Why Woke is Wrong
***This is an opinion piece and does not represent the views of the CSMA or it’s partner organizations. The views expressed here in, are solely those of the author. Please contact the author with constructive feedback on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-pepper/ ***
There is a popular theory that gay people ruined the military. You have probably heard some version of it by now. The military used to be tough, serious, disciplined, and ready. Then the gays showed up, someone found a rainbow lanyard, and Western civilization apparently took a knee in the commissary. It is a tidy story. That helps. Tidy stories are easier to repeat than history, and this one has been repeated so many times that people forget to check whether it is true.
So let’s check. If gay people ruined the military, then we should be able to follow the trail of destruction. It should show up in military readiness, war outcomes, intelligence failures, weak leadership, and the collapse of serious institutions. Unfortunately for the theory, the trail keeps leading to competence.
Alan Turing and the Allied War Effort
A good place to start is Alan Turing, because if the charge is that gay people ruin military operations, helping crack Nazi Germany’s encrypted communications is a rude way to begin the evidence review. Turing was not an American soldier, and he was not enlisted in the U.S. military. He was a British mathematician, codebreaker, and one of the central figures at Bletchley Park during World War II. His work helped attack the German Enigma system, which protected military communications used by Nazi Germany.
According to The National Museum of Computing, the Turing-Welchman Bombe was an electro-mechanical machine used to break Enigma-enciphered messages about enemy military operations. The museum describes the Bombe, alongside Colossus, as widely regarded as having shortened the war, saved countless lives, and helped open the road to the digital world.
That is quite a bit of damage for one gay mathematician to do. He helped damage Nazi secrecy, damage German confidence in encrypted communications, and damage the Axis war effort. Very inconsiderate of him. Britannica also notes that Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park and that Bombes supplied the Allies with large quantities of military intelligence. By early 1942, Bletchley Park was decoding tens of thousands of intercepted messages each month.
Von Steuben and the Army America Started With
The National Archives identifies Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as the Prussian military officer who arrived in 1778 to help the Continental Army. He reworked Army training, improved recordkeeping, helped reduce waste and corruption, became Inspector General and Chief of Staff to George Washington, and created a training manual that served the American military for decades.
This is where the “gay people ruined the military” argument starts developing a limp. One of the men tied to the formation of American military discipline was not weakening the Army. He was organizing it. Von Steuben did not show up at Valley Forge in a pup hood with a Pride float and a brunch reservation. He brought training standards, discipline, military structure, and enough competence to help turn a struggling revolutionary force into something closer to an army.
Josephine Baker, Glamour, Espionage, and Nazis Having a Bad Day
Wars are not only fought by people carrying rifles. They are fought through intelligence, logistics, morale, communication, and the ability to move information where it needs to go without getting caught. Josephine Baker understood that beautifully.
She was a Black American-born superstar who became a French citizen, a civil rights figure, and a French Resistance intelligence asset during World War II. She was also a queer woman whose public image has often been flattened into glamour alone, as if glamour cannot carry classified information.
Recent reporting in The Guardian describes how Baker used celebrity as cover, gathered intelligence, and helped move information through Europe and North Africa. She received French military and resistance honors for her wartime service. This is the sort of example the old argument never knows what to do with. Baker was stylish, famous, theatrical, political, Black, queer, and useful to the Allied war effort. She did not need to become less herself to become more valuable.
She walked through rooms where people underestimated her, listened carefully, and turned access into intelligence. If that ruined anything, it was the assumption that patriotism only comes in one costume.
Harvey Milk, the Navy, and the Talent We Pushed Out
Harvey Milk is usually remembered as a gay rights leader and one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. Before that, he was a Navy officer. The National Archives preserves Milk’s officer evaluation, which described him as “outstanding,” “good officer material,” and “a good leader.” Milk served in the U.S. Navy from 1951 to 1955 and left as a Lieutenant Junior Grade after questions began to arise about his sexuality.
The Navy had the leadership. The Navy recognized the leadership. Then sexuality became the problem. This is one of the most consistent patterns in LGBTQ military history. The problem was not always whether queer people could serve. They were already serving. The problem came when the institution decided that knowing the truth mattered more than keeping the talent. Years later, the Navy launched the USNS Harvey Milk. That is a very American arc: force someone into the shadows, wait a few decades, then name a ship after him.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Closet With Paperwork
By the time “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” arrived in the 1990s, the country had already spent generations proving the same point the hard way. LGBTQ people were serving. The military knew some of them were serving. The argument was not really about whether they could do the work.
The National Archives explains that the 1993 Department of Defense Directive 1304.26 instructed the armed forces not to ask new recruits about sexual orientation, while allowing gay and bisexual service members to remain only if they did not disclose who they were. That was sold as compromise. It was really a closet with paperwork.
The Obama White House archive marks September 20, 2011, as the day Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was finally and formally repealed. The archive also notes that repeal allowed gay and lesbian service members to serve openly in the armed forces. Then the military kept going. The ships did not sink from honesty. The planes did not fall out of the sky because someone had a husband. The tanks did not become less tank-like. What changed was that people who were already serving could stop wasting energy pretending not to exist.
The Pattern Was Never Just Famous Gay Men
Turing, von Steuben, Baker, and Milk make the point clearly, but they are not the whole story. They are the part that is harder to ignore because the names are bigger, the contributions are obvious, and the history has receipts.
During World War II, the National WWII Museum notes that many lesbians in the armed forces rose to positions of influence. The museum tells the story of Phyllis Abry, a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps member featured in propaganda because she represented the ideal WAAC. Unknown to the Army, her partner Mildred was also selected for the same propaganda.
Two lesbians became official examples of ideal military women. Apparently, the problem was not performance. The problem was finding out.
Perry Watkins, a Black gay Army soldier, also complicates the neat little culture-war version of the story. Watkins was one of the early service members to challenge military exclusion of gay people, and his case exposed how absurd the policy could become when the Army already knew who someone was and still kept relying on his service.
Then there are the modern examples. The National Veterans Memorial and Museum identifies Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram as an active-duty astronautical engineer with the U.S. Space Force who led space policy integration at the Pentagon and was one of the highest-ranking openly transgender officers serving in the military. The same source notes that Gina Ortiz Jones served in the U.S. Air Force under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, became an intelligence officer, deployed to Iraq, reached the rank of captain, and later became the first out lesbian and first woman of color to serve as an Under Secretary of the Air Force.
So yeah maybe the gays did ruin the military, if “ruin” includes codebreaking, Army discipline, espionage, Navy leadership, World War II service, legal challenges, space policy, intelligence, and senior Air Force leadership.
At a certain point, the word “ruin” starts doing a lot of unpaid labor.
The Real Damage
The old argument says gay people ruined the military by being allowed to serve openly. The history points in a different direction. The real damage came from wasting trained people. It came from forcing capable service members to lie. It came from pushing out talent after the institution had already benefited from it. It came from treating honesty as a threat while pretending prejudice was discipline.
Queer people did not weaken military readiness by existing. They helped build armies, crack codes, move intelligence, treat the wounded, lead teams, challenge bad policy, and serve in systems that often made their service harder than it needed to be. That does not mean every LGBTQIA2+ person in military history was a saint. Nobody gets that deal. It means they were people: patriotic, flawed, brilliant, ordinary, brave, tired, ambitious, funny, strategic, stubborn, and willing to serve in ways that history too often made harder to see.
So when people talk about gay soldiers, the woke military, transgender troops, or whether LGBTQ people belong in national service, it is worth remembering who was already there.
Remember Alan Turing and the codebreakers. Remember von Steuben at the beginning of the American Army. Remember Josephine Baker carrying glamour into espionage. Remember Harvey Milk in uniform before he became a symbol. Remember the lesbians in World War II propaganda, the Black gay soldier who fought the ban, the trans officer working on space policy, and the lesbian intelligence officer who rose to help lead the Air Force.
Remember the sacrifices of queer people who served openly, served silently, served before they were allowed to tell the truth, and served even when the country had not yet decided to honor them.
Maybe it’s time we drop the rainbow camouflage, and let those who wish to serve do so without forcing them into a closet or pretending we are safer as a country when we discriminate.
Resource List
The research and image for this article were assisted by the responsible use of AI.
The National Museum of Computing: The Turing-Welchman Bombe — for Alan Turing, the Bombe, Enigma, and wartime codebreaking.
Encyclopaedia Britannica: Alan Turing — for Turing’s broader biography, Bletchley Park work, and codebreaking legacy.
National Archives: LGBTQIA+ Community in Military Records — for Friedrich von Steuben, Harvey Milk, LGBTQ military records, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
The National WWII Museum: “Coming Out Under Fire” — for gay and lesbian service members in World War II, blue discharges, and Phyllis Abry.
Obama White House Archive: The End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — for DADT repeal dates and official language around open service.
National Veterans Memorial and Museum: Saluting LGBTQIA+ Service Members — for Gilbert Baker, Bree Fram, Gina Ortiz Jones, and other LGBTQIA+ veterans.
The Guardian: Josephine Baker, the Superstar Turned Spy — for recent reporting on Baker’s WWII intelligence work and French Resistance legacy.
Making Gay History: Perry Watkins — for the oral-history framing of Perry Watkins and his challenge to gay-exclusion policies.