Homos in the UK Army
Keep the homosexual lobby at bay
2000
In January 2000, the UK government finally ended the ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) military personnel serving in the armed forces.
The end of the so-called ‘gay ban’ was the result of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the bar violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, protecting an individual’s right to family and private life.
Whilst the effects of this ban on individuals before and afterwards have been examined in detail, the deliberations that led to this change using the records of the Ministry of Defence have not. Using material released under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (2000) to go beyond the public statements of Ministers and service personnel, this article concludes that wider political and societal pressures put the Ministry of Defence on the backfoot, forcing attempts at evidence-based policy and the report of the Homosexuality Policy
Assessment Team. Whilst in public the MOD sought to make an evidence-based case for the ban to remain, the article reveals the frank discussions behind closed doors on the future of the ‘gay ban’ and the MOD’s robust response to calls for change.
In July 2023, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a statement to the House of Commons apologising for the ‘appalling’ treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)1 personnel in the UK armed forces prior to the end of the so-called ‘gay ban’ in January 2000.
‘It was not acceptable and it was not what the brave men and women it affected deserved’, then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the House, commenting on a policy that led to the involuntary discharge of an estimated 2,400 service personnel.
The statements came after the publication of a damning review into the treatment of LGBT personnel chaired by Lord Etherton and co-commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the Office for Veterans Affairs.
It revealed a widespread ‘culture of homophobia, and of bullying, blackmail and sexual assaults, abusive investigations into sexual orientation … disgraceful medical examinations, including conversion therapy, peremptory discharges’, resulting, it said, in ‘appalling consequences in terms of mental health and wellbeing, homelessness, employment, personal relationships and financial hardship’.
The review recommended that veterans should be given financial redress, that commission and rank would be retrospectively restored, and that medals handed back on dismissal would be returned. The government publishing its full response in December 2023, committing to future updates on progress.
Netherlands
The UK government had not been alone in banning LGBT personnel from their armed forces, nor was the prolonged process of change significantly different to other western militaries.
Whilst in 1987 the Netherlands became the first Western country to allow homosexual personnel to serve openly, change elsewhere was slower. There have been studies of these bans, and subsequent reforms, in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Israel, but archive-based studies of the UK have been limited—a gap this article seeks to fill.
In 1994, Harries-Jenkins and Dandeker wrote that the subject had attracted ‘considerable attention and … produced a small but significant body of literature’, though, they believed, much of it was ‘value based’.
The literature has moved considerably further, not least because of the change in UK policy in January 2000, with the study of MOD policy grouped into several distinct categories.
The first can be summarised as qualitative social research methodologies, including ‘in-depth interviews and thematic analysis rooted in lived experience approaches. Whilst there are similarities with oral history, it ‘encompasses a broader range of approaches’ offering ‘transferable insights about marginalised groups … to inform policy, practice and further research’.
Work by the ‘Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research’, based at Northumbria University, has pioneered research in this area, working in conjunction with veteran groups to draw attention to the cumulative impact of discriminatory practices within the forces pre-1991, and the wider impact related to housing, employment, health and social care. Others have followed a similar methodology
There are also accounts that fall into a second, or personal narrative; Edmund Hall’s 1995 book, We Can’t Even March Straight, was both an individual account and a polemic, and influential in early campaigns to overturn the ban
Equally, Craig Jones’ edited collection, Fighting with Pride, allows those most affected by the ban to tell their story and offers a graphic account of the short-term and long-term impact of policy from the personal perspective.
Studies
A study by the US-based RAND Corporation found that the inclusion of known homosexuals was unlikely to damage unit cohesion, a conclusion observed elsewhere.
In the UK, despite the huge effort put in to justify the ban, a tri-service review, completed in December 2002, found there had been ‘no discernible impact on operational effectiveness’ and a change in policy had been generally ’well received’.
The end of the blanket security ban to LGBT officials serving in Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), intelligence agencies and other parts of Whitehall in July 1991, was a landmark moment for post-war Whitehall security.
If the end of the 1980s had seen increasingly homophobic attitudes expressed in the press and government, the relaxation of security restrictions for homosexuals revealed a softening of attitudes into the 1990s, part of the beginning of a wider ‘cultural shift’ away from ‘frantic homophobia’.
The homophobia of the late-1980s brought in a new counterculture which campaigned for homosexual rights with no issue ‘too large or too small’, with gay men viewing themselves as ‘perfectly normal’.
The security rules, first introduced in 1951 and reaffirmed by a 1956 Conference of Privy Counsellors, had viewed homosexuality as a ‘character defect’ which, alongside drink and drugs, signified unreliability.
Although the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised sexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21 in private, in 1981 the Security Commission recommended homosexuality ‘remain a bar’ to Positive Vetting clearance.
In July 1991, the UK government had announced a change in policy and the removal of the blanket ban, citing the changing times and greater willingness of officials to divulge their sexuality.
Whilst 1991 marked a significant change in Whitehall security, nothing suggested that the gradual acceptance of homosexual life extended to the UK armed forces. Indeed, in his statement, Prime Minister John Major made it clear that the exception to change was ‘the special case of the armed forces where homosexual acts remain offences under the service disciplinary Acts’
Modern-day British military
There has been a third, policy-focused, strand of scholarship, drawing on publicly available statements without access to MOD files; Stephen Deakin, a civilian lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, concluded in 1999 that homosexuality in the armed forces was ‘strongly offensive’ to heterosexuals and would result in ‘diminished trust and social cohesion’ in the military.
Published in 2000 as part of an edited volume, such views were overtaken by events. Another study of the modern-day British military commented that, although homosexuals were officially ‘tolerated’, reality in the ‘ranks is another matter’ before quoting an anti-LGBT chat room message in full.
More recently, Paul Johnson’s study of the role of Parliament in shaping service law in the UK used published documents going back to the nineteenth century but was written without access to the MOD files used in this article. Finally, there has been a fourth longer term focus on LGBT personnel from Edwardian times to the early post-war period
These areas offer important insights into aspects of LGBT history within the British military, yet there is a significant gap when it comes to the study of the end of the ‘gay ban’ between 1991, when the security restrictions on the employment of homosexuals in sensitive posts across the UK government were removed, and the end of the ban in January 2000.
Oral-inspired accounts of the end of the ban naturally focus on the personal, whilst those accounts that study the long-term effects of the ban used the secondary literature with little reference to original archive-based work.
This is not itself a criticism; Ministry of Defence files on the end of the ban were only released to The National Archives (TNA) between September 2021 and June 2022. These files allow the study of the end of the ban to go beyond the public contributions of Ministers, officials and senior military figures, giving insights into private discussions on the ban, and the departmental responses to the outside campaign to overturn it.
Additionally, the article makes use of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (2000) using files released to the author between 2021 and 2022, which are still to reach TNA. Whilst subject to redactions under Section 40 of the Act, covering ‘personal data’, these papers supplement the existing archival record to provide insights into internal Ministry of Defence policy.
MOD policy
Readers of the article should be aware that FOI is not an alternative to traditional archive-based research; the FOI material used throughout this article places other records released by the MOD into a broader context, giving the researcher over a decade of material in charting official responses to calls to overturn the ‘ban’.
The documents released under FOI should not be viewed on their own, and the article seeks to integrate them into the wider document-led analysis of MOD policy. It should also be noted that FOI has limitations; whilst the Act, which came into force in January 2005, gives researchers the right to ask for unreleased information from public bodies, it is time consuming and—even when material is released—subject to redactions.
Nevertheless, the files released by FOI (used alongside documents released by the MOD generally) are remarkable for the frank insights into MOD policy that individuals believed would never see the light of day for a long time.
The files therefore offer insights into the dangers of contemporary history on sensitive subjects; many of the people referred to in the files—whether politicians, service personnel, or civil servants—are alive today. If, to quote L.P. Hartley’s line that ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, this story is a very recent past.
It is also worth adding that many of names cited in the article, whilst sharing views that would today be classed as homophobic, were writing in an official capacity and may have held markedly different views in private.
The article examines why the ban took so long to overturn, despite growing opposition that transcended political divides and increasingly vocal opposition groups, using new documents to demonstrate the entrenched position of the MOD.
The issue of change within the UK armed forces should also be seen against the backdrop of broader inclusion, specifically gender and ethnicity, with the process of change being equally difficult and lengthy.
The Independent Veterans LGBT Review puts a significant focus on security, first linked to the Cold War defection of Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. It was the MOD’s policy to discriminate against homosexuals that, the report acknowledges, made sexuality a security issue with personnel vulnerable to blackmail.
MOD’s stance
The 1991 decision by the UK government that homosexuality would no longer be a bar to high-level security clearances undermined the MOD’s stance, with the emphasis of the ban quickly going on maintaining ‘operational effectiveness and efficiency’ of the armed forces, a stance that was increasingly challenged and ultimately scrapped in January 2000.
The released files show that the MOD increasingly tried to justify a policy that was, even at the time, outdated and discriminatory. They also suggest that Ministers often deferred to armed forces personnel on important aspects of policy, and, even acknowledging that the weight of evidence for change was increasing, supported a ban in favour of military effectiveness and service regulations by commissioning review of policy which, whilst appearing impartial, sought to justify the status quo.
Despite wider societal attitudes, and the growing legal challenge, 1990s marked, as the documents show, a doubling down by the MOD on the homosexual bar, resulting in a long-drawn-out process involving both British and European courts.
More broadly, the article can be used to place the evolution of UK policy in an international context. By the time the UK removed its ban 2000, other nations had long since removed equivalent bans. These included Canada and Australia, both which lifted bans in 1992, and Israel and New Zealand, which lifted bans the following year.
The Belgian, Spanish, French and the Netherlands had no restrictions in place, although the German Bundeswehr, whilst permitting homosexual conscripts to serve as conscripts, continued to have limits on full-time personnel until 2000. The evolution of US policy was more fraught than the UKs.
The policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (DADT), issued in December 1993, implemented from February the following year, prohibited inquiries into closeted homosexual personnel, whilst still banning overt homosexual activity.
Following further campaigning, DADT was repealed in 2010, with homosexual personnel allowed to serve openly from 2011. The UK’s evolving policy between 1991 and 2000, like others, focused on the issue of effectiveness.
The UK MOD sought to maintain the line that homosexuality was ‘incompatible’ service life, because, it argued, homosexual behaviour could cause offence, polarise relationships, induce ill-discipline, and … damage morale and unit effectiveness’.
