The below introductory paragraphs from Alana Yu-lan Price’s article “The Transformative Promise of Queer Politics” in Tikkun importantly reminds LGBT activists who might see themselves as progressives in a larger political context that the fight to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is difficult to reconcile with an anti-war, peace and justice-oriented progressive politics. 

If we in fact are committed to demilitarization, diplomacy over saber-rattling, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, then gay progressive activists must elaborate the message: that as a matter of equality/equal access, everyone must be able to serve in the military openly as they are—gay, lesbian, transgender, intersex, etc. But moreover, the broader political goal is to end foreign occupation, eliminate the military industrial complex, nuclear disarmament, etc.

LGBT progressives need to contextualize DADT; otherwise, we might find that all we are really fighting for is the right to kill and be killed and to perpetuate the atrocities of war.

The lieutenant has handcuffed himself to the White House fence. Defiant in his camouflage fatigues and black beret, his arms outstretched against the black iron barrier, he protests the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Images of the gay soldier soon pepper the blogosphere and reel across TV news shows, quickly becoming a symbol of gay activists’ growing impatience and frustration with the Obama administration.

The March 18 protest action of Lt. Dan Choi—an army linguist facing pending discharge following his decision to come out as gay on Rachel Maddow’s popular news show on MSNBC—and of discharged Capt. Jim Pietrangelo, who also locked himself to the fence, followed a rally against the military’s ban on openly gay service members. Choi and five other service members were arrested for cuffing themselves to the fence once again on April 20, and six others again on May 2.

In an age of gay and lesbian activism characterized most visibly by highly respectable inside-the-Beltway efforts to convince lawmakers of gay couples’ acceptability to the mainstream, the soldiers’ edgy direct actions sparked a flash of recognition and perhaps delight in leftist activists yearning for a revival of the high-profile, militant, grassroots actions associated with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the 1980s and Queer Nation in the 1990s.

But the flash faded fast. Here’s why: even though the protesters’ edgy tactics mirror the tactics of radical groups of decades past, the goal of the action fits neatly within the conservative, assimilationist aims articulated by mainstream LGBT lobby groups. Soldiers chaining themselves to the White House fence may on the surface resemble the ACT UP members who disrupted the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour’s live broadcast back in January 1991 by chaining themselves to Robert MacNeil’s desk with signs declaring “The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over.” But whereas the ACT UP activists were fighting for their lives in the face of homophobic societal inaction on AIDS, Choi and his compatriots are fighting for a nearly opposite goal: the right to participate in an institution that is killing people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in wars that most progressive activists consider unjust. What a change from the 1960s and 1970s, when gay liberation was closely entwined with the broader, anti-militaristic vision of the New Left.

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