Last week three prominent members of the US military put their support behind a study from The Palm Center which suggests that the US Military should lift their ban on openly transgendered service members.
I was not surprised by this development: considering the military’s 2011 decision to support openly gay soldiers, supporting openly transgendered ones seems like the logical next step.
What did surprise me was that these prominent military figures, which include a former Army acting surgeon general and a former chief of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, threw their weight behind a report that says 15,500 transgender members actively serve in the military, while 134,300 “Veteran retired Guard/Reserve” are transgendered. That means one in a hundred active US military personnel are transgendered.
Lt Col Jennifer Natalya Pritzker, of the billionaire Chicago family, ‘anonymously’ donated $1.35 million to the Palm Center to fund research on integrating the transgendered community into the US military, says Advocate.com. Thank you, chicagophoenix.com for image.
15,500 active transgendered military personnel is a huge number; the estimate’s validity is bolstered by the fact that two distinguished military medical professionals– who ought to know about the populations they serve– authored the report in question.
These estimates come from UCLA Law Center’s Williams Institute, which also estimates that transgendered individuals are much more likely to serve in the military than the US population in general:
This is how the estimates’ creators, Gary J. Gates and Jody L. Herman, describe their findings:
By comparison, approximately 10.7% of adults in the US have served. This implies that transgender individuals are about twice as likely as adults in the US to have served their country in the armed forces. Transgender individuals assigned female at birth are nearly three times more likely than all adult women and those assigned male at birth are 1.6 times more likely than all adult men to serve.
The transgendered community’s devotion to the armed services exists despite persistent discrimination from the defense establishment: the military has banned openly transsexual people from serving. On top of that, I find it extraordinary that a persecuted minority is drawn to an organization which, at least for the past sixty years, has been used to force the will of a few people on less powerful countries around the globe.
This apparent anomaly begs the question: what is it about the US military that attracts so many transgendered individuals? Gary and Herman have provided statistical evidence that demands further research.
Are statistics for homosexual people in the military also so striking? Yes, they are. Gary Gates, the same researcher as before, wrote a paper in 2004 for the Urban Institute, here are some select quotes:
Estimates suggest that more than 36,000 gay men and lesbians are serving in active duty, representing 2.5 percent of active duty personnel. When the guard and reserve are included,nearly 65,000 men and women in uniform are likely gay or lesbian, accounting for 2.8 percent of military personnel.
In particular, military service rates for coupled lesbians far exceed rates for other women in every military era of the later 20th century. Nearly one in 10 coupled lesbians age 63–67 report that they served in Korea, compared with less than one in 100 of other women. Even in the most recent service period from 1990 to 2000, service rates among coupled lesbians age 18–27 are more than three times higher than rates among other women
Nearly one million gay and lesbian Americans are veterans.
The District of Columbia leads all states with a rate of 10.2 gay or lesbian veterans per one thousand adults, more than double the national average.
Despite a variety of rules designed to keep gay men and lesbians out of military service, census data make clear that they are actively serving in the armed forces, in guard and reserve units, and have served in the military throughout the later part of the 20th century.
Again, homosexuals’ draw to the military– despite the organization’s historically discriminatory stance — is something that is difficult for me to understand. Are homosexuals drawn to the military for the same reasons as transgendered service members?
Many of you know that I’m interested in ‘spooky’ things, so my next question… Is the LGBT community also overrepresented in the intelligence community? Seeing as a lot of spook talent is derived from the military, my hunch is that they are. What’s tricky about this question is that it’s very hard to count spooks given the secretive nature of their work– you never know if you’re getting a representative sample of the intelligence community. (Unless you’re somebody like DNI James Clapper, but even he may not know about all his contractors!:) )
The best most people can do– probably the best most professional intelligence historians can do– is look to history for individuals who are now known agents and were also part of the LGBT community.
The most famous homosexual intelligence professionals are Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, who were Soviet double agents and half of ‘The Cambridge Five’, of who only four are known conclusively. Burgess and Blunt were known homosexuals at a time it was illegal to be so; yet these two men also held sensitive positions in the UK government. (Between the known four spies, they infiltrated MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, the War Ministry and Blunt even became an advisor to the Royal Family!). I don’t want to get hung up on their traitorous actions. What I do want to point out is that even back in the 1940s homosexuals were represented amongst the UK intelligence community’s ‘best and brightest’. Both the British and the Soviets recognized something exceptional about Burgess and Blunt.
The Soviets chose to recruit and cultivate these two highly-placed, homosexual spies over a period of thirty years. That’s a huge investment which the Russians wouldn’t have made unless the pair showed exceptional intelligence talent. There were plenty of prominent Brits with socialist sympathies; there were plenty of well-placed Brits in the Communist Party who the Soviets could have recruited (See Secrets of the Service, by Anthony Glees); but it was a group of disproportionately gay agents who were the ‘jewel in the Soviets’ crown’– agents who were recruited despite the obvious vulnerabilities their sexuality presented at the time.
History provides far more examples of LGBT agents than just Burgess and Blunt. Gabriel Pascal, the Hollywood movie-man who put British spy Roald Dahl in touch with FDR was homosexual; Julia Child’s husband Paul Cushing Child, who was in charge of USIA propaganda in Germany after WWII was likely bisexual; FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who left such an indelible mark on US intelligence worldwide, was likely bisexual (and is rumored to have dressed as a woman for sex parties); Hoover’s partner both at the FBI and domestically, Clyde Anderson Tolson was also likely gay; Joan Cassidy, the famous US Navy intelligence office was homosexual; Whittaker Chambers was homosexual. These eight people are just the intel pros I can think of off the top of my head– most of them were heavy-hitters in the intelligence community. Considering that homosexuality was frowned upon amongst the general public, there are probably many more examples.
What about less well-placed spooks? Ironically, the turmoil caused by the gradual discovery of the Cambridge Five sheds light on just how many homosexual agents have contributed to the intelligence community.The ‘Lavender Scare’ of the 1950s and 60s specifically targeted homosexuals and sought to remove them from sensitive positions in the government. In the words of Tracey Ballard, an intelligence agent who came out in the 1980s:
Hundreds of gay men and women were purged from government agencies in the ’50s and ’60s. But Ballard says that charge — that gays were a blackmail risk — was always false.
“If you do research within the community over the decades, you’ll find that it really wasn’t an issue,” she says. “LGBT people were not blackmailed in any type, any way or form. That was their way of ensuring that we were not employed.”
Trudy Ring, Advocate.com reporter, wrote this in a review of a documentary about the ‘Lavender Scare‘:
Cassidy was one of thousands who either resigned or were fired because of the order, which she says initiated a “witch hunt.”
From the side of the 50s-60s persecutors, a Mr. Clevenger gives this congressional testimony on April 24th, 1950:
It is an established fact that Russia makes a practice of keeping a list of sex perverts in enemy countries and the core of Hitler’s espionage was based on the intimidation of these unfortunate people.
Despite this fact however, the Under Secretary of State recently testified that 91 sex perverts had been located and fired from the Department of State. For this the Department must be commended. But have they gone far enough? Newspaper accounts quote Senate testimony indicating there are 400 more in the State Department and 4,000 in Government…
Here we find that the Commerce Department has not located any homosexuals in their organization. Are we to believe that in the face of the testimony of the District of Columbia police that 75 percent of the 4,000 perverts in the District of Columbia are employed by the Government, that the Department of Commerce has none?
[In The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev detail Soviet penetration of the State Department; the department which Soviets codenamed 'Surrogate'. -a.nolen]
It seems experts agree that prior to 1950s, homosexuals were well represented in the US government and at the intel-sensitive State Department in particular.* This speaks well toward their representation in the intelligence community.
What about today? Any investigation into the LGBT contribution to intelligence is hard because, of course, current agents cannot identify them selves as such. Therefore, the best anybody (besides James Clapper!) can do is make an educated guess about who works with intelligence, and amongst that subset look at who identifies as LGBT or is likely part of the community.
Here are some prominent LGBT intel candidates: Peter Thiel (Palantir co-investor with CIA’s In-Q-Tel) is gay; high-profile Tor promoter Jacob Appelbaum is homosexual/bisexual; FBI asset/Advocate.com contributor ‘Laurelai‘ and former analyst Chelsea Manning are transgendered; intel-affliated media baron Nick Denton is homosexual; Snowden clean-up crew Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald are homosexual; the CIA’s porn king Hugh Hefner is likely bisexual; Anderson Cooper was/is a gay CIA agent. Those are nine high-profile LGBT people who are *probably* serving their country this very minute.
I have no way of knowing whether that list is a representative sample of high-profile intelligence professionals, but the fact that even I could come up with nine candidates in the time I took to type the preceding paragraph suggests that the LGBT community has an active roll in today’s intelligence ‘sphere’. I don’t think an active roll should be surprising, given exceptional LGBT participation in the military.
But what about the spook rank-and-file? Are homosexuals persecuted at government agencies today? According to Michael Barber, the CIA’s LGBT Community Outreach and Liaison program manager:
More than 200 CIA employees are members of the agency’s LGBT resource group today. The spy agency is one of the founding partners of Outserve, an organization that represents gay active military personnel, including those with the CIA.
Barber says there were always gay men and women doing important jobs at the agency, but until recently few were comfortable being out.
“Part of the reason we’re doing outreach is to change that perception in the community,” he says. “That this is no longer an issue for holding security clearance, that we want the best and the brightest regardless of your sexual orientation.”
Given intel attitudes before ‘The Cambridge Five’ and the attitude of the CIA (at least) today, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that excluding gays from intelligence work during the 50s and 60s was a deviation from the norm.
Check out this recent press release from James Clapper’s office (Director of National Intelligence), announcing an Advocate.com article about a transgendered CIA employee’s ‘transition’.
I’m not saying that every great intelligence professional is or was gay, nor even that homosexuals are overrepresented in the intelligence community as a whole. (It may be true, but don’t have access to that type of data!) However, having read a fair amount about the history of the Western world’s modern intelligence services, it strikes me how many prominent intelligence pros– people who are in the public eye and must therefore be exceptionally reliable– were and are homosexual, bisexual or transgendered. The prevalence of homosexuality amongst talented, prominent and celebrated intelligence professionals deserves academic study.
Now that the US military has taken steps to shake off the nearly global prejudice against LGBT people, I challenge the security-cleared research community to investigate just what role this exceptional minority has played in shaping the US military, and organizations like the CIA, NSA and FBI, into what they have become today.
Here are some questions to get the pros started:
1) Was homosexuality really a blackmail risk? If it was, why were so many LGBT agents employed by intelligence agencies prior to 1950? What was special about the 50s and 60s that changed intelligence leaderships’ perspective so abnormally?
2) What is it about the military lifestyle that appeals to the LGBT community despite active persecution?
3) Are LGBT professionals statistically overrepresented in high-trust intelligence positions?
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* The D.C.’s total population in 1950 was 814,000, if at least 4000 LGBT individuals were employed by the government in D.C.’s ten square miles alone; and if Gates’ estimate of 3.5% LGBT across the population holds; and if the government accounted for 29% of D.C. employment back in the 1950s too, then the LGBT community was probably over-represented in government prior to the 50s and 60s. (4000 ‘caught’ LGBT individuals who were employed by the government makes them alone 1.7% of total government employees in D.C.) I doubt as many as one in two LGBT individuals were counted by the press or police; the 4000 figure probably represents a more vocal/outgoing segment of the LGBT population.
