The best laid plans.... When Bill Clinton campaigned for president in 1992, he promised to end the military's ban on gay and lesbian soldiers. As everyone knows, that didn't happen and instead for nearly 20 years we've lived with "don't ask, don't tell" -- a shabby compromise that managed to actually accelerate discharges instead of reduce them.
Unlike when President Obama worked to unravel DADT, President Clinton encountered a military and Congress much more resistant to the idea of openly gay men and women serving. When Clinton initiated congressional hearings to end the ban in 1993, former Georgia senator Sam Nunn headed the Senate Committee on Armed Services. Nunn was dead-set against letting gays serve openly, but was more open to gays pretending to not be gay. (Carl Levin, the Michigan senator who now heads up the committee, was much more amenable to letting gays serve openly when Obama applied pressure.)
Realizing he couldn't get Congress or military leaders to get on board with reversing the ban, Clinton worked with military and congressional leaders to craft DADT, which was initially known as "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue." As a testament to how endemic homophobia was at the time, Clinton said this to reporters in May 1993: "We are trying to work this out so that our country does not... appear to be endorsing a gay lifestyle."
Clinton signed DADT into law in November 1993. "The compromise [permitted] homosexuals to serve in the military so long as they remained silent about their sexual orientation, except in the most private of settings, and did not engage in homosexual acts," according to a New York Times article from November 17, 1993.
Legal challenges greeted the policy almost as soon as it was announced and by 2003, former President Clinton was calling for DADT's death. (Nunn did the same in 2008.) While Obama faced resistance in keeping his promise to kill DADT, he did have one big advantage that Clinton lacked: public sentiment. Only 27% of Americans opposed gays serving openly in the military, according to a 2010 Pew survey--an 18-percentage point drop in opposition since the same survey was conducted 16 years earlier.
Click on the following pages to see how The Advocate handled the DADT issue in 12 covers over the years.
