There’s an old military saying:
“No secrets between sailors.”
...but on this 1974 episode of MASH the secret is out about Private Weston.
“A non-heterosexual.” “That nice boy?” “That’s
what I understand from some very reliable gossip.”
And now that the private’s gone public, the camp’s in an uproar about whether
to turn him in. But he’s not the only one with something to hide.
“Look, let’s skip the manicure.”
Hi, I’m Matt Baume, I make videos about pop culture. And this time we’re talking about
M*A*S*H — one of the first shows on TV to tackle the issue of gay
soldiers. It was an issue that the country had been grappling with for
decades before M*A*S*H’s gay episode aired, and one wouldn’t be resolved until decades
later ... making this an episode of TV made in the 1970s that uses the 1950s to talk about the 1990s.
So if you’re not familiar with the show M*A*S*H,
or its general air of malaise — it was a comedy drama that premiered in 1972,
set at an Army medical camp twenty years earlier in the 1950s. M*A*S*H was sometimes funny,
sometimes serious, and often quite dark — it was a biting satire of the US military, and a critique
of America’s role in the then-ongoing Vietnam War and Cold War. Now I know that doesn’t sound like
it’s got the makings of a hit — but it was one of the most popular shows on television. To this day
M*A*S*H holds the record for the most-watched episode in the history of TV. It was huge.
And that’s what makes this Season 2 episode,
entitled “George,” so amazing — one of the creators later called it a
“miracle” that they were allowed to say what they did about homosexuality at the time. The episode
starts with a young wounded soldier arriving at camp, and meeting one of the doctors — Hawkeye,
played by Alan Alda. You might recognize him from 30 Rock ...
“I’m a contest winner!”
Or from momentarily going upside down at the Emmys.
The soldier is Private George Weston, played by Richard Ely — he was an
early-70s heartthrob. George has some combat wounds, but also a few unexplained bruises.
“Looks like somebody used him for batting practice.”
While he’s recovering from his injuries, he takes Hawkeye aside with a surprising request:
“As a matter of fact I was wondering when I could get out of here and get back to my outfit.”
“You want out of here? After the Army went to the trouble of arranging all this mud and lice?”
Most soldiers are happy to get a medical discharge and get sent home,
but George wants to return to his unit. At first, he doesn’t want to say why,
but after a little hesitation he decides he can trust the doctor with a secret.
“I’ve watched you around the hospital. You care about people.”
“Some of my best friends are people.”
George chooses his words carefully here — and just a reminder, this show’s set in the 1950s, and they
use some language that people don’t use today. George confesses to Hawkeye that he did indeed
get his bruises in a fight. He tells him, there have been two soldiers beat up in his outfit:
“One colored, and one homosexual.” “So you’re a negro.”
They both know that they can’t talk openly about George being gay,
even though it’s clear that that’s what’s he’s saying. Why not? Well back then,
coming out wouldn’t JUST have made George a target for violence from other soldiers.
If the Army found out that he was gay, military rules were designed to ruin his entire life.
We’ll talk about how that worked in just a little bit. And if soldiers not allowed to
talk about homosexuality reminds you of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, don’t worry, we’re gonna get to that.
For now, George just wants Hawkeye to keep his secret,
and to send him back to the front lines — to prove that he belonged there.
“It’s important to me that I finish my tour of duty. Now more than ever.”
And at first, it looks like that’s just what’s gonna happen.
But then one of the other officers, Frank, hears a rumor from some other soldiers.
“There’s one of those in camp.”
Frank is disgusted by the idea that George is gay. He can’t even bring himself to say it.
“One of those types that don’t like girls.”
Even though he doesn’t have any proof, Frank wants to expose George as gay and give him a
dishonorable discharge for homosexuality. That means it’s up to Hawkeye to stop him. Somehow.
So just how bad would that dishonorable discharge have been?
Well, once the Army hung a label of homosexuality on you, you might
never be able to work again. Depending on the circumstances of your discharge,
you could face a lot of different penalties. And in some cases, it was considered equivalent
to a felony conviction, which meant you’d lose the right to vote, to own property,
or get government licenses. You couldn’t get a job, and you also couldn’t collect unemployment.
It effectively cut you off from society — what the Army itself called “a downward spiral.”
Now, quick sidenote, it’s not like gays and the military haven’t gone hand in hand in
the past — back in 350 BC there was a group of warriors called The Sacred Band of Thebes
that was made up of 150 pairs of male lovers. For more about them,
check out my Patreon — I’ve got a bonus video there about their whole story.
But when it comes to the US military, their history with homosexuality is a little more
spotty. The Army’s first ban on homosexuality was established in 1916, and by the time this
episode of M*A*S*H aired, about 50 years later, the US government had developed a
whole system for hunting for queer people — not just in the military, but any government job.
It’s a time now called The Lavender Scare, a moral panic and organized campaign to expose
anyone in government even suspected of homosexuality. It was pretty ruthless:
“We looked at every part of a person’s life. Just like a police department investigates murders.”
“They pulled them out of bed in the middle of the night and set them up with lights. … They
said to them, ‘we have your friend in the next room.
She’s already told us you’re gay. You give us the names of the others and we’ll go easy on you.’”
The anti-gay hunt was codified in 1953, when Eisenhower signed an executive order that banned
homosexuals from working for the government. These were extrajudicial investigations — meaning if you
were suspected, you had no right to a lawyer, or to see the evidence against you, or to appeal.
“They also sent letters home telling their parents WHY they were being discharged.
So that they would not be able to go home and just
fold themselves back into family life. … You know, these were kids.”
That’s exactly what Frank wants to do to George — to give him
a dishonorable discharge that could ruin his life based on just a rumor.
Even though, as other officers point out, George hasn’t given them any reason to do so.
“Has the man made a pass at you? At me? At anyone?”
Even when the Lavender Scare was happening, it was clear there was no basis for the policy
other than dumb prejudice. In 1957, a report found that queer people posed no more threat
to security than anyone else, but concluded that the hunt should continue simply because, quote,
“homosexuality is wrong, [it is] evil,” and it is to be branded as such. A 1946 memo says,
“the Navy considers homosexual acts morals offenses because they are morals offenses.”
And here’s another memo from just after World War II, recommending that the army create a program
to indoctrinate officers into catching queer people. That’s literally the word they use,
“indoctrination.” Recruits were told that homosexuals are sick, and a threat to the
Army. They were ordered to keep an eye out for telltale traits of homosexuals — for example,
“an unnecessarily ‘prissy’ way of walking” — there’s no guidance on
what the necessary amount of prissiness is.
And one more quick sidenote here — the Army wasn’t always so uptight about the gays.
During the revolutionary war, one of George Washington’s close advisers had a reputation for
his intimate relationships with other men, and he became known for throwing a party at Valley
Forge where soldiers weren’t allowed to wear pants — a rule that M*A*S*H itself observed on occasion.
I’ll have more stories about that over on my Patreon too.
Anyway, by the time we get to the 20th century,
the US Army was instructing officers to report gay soldiers so they could be fired.
Frank here is just following orders, and he expects everyone else to do the same. He
goes to the commanding officer, Colonel Blake, and demands that he sign the discharge papers.
“It’s been brought to my attention that we’ve got an undesirable in the post-op.”
Bu then word gets back to Hawkeye that Frank is forcing the discharge to go through. So Hawkeye
goes to find Colonel Blake and starts criticizing him for signing the discharge papers. But then:
“Pierce, I didn’t sign.” “How dare you do the right thing?”
Blake refused, since all Frank had to go on was a rumor. So Frank went above his head to another
officer to get the forms… even though nobody else in camp wants George kicked out of the Army.
And this illustrates another problem with the ban on letting gay people serve — it meant
that thousands of qualified people, who wanted to work, who were valued by their coworkers,
could just vanish from the workplace. All it took was one accusation.
And remember, policies like these weren’t limited to the military. Teachers, clerks,
doctors, scientists — over ten thousand people are estimated to have lost their
jobs in the lavender scare. It was a disaster for the people who were fired,
losing qualified workers was a disaster for the government, and having a constant
churn of firing and replacing government workers was a disaster for the country.
But then something big changed. And this witch hunt for gays reached a turning point
right when this episode of M*A*S*H aired.
That change started in 1958, when the government fired the wrong guy, an astronomer named Frank
Kameny. He was working for the Army’s map service when he was accused and fired, and
Frank Kameny was furious. He was determined to do something about it. He became a full-time activist
for the rest of his life. He organized protests and picketed the White House in the 1960s.
He helped to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the early 70s. He’s credited
with creating the slogan “gay is good,” inspired by the civil rights slogan “Black is beautiful.”
One of Frank Kameny’s big events was a protest called The Annual Reminder — a picket in
Philadelphia every summer to show the world that queer people could be out and open and proud.
They held it every year starting in 1965. And then after the Stonewall Riots in 1969,
organizers decided it was time to think bigger. The next summer,
instead of the Annual Reminder, they organized the first Pride. And in the span of a year,
queer protests went from a few dozen people to thousands.
Along with that visibility came a new public debate in the early ‘70s
about whether it was right to ban queer people from government jobs.
And that’s the context in which this episode of M*A*S*H aired — ostensibly about the 1950s,
but really about a debate that was timely in the 1970s.
In this episode of M*A*S*H, Frank represents the past — the Lavender Scare, the witch hunts,
the indoctrination memo. He’s not going to give up on getting Private Weston discharged,
and plans to go over his commanding officer’s head:
“As a surgeon and an officer I’m obliged to report any man who may jeopardize his unit.”
“Well you just never know, do you?”
Hawkeye and his friend John represent the future,
taking a clear stance that while Frank’s actions might be legal, they’re also morally wrong.
“Condemning somebody for something that’s his own business.”
“Next time you’re browsing in the Bible, try to find a few words about compassion.”
As the episode reaches its climax, what Frank doesn’t know is that Hawkeye and
John have cooked up a little scheme. They trick Frank into admitting that years ago,
he paid for the answers to an exam so he could get his medical license.
“I paid 400 for mine.”
“And you have the dumb nerve to judge someone else?”
If that information got out, Frank could lose his license and his career.
Just like he’s threatening to do to George. Hawkeye points out
that Frank’s in no position to judge whether someone else is fit to serve,
which Frank doesn’t love … but he gets the message and he rips up the discharge papers. The end.
It’s pretty remarkable to hear an episode from the 1970s come down
so decisively in favor of allowing queer people to serve.
It’s also remarkable how closely the arguments in this episode mirror the ones you might hear
in real life over the next few decades. One year after this episode aired, a soldier named
Leonard Matlovich read an interview with the fired-astronomer-turned-activist Frank Kameny,
and it inspired Matlovich to come out, go public, and challenge the military ban on open service.
“And just, keeping quiet … my conscience wouldn’t
let me do it anymore. I had to come forward and say, ‘no more, America.’”
And that was the start of a long effort to end not just the ban on open military service,
but the ban on homosexuals working in any government job. Some of those rules were rolled
back the same year that Matlovich went public. Others took longer to overturn. At the start
of the 1980s, the government’s official policy was "homosexuality is incompatible with military
service,” but by the end of the ‘80s, a new governmenrt report found that homosexuality was
“unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed."
Pressure kept mounting to repeal the ban, in part because it was
clear that queer people were serving, and always had, and were good at it.
“I learned this from the Marines.” “You were in the Marines?”
“Yes. They were looking for a few good men, and so was I.”
By the early ‘90s, public officials were having arguments almost identical to that episode of
M*A*S*H. Conservatives said homosexuality was unnatural and threatened unit cohesion,
just like Frank claimed on M*A*S*H. Civil rights groups said that simply wasn’t true,
and that forcing people to keep themselves hidden was harmful, like Hawkeye said.
That came to a head in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed a compromise into law — the
full name was “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass,” but for some reason
people only remember the first two parts, maybe because the Army continued to pursue and harass.
Reports showed that the government was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate
people, fire them, and train replacements … for no benefit whatsoever. Again, the problem
wasn’t homosexuals in the military. It was that the military was forcing them to stay hidden.
Finally, in 2010, Obama signed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And by the end
of his administration, he’d also repealed Eisenhower’s executive order that banned queer
people from government jobs. That hadn’t been enforced for years, but remained on the books.
Now this is not to say that the US military is now beyond reproach. In fact it is a deeply
problematic institution deserving of critique! But the last hundred years of policy has shown that
forcing queer people to hide in ANY profession, whether soldier or astronomer or case worker
or astronaut, helps nobody — and everyone’s better off when those restrictions go away.
Repealing the bans means ending the legal need for queer people to keep secret.
You can see that change in this clip from a White House reception in 2009. It was just after Obama
was elected, and he was welcoming a group of gay activists to the White House. While he was
speaking, he happened to spot Frank Kameny, that astronomer who’d been fired in the 1950s, who
a half century earlier could only represent queer people on the other side of the White House walls.
“A civil rights hero who is here today, Frank Kameny … In 1965 he led a protest
outside the White House, which was at the time both an act of great conscience but also an
act of extraordinary courage. And so we are proud of you, Frank. We are grateful to you.”
It was 101 years from the military’s first ban on homosexuals to Obama’s repeal of the
ban on gay civil servants. A century of unjust laws, and the gay episode of MASH came exactly
in the middle of that. A half-hour episode that came just at the moment in history when the tide
was starting to turn — when America was slowly shifting from the assumption that queer people
are sick and threatening, to realizing that the real threat is forcing good people to hide.
Now in making this video I found a lot more fun stories I didn’t have room for
in the script. For those stories, check out my Patreon — I’ve got a video up now about
The Sacred Band of Thebes, and I’ve got hours of bonus videos about other shows
that I’ve talked about. I’ll be posting more bonus videos in the coming weeks.
Big thanks to Jacob Haywood, an Archivist at
the U.S. National Archives, for research help with this video.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been asked to come up with a new slogan for the Marines.
“Two things I love to do is fight and kiss boys! Come on!”