The right not to be erotically enjoyed

Sir Winston Churchill was pacing around his guest room in the White House during World War II totally nude. President Roosevelt entered the room in his wheelchair and, noting the absence of textiles adorning his guest, beat a flustered retreat. "Oh, come on in, Franklin," boomed Churchill. "We British have nothing to conceal!"

In that spirit, there follows the revelation of intimate feelings more comfortably left unexpressed.

I wouldn't want to be seen naked by a homosexual male. I wouldn't mind in the slightest being seen naked by a straight man OR – gripping mood music would fit nicely here – by a male whose sexual proclivities were unknown, hence presumed to be heterosexual.

This is nothing less than the proclamation of a new civil right – the right not to have your body enjoyed erotically against your will. More accurately, that's far from a new civil right. It's a right we've always had but never had the need to invoke and defend until the government overthrew "don't ask, don't tell." Women, in particular, have always held that right dear, and men have helped them preserve it. ("Officer. That man in annoying me!" "OK, buddy. Move along!") The only thing that's new is the prospect of men and women in the service now openly preferring intimacy with members of their same sex.

All other arguments against gays serving openly in the military are moral, legal, tactical and practical. This one is highly personal. This one zooms right on by all those earnest questions of "unit cohesion," what course do military chaplains now take whose religions consider homosexuality an abomination, how many dramas might begin with a homosexual of superior rank hitting on a same-sex subordinate and to what deleterious end might those dramas lead, etc.

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It was dismaying to hear the president spin a heart-warming anecdote about a commanding officer who revealed himself as gay and whose supportive heterosexual troops declared, "We knew he was gay all along, and he's the best commander any of us has ever had." I don't doubt that story's veracity, but I question its typicality. Don't forget; it was an official of the Nazi German Embassy in Copenhagen who tipped off the Danish Underground that they were about to round up the Jews and deport them to concentration camps. That particular "Nazi" saved 6,000 Jewish lives. Some American civilians paid their own way to the Philippines in 1946 to testify on behalf of a Japanese prison camp commander who was uncharacteristically kind to his prisoners.

I'm simply saying there was a good German here and a good Japanese there. I'm not saying the wartime Germans and Japanese were a good ol' bunch of boys. And, no, dummy; I'm not comparing gays to Nazis or imperial Japanese. I'm simply saying President Obama cherry-picked a story of an effective and beloved military commander who happened to be homosexual. And, no, this is not an anti-gay screed. This may be the most pro-gay piece you've read lately. I literally fear instances of straight GIs losing it and actually murdering their gay comrades-in-arms. And I feared that long before any present debate or legislation about gays in the military.

In the mid-1990s, I got a call from a listener to my radio talk show who told of serving with five or six other men in close quarters in an Arctic hut in Greenland. One of the men started making subtle and then not-so-subtle homosexual advances. "We put him out," said the caller. "You did WHAT?" I asked. "You heard me," said the caller. "We put him out." "Did he survive?" I asked. "Of course not," said the caller without remorse. "This was the Arctic." A conscientious listener notified the police. This was an open, if anonymous, confession of murder. The FBI asked the network for a tape of that conversation. I heard nothing further about it.

Help yourself to an "inconvenient truth." Apparently, gays are not enraged by heterosexual sex practices. Vice-versa does not obtain. Gay sexual practices can trigger anti-gay rage among some heterosexuals. Only gays dare comment on gay behavior, so I'll settle for quoting the mantra at a gay San Francisco bathhouse. "Rub-a-dub-dub. Three men in a tub. And that's on a slow night!"

I recall shower time during basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was like watering cattle down before shipping them out of Omaha in boxcars. At least a dozen shower nozzles and a hundred naked men screaming, cussing, carrying on and even washing. I remember thinking, "I would rather take a shower like this with a hundred gay men who I didn't know were gay than with 99 straight men and one known homosexual."

Go ahead and laugh, denounce, demean, berate, snarl, spit and threaten. I remain the world's foremost authority on whom I'd like to take a shower with.