DADT was repealed by Obama’s signature yesterday of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act. Questions remain on how long the process of implementation will take place, or just how much may have to be discarded (and who should do the discarding) alongside the policy during the process, and it is not known just how much of the implementation may derive from the 87-page report on the survey conducted by the top brass of the Armed Forces.
The impact in the long term within the military is harder to measure, with demands growing for a more accommodating inter-personnel culture as LGBT activists continue to follow up on the DADT repeal. But some elements of the impact of the repeal, or perhaps the larger, longer repeal of the overtly-homophobic inter-personnel culture which has existed since the days of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, may be very evident to historians and observers of military history, LGBT history and demographic statistics.
For example, the rescinding of Article 125 of the UCMJ, if it is indeed endangered by proxy effect of the repeal of Section 654 of the general USC, will probably bring to an end a core linchpin of the LGBT history in this country, if journalist Neil Miller, who wrote the 1995 book Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, is right. In Out of the Past, Miller opined that the blue discharges, the preferred method of discharging soldiers without honorable or dishonorable status which was utilized from 1916 to 1947 disproportionately against gay soldiers and African American personnel, contributed directly to the growth of large concentrated gay presences in major port cities such as New York City, Chicago and San Francisco; most who were issued "blue tickets" and dropped off at the nearest port-of-call were worried that their families in more rural areas would shun them due to the acquired shame of such tickets, and preferred to take the path of least resistance by residing in more gay-friendly environs.
If Miller is correct, and LGBT urban culture as is known and stereotyped in other sectors of American society without concern to the current status of said culture was established during this period of the 20th century (if not earlier by even more undoubtedly draconian inter-personnel policies), then later policies, such as the general/undesirable discharges which existed from 1947-1993 and the DADT discharges from 1993-2010, only gradually raised the threshold for discharge, while LGBT community and rights initiatives continued to spread after Stonewall in 1969 to other, non-port major cities with the growth and migration of the LGBT community population (especially the discharged veteran subset).
Hence, through its policies, the military helped contribute to the current and past demographic status of the LGBT subset of the United States, especially such phenomena as the gay villages like The Castro.
So the question now becomes this: will the end to the military sodomy laws and the integration of LGBT people into the service change the demography and culture of LGBT America?
I say that there is a strong possibility for such a shift. The integration of LGBT people into the military will produce a larger number of seasoned, decorated veterans without an openly-negative regard to their sexual orientations, and it will likely lead to more LGBT veterans joining the habits of heterosexual veterans such as residing in rural and suburban areas of the country, perhaps those areas closer to their last post of service, during retirement rather than decidedly-gay-oriented areas of cities. Just as female soldiers and non-white soldiers before them, they will come to demand, if not receive, greater accommodation of their presences and accomplishments at veterans’ events in such locales, and LGBT-accommodative veterans’ memorials may even be constructed.
All such events will culminate in the fact that LGBT veterans will begin to feel less of an impulse to settle in urban settings, depending on just how intense the cultural rejection of the LGBT presence in non-military sectors of the rural areas may be (for instance, the relative lack of religio-cultural accommodation for LGBT people in rural and suburban areas due to the prevailing Abrahamic religious dependence among the rural and suburban areas’ populations). Cultural and socioeconomic roots and nets will be placed in these areas by such veterans in successive generations, leading to younger LGBT non-servicemembers also residing openly and assertively in rural and suburban areas.
This change will be accompanied by changes to the LGBT sector’s cultural contributions; pride events in rural and suburban areas, for tentative example, will likely be different in scale and attendance than their urban counterparts.
As the military in the United States has long been a rurally-extensive institution due to the 20th century spread in interior military bases, the LGBT soldier, reserve, civilian employee and veteran presence in such areas will likely play a 21st-century-long role in shifting the perception among LGBT Americans that one can only be freely open about one’s non-heterosexuality in an urban setting. The cultural safety net for LGBT people born, raised or retired in rural and suburban areas may become strengthened by the same institution which previously shunned them and their predecessors like "dirty little secrets".
