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Reviewed by:
  • Ask & Tell: Gay & Lesbian Veterans Speak Out
  • Ian Lekus
Ask & Tell: Gay & Lesbian Veterans Speak Out. By Steve Estes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 280 pp. Hardbound, $29.95.

At the outset of Ask & Tell, Estes recalls the debates that produced the 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting “homosexual conduct or activity in the armed forces” of the U.S. and laments the silenced voices of those most directly affected by the policy: gay and lesbian service members. In response, Estes, an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University, enlists oral history as an ally in the on-going campaign to allow gay men and lesbians in the U.S. to serve openly in the armed forces. He argues “that historically, the silence concerning gays in the military has led to a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. In this case, the politics of military service are also the politics of memory” (2). This historical silence facilitates denying lesbian and gay Americans their civil rights, given how intertwined military service and citizenship are in the nation. “Oral history provides one way to break this silence, to ‘ask and tell’ about the military careers of gay and lesbian soldiers and to allow these veterans to speak for themselves about the current military policy,” he explains (2).

Ask & Tell grew out of Estes’ participation in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center’s Veterans History Project. As a Project volunteer, Estes conducted more than fifty oral histories with gay and lesbian veterans, thirty-three of whose stories are represented in this volume. The interviews span veterans from World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars, and the more recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Estes also includes chapters dedicated to alumni of the service academies, to women’s efforts to secure equal treatment in the military, to the campaigns to lift the ban, and to retired flag officers who have come out publicly after decades-long careers in order to discredit arguments that lesbians and gay men cannot serve effectively and that they necessarily undermine group cohesion and morale. For methodological purposes, Estes also includes an appendix with his interview questions and an explanation of how he edited raw transcripts into the published narratives, with side-by-side samples of each from his interview with Gulf War veteran Lisa Michelle Fowler.

To provide context for his narrators’ stories, Estes begins each chapter with a short introduction synthesizing the relevant scholarship (including, in the Vietnam War chapter, this reviewer’s own). The introductions offer few new insights, but clearly and effectively set the stage for the narratives. The published list of interview questions, in tandem with Estes ‘policy aims, help explain the stylistic similarities in many of his narrators’ tales: the interviewees recalling their family background; the opportunities they saw in serving their nation; the details of their basic training; the friendships they built with other personnel; their daily routines and [End Page 128] the risks they faced while serving; how their military careers ended; their reflections on how their service shaped their lives; and their general attitudes toward the don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Perhaps ironically, the familiarity of these patriotic stories, with their structural and narrative similarities, will likely make Ask & Tell more compelling to policy makers, activists, and a general readership—especially other veterans, of all sexualities—than to more critically engaged academics. Estes’ desire to allow gay and lesbian veterans to tell their stories most likely explains the lack of any conclusion or afterword; instead, he decides to bookend his collection of stories with the account of Robert Stout’s unit being ambushed near the Tigris River by Iraqi insurgents and his determination to get “his guys” out alive. Still, scholars might well be interested to hear more of Estes’ own analytical insights.

Though similar stories have been documented and analyzed more deeply elsewhere, the greatest historical significance and emotional heft of the book lies in the stories of how lesbian and gay male service members have negotiated the military ban from World War II to the present. In...

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