Background
As early as the Revolutionary War, American historians have found evidence of gay soldiers, as well as evidence of military discharges on grounds of homosexuality.
In its 1916 Articles of War, Congress cited “assault with the intent to commit sodomy” as a punishable offense. In the years to follow, the U.S. Army adopted a ranking system to disqualify men from serving on biological and psychological grounds, using language of psychopathy, degeneracy, and perversion. By the 1940s, the Navy introduced policies that rejected and discharged men not only for homosexual acts, but for their "tendencies." Many gay men were released from service in World War II with less-than-honorable "blue" discharges that stigmatized them to future employers and disqualified them from receiving GI benefits. The Department of Defense issued and amended its policies over the following decades, and in 1981, Directive 1332.14 firmly called for the mandatory discharge of any service member who engaged, or desired to engage, in a homosexual act.
It was this directive that President Clinton proposed to overturn in the early 1990s, but facing opposition, he forged a compromised policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." For 17 years, from 1994 until its repeal in 2011, the careers and livelihoods of LGBTQ+ service members remained at risk. The United States also explicitly banned transgender people from serving in the military from 1960 until 2016, and again between 2019 and 2021. In March 2021, the Department of Defense revised its policies to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
