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The alleged complications in this case underscore the danger of: 1) the closet, 2) that DADT reinforces the closet and foments fear of being shoved out of it to a deadly level, and 3) the military engages in secrecy because of the homophobia that instituted Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the first place.. (Dallas Voice):
The aunt of August Provost, a bisexual Navy seaman from Houston found murdered at Camp Pendleton last month, told Dallas Voice this week that the family has received information suggesting that her nephew’s killer is a gay sailor who somehow feared being outed by Provost.
Rose Roy, of Beaumont, the sister of Provost’s father, said in a phone interview Tuesday, July 14 that she’s “not at liberty” to identify the source who provided the information to the family. But Roy said the source told the family Provost had a heated argument with the suspect a week before his murder, and that the sailor now being held as a person of interest by the Navy has a history of mental illness.
“This guy went the extra mile to make sure that my nephew would never be able to speak about his [the killer’s] sexuality,” Roy said. “My nephew died for reasons other than what the military is saying.”
If this is the case, then it's not a hate crime, as the military asserts, but the inquiries by a member of Congress for clarity on the matter are going unanswered.
“What I know about the murder is what the Navy so far has told us, which is not very much,” [U.S. Rep. Bob] Filner told Dallas Voice. “I think they ought to be far more open and far more in detail. They keep saying they know it’s not a hate crime, but they don’t give me enough information for me to agree with that or not. If they don’t do it right, we will have an independent congressional inquiry. There are several of us in Congress who are calling for that, and we’ll figure out a way to do it if we need to.”
Related:
* Congressman on Provost murder and DADT: the military 'doesn't want that discussion to take place'
* Sheila Jackson-Lee to call for Congressional investigation into the murder of sailor August Provost
* Time article mulls connection between slain sailor's murder to queasiness over repealing DADT
* Sailor killed at Camp Pendleton may have been target of hate crime
6 Comments
Closet cases have always been the MOST dangerous to our communityDADT is an institutionalized idiotic program which rewards lying and the closet.
This breaks my heartIt was bad enough that August Provost may have been murdered by a shipmate as a hate crime for his sexual orientation, but that one of his shipmates may have murdered SN Provost to protect his own closet…
How can people like John McCain honestly say “the policy is working” when troops are killing each other over it? How? This has to stop. This evil policy needs to have a stake driven through its heart, then beheaded, burned, and the ashes scattered to the winds. It’s causing hatred, terror, division, and people are resorting to murder to uphold it.
Dress GrayStrangely, this whole story is the exact plot of the 1986 TV movie Dress Gray, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal.
Granted, the movie takes place in a military academy and not the actual military, and was made several years before DADT – but the situation described is exactly the same.
I’ve said it dozens of times, but it always bears repeating:Our worst enemies are NOT straight.
*cough-Ken Mehlman-cough*
Underscoring an unfortunate illusion…
I’m not directing this at you, pope, because I trust that you are one of those who understand that a ban on gays in the military had existed for 50 years before DADT, but want to make it clear to younger Blenders who might not.
As reported by Randy Shilts in Conduct Unbecoming, 1986, the year the mini series Dress Gray appeared on television [from a novel by Lucian K. Truscott IV who wrote the first Village Voice account of the Stonewall Riots, and whose Army veteran father was forbidden by Sam Nunn from testifying in favor of allowing gays into the military during the 1993 Senate hearings], was an especially terrible year for gays in the military.
More gays were discharged that year than in 2001-the year of the highest number of discharges under DADT.
There were witchhunts of gays on military bases and ships, particularly directed at gay women, and it was one of those years when sexual harassment of women in the military, gay and nongay, was at its highest. Air Force investigators grew fond of simply locking airmen suspected of being gay in an actual closet until they confessed.
What made it extra horrible was that it was the first year that servicemembers were required to have HIV tests, and the AIDS panic that was burning hot in the civilian world was even worse in the military where, initially, HIV-related policies were unclear, training was minimal or ill-informed, and the meme was HIV = GAY.
Though he had committed no crime, after sailor Wayne Bell tested positive for HIV he was handcuffed and escorted by Marine MPs to the brig to await discharge. On the way they beat him up because, well, he “must be a fag.” His physical abuse and being locked up led him to attempt suicide twice before more level headed superiors prevailed. But a call home informed him that his parents didn’t want to see him again.
The OSI tried to get lists of names of people in military hospitals diagnosed with HIV. Even servicemembers simply suspected of being gay were often ordered to take HIV tests ahead of those who were not. One Army private who’d tested positive was lectured by his Walter Reed Army doctor about what Leviticus said about gays, was shunned by other non-HIV+ patients, and hung himself in the stairwell nearest his hospital room.
One study showed that approximately one-third of servicemembers testing positive for HIV attempted suicide.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” understandably became catchy shorthand for the cumbersome “ban on out gays in the military” but constant references to it alone, particularly when misleadingly wrapped in the context of Clinton and 1993, have had the unintended consequence of obscuring, and, thereby, under reporting, the length and depth of institutionalized military homohatred that civilian courts have admitted trampling on the US Constitution to protect. “In the beginning” was not DADT but military bigotry.
The rhetorical power of “13,000 Have Been Discharged Since DADT” is dwarfed by “Over 100,000 Have Been Victimized By the Military’s Long History of Homophobia.” The financial cost of military homophobia to taxpayers under DADT-hundreds of millions wasted training, then discharging gay servicemembers, the cost of investigating them, the cost of training their replacements-is over a billion dollars when one factors in all those kicked out since the ban was instituted during WWII.
It’s long past time gay advocacy groups working against the ban rebooted their approach to reflect the much bigger picture.
Finally, if August Provost’s murder was in any way related to sanctioned military homophobia, it wasn’t the first any more than Barry Winchell’s was in 1999 or Allen Schindler’s was in 1992 before anyone had even conceived of the phrase “don’t ask, don’t tell” or the ban policy became a statute.
Governmentally mandated, violence-inducing bigotry is the same no matter what formal label one gives it and our Commander-in-Chief could at least remove that mandate in seconds with a ballpoint pen after which Congress would be more motivated to formally repeal it.