Don't Ask, Don't Tell From the 1993 Compromise to the 2010 Repeal

In the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, a few blocks from the Navy Yard, there is a black granite headstone with no name on it. It belongs to Leonard Matlovich, an Air Force technical sergeant who served in Vietnam, won a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and in 1975 wrote a letter to his commanding officer saying he was gay and wanted to keep serving. He was discharged. His face went on the cover of Time. When he died in 1988, his stone was carved with a line contrasting the medal he received for killing two men with the discharge he received for loving one. He had picked a plot near the grave of J. Edgar Hoover. The joke was deliberate, and so was the argument, and it took the country another twenty-two years after his death to accept it in law.

In short: Don't Ask, Don't Tell was sold in 1993 as a middle path between banning gay service members and letting them serve openly. In practice it kept the ban, forced silence and drove thousands out of the military. Its repeal in December 2010 came from a mix of court pressure, a careful Pentagon review, military leaders who changed their minds and a lame-duck Congress that voted before the window closed.

The ban before the compromise

Gay and lesbian Americans have served in every war the country has fought. What changed over the twentieth century was how systematically the military hunted for them. During the Second World War, psychiatric screening began treating homosexuality as a disqualifying condition, and discharges followed. In the decades after, the services ran investigations, interrogations and purges, sometimes pressuring service members to name others.

In 1981, the Defense Department wrote the policy down in plain terms: homosexuality was incompatible with military service. That sentence gave every commander the authority, and in many cases the obligation, to remove anyone found to be gay, whatever their record.

People challenged it. Matlovich did. So did Margarethe Cammermeyer, an Army nurse and Vietnam veteran who rose to the rank of colonel in the Washington National Guard and acknowledged during a security clearance interview in 1989 that she was a lesbian. She was discharged and fought it in court, and a federal judge ordered her reinstated in 1994. Each case made the same point from a different angle. The people being removed were often exactly the soldiers the military said it wanted.

A campaign promise meets the Joint Chiefs

Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 promising to end the ban. Within days of his inauguration in January 1993, the promise ran into a wall. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Gen. Colin Powell, opposed lifting it. So did Sam Nunn of Georgia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, one of the most respected defense voices in his own party. Nunn held hearings that spring, including a widely covered visit to a Navy submarine to examine sleeping quarters, which tells you where the argument was headed.

The opponents' case, stated fairly, was about cohesion. They argued that in close quarters and combat, the presence of openly gay service members would hurt trust and morale, and that the military was not the place for social experiments. Many of the men making that argument had led troops and believed it sincerely. Supporters of lifting the ban answered that the same arguments had been made against racial integration in 1948 and that units already included gay members who simply hid it. A RAND study commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993 concluded that the ban could be lifted without serious harm to effectiveness, if done with clear rules of conduct. The study was largely set aside.

The compromise that emerged borrowed a phrase associated with the military sociologist Charles Moskos: don't ask, don't tell. Recruits would no longer be asked whether they were gay. Gay service members could serve if they kept it secret. Commanders were not supposed to go hunting. But any statement that one was gay, any same-sex relationship, any act that revealed it, remained grounds for discharge.

Congress wrote the substance into law in the defense authorization bill that Clinton signed on November 30, 1993. That detail matters more than it looks. Because the policy became a statute, no future president could undo it with a stroke of a pen. Repeal would take another act of Congress.

How a compromise became a trap

Supporters of the 1993 deal hoped it would at least reduce discharges. It did not. Under the policy, the military discharged more than 13,000 service members. The numbers rose for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s before falling during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the services needed every trained person they had.

The "don't ask" part was often ignored. Investigations began from anonymous tips, from overheard conversations, from a private email. Women, especially, reported that accusations of lesbianism were used as a weapon against those who refused advances or reported harassment. In 1999, Pfc. Barry Winchell was beaten to death at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, by a fellow soldier after months of anti-gay harassment, a killing that forced the Pentagon to look at how the policy was being carried out on the ground.

The policy also discharged people the country could not easily replace. Dozens of Arabic linguists trained at the Defense Language Institute were among those dismissed in the years after September 11, at the moment translators were in short supply. Whatever one believed about cohesion, it was hard to argue that removing a fluent Arabic speaker during a war in Iraq served readiness.

And the silence had costs that statistics do not capture. Service members could not list partners as emergency contacts. They could not talk openly about their lives. Many who served honorably left at the end of their contracts because they were tired of hiding.

The turn: lawsuits, a chairman and a survey

By the late 2000s, three pressures were building at once.

The first was public opinion. Polls showed steadily rising support for allowing gay people to serve openly, including among Republicans and churchgoers. Many younger troops did not see what the fuss was about.

The second was the courts. The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican group, had sued, arguing the law violated service members' constitutional rights. In September 2010, a federal district judge in California, Virginia Phillips, ruled the policy unconstitutional and later ordered the military to stop enforcing it. The ruling was stayed on appeal, but the message to Congress and the Pentagon was clear: if they did not act, a court might make the change for them, on its own timetable and without a plan.

The third was leadership. Barack Obama had promised repeal in his 2008 campaign and in his 2010 State of the Union address. A week later, in February 2010, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his personal belief was that allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly would be the right thing to do. He spoke about integrity, about an institution asking people to lie about who they were. Coming from the nation's top military officer, it changed the terms of the debate.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, asked for something specific: time to study how repeal would work before it happened. He set up a review that surveyed service members and their spouses on a scale the military rarely attempts. The report, released on November 30, 2010, found that about 70 percent of respondents expected repeal to have a positive, mixed or no effect on their units. Concerns were higher in some combat arms units, and the report took them seriously. Its conclusion was that the risk to effectiveness was low if repeal came with leadership, training and clear standards of conduct.

That study is the hinge of the whole story. It turned an argument about values into an argument about evidence, and the evidence favored repeal.

The lame-duck vote

Timing nearly sank it. The House had attached repeal to the annual defense bill in May 2010, but in the Senate, that bill stalled. In September and again in early December, efforts to bring it up failed to reach the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, with fights over amendments and procedure tangled up with the policy itself. Republicans had just won the House in the November 2010 midterms. Everyone understood that if repeal did not pass before the new Congress took office in January, it would not pass for years.

So supporters pulled repeal out into a standalone bill. Patrick Murphy, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Iraq veteran, carried it in the House, which passed it on December 15, 2010, by a vote of 250 to 175. In the Senate, Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, led the effort. On December 18, the Senate passed it 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats. Collins's role is worth remembering. Repeal was not a party-line act; it needed votes from across the aisle and got them.

President Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 on December 22. The law did not end the policy that day. It required the president, the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to certify that the military was ready, followed by a sixty-day wait. Certification came in July 2011. The policy ended on September 20, 2011.

What happened next is the strongest answer to the 1993 fears: very little. Units did not fall apart. The services reported no meaningful effect on readiness, recruitment or retention. Service members who had been discharged could apply to have their records upgraded, and in later years the military made it easier for veterans pushed out under the old policy to get their discharges corrected.

The faces that kept the issue alive

Laws change when particular people make an abstraction impossible to ignore, and the repeal had plenty of them.

Maj. Margaret Witt, an Air Force Reserve flight nurse with nearly two decades of service, was suspended and then discharged after an investigation into her relationship with a civilian woman. She sued. In 2008, a federal appeals court held that the military had to show that discharging her, specifically, advanced its goals, rather than relying on the policy in general. In 2010, a district judge found that it could not and ordered her reinstated. Members of her unit testified on her behalf.

Lt. Dan Choi, an Army infantry officer, West Point graduate and Arabic speaker who served in Iraq, said on national television in 2009 that he was gay, knowing it would trigger discharge proceedings. He became one of the most visible protesters of the policy, chaining himself to the White House fence with other veterans. Some repeal supporters thought his tactics were counterproductive. Others credited him with keeping the issue from fading behind the more polite lobbying in Washington.

Behind them stood organizations that had worked the issue for years, providing lawyers to service members under investigation and documenting how the policy worked in practice. That record of individual cases, accumulated one discharge at a time, gave members of Congress and the Pentagon's review team a picture of the policy that no statistic could.

What the repeal teaches, and what it did not settle

There are a few lessons here worth carrying.

First, a compromise written into statute can outlast the people who wrote it by decades. The 1993 deal was meant as a temporary truce. Because it became law, it bound three presidents. Progressives who are tempted by half-measures should ask what the half-measure locks in and how hard it will be to undo.

Second, evidence moved people who values arguments did not. The Pentagon's 2010 survey gave skeptical senators a reason to vote yes that was about readiness, not ideology. That is not a cynical point; meeting people on their own terms is how a majority gets built.

Third, the repeal was bipartisan, and the people who made it so took real political risks. A party that wants to win future fights for equality should remember who crossed over and treat them as partners.

Finally, the repeal covered gay, lesbian and bisexual service members. It did not address transgender troops, who were governed by separate medical rules. That fight came later, and it has gone in a different direction, with a ban announced in 2017, lifted in 2021 and reimposed in 2025. The story of open service is not finished, and the lesson of 2010, that careful evidence can carry the day, is being tested again.

What you can do

Repeal came from a Congress that acted in a narrow window, pushed by people who kept calling. Here is where that energy can go now.

• Know how your members vote on defense policy. The annual defense authorization bill is where many personnel rules are written or undone. Look up your House member and senators, their contact information and recent votes on your representatives' page, and ask them how they will vote on provisions affecting LGBTQ+ service members.
• Watch for cross-party coalitions. The 2010 repeal needed Republican votes. The common ground page tracks bills that passed with support from both parties, which is a useful map of who has been willing to work across the aisle.
• Help veterans fix their records. Veterans discharged under the old policies may be eligible to upgrade their discharge status, which can affect benefits. Veterans' legal clinics and LGBTQ+ legal aid groups do this work; the organizations directory lists legal aid and LGBTQ+ nonprofits by state.
• Keep the military story in view. Our topic pages on the Pentagon and militarism and LGBTQ+ rights follow the current fight over who is allowed to serve.

Leonard Matlovich's stone still has no name on it, only the words "a gay Vietnam veteran." Visitors leave things there. The country he served eventually decided he had been right, and that is worth remembering on the days when the next argument looks impossible.