission of an act of sodomy; in the postwar era, the attention shifted to status or identity, that is, to sexual orientation.”

A lot of writers have thoroughly critiqued DADT around the dubiousness of the status/conduct contrasting, but it appears that the different versions of that faux “tolerance” (i.e, love the sinner, hate the sin) have been very much supplanted by another—perhaps uniquely American—normative trope. 

This trope has changed into a type of everyday truth and has gigantic consequences both legally and politically.

If marriage and military entry are conjured as the Oz of queer liberation—and tolerance is most truly the good witch—then biological and genetic arguments are the yellow brick road, providing the route and the rationale for civil rights.

The medicalization of sexual identity, and the exploration for a cause, if not a cure, has a long and notorious history

This history includes not just well meaning attempts by social activists to create a safe life for same-sex desire by designating homosexuality as biologically predetermined, but also, more grimly, includes the long and seedy history of incarceration, medication, electroshock “therapy,” and lots of other attempts to rid the body (and mind) of its same sex desires.

Ideas of homosexuality as “inbred,” innate, and immutable were championed by a wide array of thinkers and activists, including some progressive reformers, like Havelock Ellis, and also some not so progressive conservatives who were eager to assert that same-sex love as nature’s mistake.

In the 1880s and 1920s/1930s respectively, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, both pioneer sexologists and broad advocates of “toleration,” or at least decriminalization—came to believe some idea of “innate” homosexuality, whether through theories of brain inversion or unclear or abstract references to hormonal imbalances and other (unsubstantiated) anomalies

These theories had small traction and no corroborating evidence at all. 

They were further subverted during the heyday of the early gay movement, which contained a deep commitment to the depathologization and demedicalization of homosexuality, embodied in a long-term attempt to remove “homosexuality” as a disease category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Theories of heritability, genetic, or biological origins of “gayness” have fluctuated during different historical and social moments, most clearly intersecting with the rise of eugenics and other determinist frameworks in the early 20th century.

There is no doubt, however, that the romance with biological and/or genetic explanations for sexual “orientation” (actually, same-sex orientation as the search for the hetero gene or the straight hypothalamus goes unexamined) has increased in recent years. This is because, in no little part to the combined power of the gay marriage debates and the increasing “medicalization” and “geneticization” of behavior and identity, goaded by the initiation of the Human Genome Project in 1989.

This move to medicalize homosexuality advanced the now present booming interest (both popular and scientific)—in genetic bases for personality, behavior and disease.

As expected, this turning of the century appears to provide a “perfect storm” moment where idea of immutability has captured the public imagination. 

It is vital to note that several of this impetus toward “hard” scientific evidence of homosexuality comes out, at least somewhat as a reaction to the sorts of social/psychological theories that predominated in the 20th century and that attributed homosexuality to a version of stunted development, bad mothering, truant fathers, or flunked Oedipal resolutions. 

Furthermore, this new moment is tagged by the proportionately unique phenomenon of openly gay scientists (i.e LeVay, Hamer, and Bailey) carrying this research out 

This does not just give an added legitimacy to the research, but a lot, if not all, of these researchers claim that they are doing this research “for” gay people and in the service of furthering “tolerance,” or possibly even furthering gay rights.

No cultural moment can be a better symbol of this better than the otherwise rather illuminating debate that occurred in August 2007. 

LOGO joined with the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) to host the first Democratic primary presidential debate with primary candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the rest of the other major and minor Democratic candidates

At some point, the host of this Democratic primary debate, gay rights advocate Melissa Etheridge, questioned Bill Richardson on the inevitable “born with it” theory. Richardson, who clearly gave a “wrong” answer when he replied to the question with the answer that he had no idea and even uttered the horrible word “choice” in talking about gay identities.

Etheridge was quickly correct him, asking how or why any person would choose to be gay? By the looks on the reactions of Etheridge and the other Democratic primary debate hosts, Richardson had clearly made an “error” and, sure enough, follow-up questions tried to get him to rectify that error.

Etheridge’s reaction to Richardson’s answer to her question, feeds the insidious outcome of the genetic argument: that since it is genetic, people can’t help being gay (“born this way”) and thus “tolerance” for this genetic aberration is the humane and proper response.

It further removes the focus from homophobia—the true social ill—and puts it on the “victim” of genetics.

A few years prior, John Kerry made the same point in regards to Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney. “We’re all God’s children,” Kerry said when he was asked a “gay” question by the moderator.

Referring to Mary Cheney, (the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney), Senator Kerry said, “she would tell you that she’s being . . . who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it’s not [a] choice.”Oddly enough, it was George W Bush who said, “I just don’t know,” and again demarcating the “choice” position as the conservative one!

Yes, in our current political context, gay volition is like Voldemort—too risky even to be uttered.

There is, undoubtably, an overwhelming “born with it” ideology afoot, an ideology which encompasses gay marriage, gay genes, and gayness as a “trait.” 

This is used by both gay rights activists and anti-gay activists to make arguments either for or against equality.

Central to very modern claims for equal treatment has been a deep reliance on the ideas of heritability or biological determinations of sexual orientation. If there is one reigning ethos at present, it is the belief that gays are “born that way.” Causality is—of course— the wrong question and will only get muddled answers.

It is intriguing, though, that immutability arguments—so generally pervasive and utilized so purposely in a lot of legal and social battles, including the marriage battle and earlier arguments

Largely cohering around the “status/conduct” distinction (the cornerstone of DADT)—and challenges to that, the identity question also comes up in the issue of “unit cohesion.”

The current hegemonic debate against inclusion (excluding for a second ones that express an easy and unadorned hatred of homosexuals) is predicated on the issue of unit cohesion.

This is where the analogies of race and gender are sensible, but to a point. The argument is that many ser- vice members do not in fact feel comfortable with, if not antagonistic toward, gays and thus will not be able to function to their optimal ability if openly gay people serve in the military beside them. 

This has caused at least one judge, in his ruling against DADT, to say that “[T]he known presence of homosexuals may disrupt the unit because heterosexual members may morally disapprove of homosexuals. This is an outright confession that ‘unit cohesion’ is a euphemism for cater- ing to the prejudices of heterosexuals.”

At times, the (fake) unit cohesion narrative gives way to a concerning honesty, like in 2007 when General Peter Pace, (then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), offered a different take. 

“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.”Obviously, acts—in particular sexual acts—have always had a prominent place in both gay rights acquisitions and discrimination itself.

Identities (such as they are) have been brought into being, policed, penalized, and normalized through reference to specific acts.

The unit cohesion narrative is the military parallel to the marriage disintegration argument: let gays in the military and all heck will break loose, and brave (heterosexual) soldiers will no longer be brave.

Let gays get married and all heck will break loose, and heterosexual couples will find their own relationships and indeed, the institution of marriage itself— wrecked on the shoals of homosexual love and lust.

Oh, would that it were the case! However of course, gay activists on both issues reply almost in sync: gays in the military will only enhance unit cohesion and military readiness by permitting openness and—importantly— utilizing all willing soldiers in the global battle to make the world safe for heteronormativity and unfettered capitalism.

The argument that ultimately won was that the military (and the nation)—were suffering due to gay exclusion, as evidenced by the selective “stop loss” actions, when gays were deemed too essential to discharge over a dumb policy and by the loss of so many Arab translators.

Or to put in another way, discrimination against gays is not just bad in a moral sense; it is actually bad for national security and the economy.

Furthermore, gays in marriage will not alter heterosexual marriage one bit, but will instrad enhance the cachet of this rather tattered institution by pledging more bodies and lives to the altar of normative familialism.

The arguments against gays in the military don’t just claim that gays will disrupt unit morale and effectiveness (due to their very difference like their free-floating and unmoored desires, their effeminate or— alternately—their manly essence), but additionally claim that they are not “fit for service.”

Underlying both of these objections is an argument about performance: gays cannot perform soldiering since they are aberrant ,morally corrupt, unmanly (or alternatively too manly) or not heterosexual, 

Also the “pro” arguments broadly reply to this in kind: gays are in fact fit for service. They might not be heterosexual but they are fighting machines—willing and able to die for God and country like any other normal, red-blooded American who joins the military.

 “Pro” arguments are littered with tales of brave gay service members and heterosexual service members supporting their brethren because they have personally observed how very soldierly they actually are.

Because the military is viewed as a “special” institution—not one open to everyone on a democratic basis but instead for the few, the chosen, the Marines—the basic equality claims are invoked less frequently than, for example, around marriage or employment rights. 

“Just as long as he is a good fighter/soldier” is the assertive supportive trope in DADT repeal discourse and a trope that just cannot work the same way for the marriage question.

Basically, DADT is dependent exactly on this status/conduct distinction: that a person can “be” gay without “acting” (performing) gayness.

However what is frequently ignored in this discussion is that acting “not gay” (but being gay) requires a performance of another kind, and not just the performance of the closet or of dissimulation. 

If gayness is conduct unbecoming an officer, by contrast straightness is conduct becoming an officer, and straightness is not only marked through sexual acts but also through the displacements of those acts into soldiering, killing, male bonding, and brotherhood

It is also the case that the movement for open military service is predicated on an understanding of “gayness” as a discrete, know- able, legible, and utterable identity.

To be against DADT is for you to assume that there is something clear to be asked and to be told. This is, without a doubt, one of the persistent dilemmas of civil rights legislation and litigation around stigmatized minorities: how to gain rights, access, and freedoms while also not enshrining (and creating) the very categories of identity that many believe to be partially responsible for the very abridgement of those freedoms. What happens, in other words, when Foucault goes to court?