Still Serving in Silence

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹See, for instance, Serving in Silence (1995), about Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer; The Investigator (1997), about the persecutions and humiliations of homophobic investigation. Most recently, Showtime's lesbian drama series The L-Word also features a ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell’ storyline in seasons 4 and 5.

²In the past ten years around 17,000 gay service personnel were discharged at a cost to the US taxpayer of circa $500 million (188). One member of the Legal Defense Network estimates that investigating, expelling and replacing gays in the military costs about $30 million per annum, and that the total cost of homophobic discrimination in the US military since the 1950s lies at around $1.5 billion. From Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey Bateman (eds), Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military, Boulder: Rienner, 2003, p. 140.