Review: "The Strange History of Don't Ask Don't Tell" Shows the Heroes and Villains of a Political Victory

You know how you're working on some GLBT political cause, and the issue loses, and some a**hole Republican comes out and says something incredibly homophobic and bigoted? And it's all you can do not to scream at the top of your lungs at the television about how evil they are, but how you finally calm yourself down by saying, "We may have lost for now, but history is going to remember this, and in the end, we're going to win, and everyone will see the other side for exactly what they are!"

The new HBO documentary The Strange History of Don't Ask Don't Tell is "history" finally setting the record straight, at least on the issue of gays in the military.

This film, which was made by longtime out documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Becoming Chaz, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, RuPaul's Drag Race), will debut tonight at midnight. Tuesday, September 20th is the first day that "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" will officially be repealed, and GLBT servicemembers will finally be able to serve openly.

It's a fascinating film, and a big part of what's so fascinating about it is how much the worm has turned since the policy was first introduced in 1993, as part of a very controversial compromise to allow GLBT service men and women to serve at all.

It's quite shocking, the appalling, brazen lengths the opponents of GLBT rights went to, in 1993 and for the last two decades, lying about the issue of gays in the military, burying repeated military reports and creating their own fake evidence and terminology in opposition to the facts.

But for much of this time, the anti-GLBT opponents had the emotions of the whole country (as well as the press) on their side. So facts and "reality" did not matter, nor did their brazen lies and open bigotry. They could say hateful and untrue things, and all we in the GLBT community could do was protest and, well, scream at our televisions.

Almost twenty years later, however, much of the country's attitudes have changed completely (due to the tireless work of a few dedicated individuals — more on them later). Our opponents no longer have the emotions of the country on their side.

All that's left on their side is their obvious hate and bigotry. And it's quite shocking to see.

To its great credit, this film names specific names: Colin Powell, Sam Nunn, Strom Thurmond, and (especially) John McCain.

Some of these folks eventually came around on this issue (after most of the rest of the country did, and there was absolutely no political price to be paid — big whoop).

But one man in particular — John McCain — remains bigoted, petulant, and incredibly petty right up until the very, very end.

Of course, that's the negative side of the film. The film also has a very positive side, which is that it gives credit to the heroic people who worked endlessly to change this unjust policy. It names names here too.

Two of the people who deserve the most credit? Iraqi War vet Patrick Murphy, a straight Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania (who lost his seat in the 2010 Republican wave, possibly in part because of his work on the Don't Ask/Don't Tell issue) and Aubrey Sarvis and all the folks at the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), who finally won, the documentary says, because they were smart and organized.

Indeed, the cameras were at the SLDN offices those last few months, as they finally conceived a plan to get the repeal passed, in spite of the incoming Republican Congress, which would've made doing so impossible.

The film makes a potent, powerful point: GLBT people lost in 1993 because we weren't organized. We won in 2010 because we were.

The film also sets the record straight on Bill Clinton, who has been the subject of some nasty historical revisionism on the part of some gay Republicans, who have tried to pin the Don't Ask/Don't Tell policy on him, since it was a compromise he ended up signing.

The reality is that Clinton, in trying to fulfill a political promise, raised the issue and spent major political capital on it, in the face of furious and unrelenting opposition from the military, and in spite of the fact that his Republican opposition embarked on a massive misinformation campaign to use this issue to undermine his presidency and paint Clinton as "weak" and "liberal" and "anti-military."

Frankly, it's shocking the lengths that Clinton did go.

The military also never enforced the policy as Clinton designed it, especially under the Bush administration, which was kicking out qualified GLBT soldiers, even as it kept lowering military standards due to the Iraq War, choosing instead to allow many clearly sub-par soldiers to serve (sometimes people with actual "terrorist" connections!). The one time discharges actually dropped? When the military was running so short of armed men and women during the height of the war. The official written policy was to send soldiers suspected of being gay or lesbian overseas and, if they made it back alive, to investigate and discharge them then.

In all, 13,000 GLBT men and women were kicked out because of this irrational policy, and another 4000 resigned, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Incredibly, there's even some evidence that 9/11 might've been prevented had the military not kicked out a number of gay, Arabic-speaking linguists. Vital communications went untranslated until two days after the attacks.

Don't Ask/Don't Tell was a dark and shameful period in this country's history. But it's now in the past (at least for the time being: all of the leading Republican candidates for president were against appealing Don't Ask/Don't Tell, and several have declared they'd reinstate it).

But history remembers who did what and why. The Strange History of Don't Ask Don't Tell is now a fascinating part of that history.

The Strange History of Don't Ask Don't Tell will air first at midnight tonight on HBO.