WIKILEAKS:
PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence officer responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military cables and a video of a helicopter attack that killed two photographers and an Iraqi citizen, is gay. You may have already known this.
Queerty has pointed out the cute detail that Manning snuck the files out on a burned Lady Gaga CD (sigh) and Gawker has speculated vaguely that Manning’s being queer in an institution that specifically outlaws the open discussion of possibly being queer unless it’s to turn someone in to your supervisor had something to do with his leaking the documents. And now the exhaustive NYT profile of Manning claims to reveal how his “early struggles” – namely, how hard it was growing up gay – may have influenced his decision to give classified government documents to the public.
The New York Times article stops short of making any sweeping conclusions – probably to its credit – mostly it wonders if the isolation and loneliness that Manning felt in the military as a gay man who joined up largely to help pay for college was what made it so attractive to fall in with a close-knit group of Cambridge-based “hackers” whom he didn’t have to hide anything from. It’s entirely possible this is true. Short of asking Manning himself about how his life experiences and emotional state figured into his decision, there’s no way we can really know.
But the easier question to think about, and one that the NYT didn’t address, is how a gay/lesbian/trans/bisexual/queer person is situated here in terms of politics instead of personality – what it means to betray orders in order to obey a moral principle when you’re a second-class citizen, when you’re someone who’s already been betrayed by the institution you belong to.
In a lot of ways, and without setting off any right-wing fundamentalist panic attacks about the end of the world as we know it, gay people are the perfect candidates for Wikileaks-style exposes. We’re a minority population that’s not allowed the same rights and privileges as the majority, and we’re constantly reminded of it as we navigate our daily lives; the indignities we’re forced to undergo as citizens and as human beings are innumerable. Many of us identify as outsiders, as subculture – the US government, Cosmopolitan, HBO, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Pentagon, and the PTA have all made it very clear that they don’t care about us, and so speaking generally, queers really don’t care about them either.
This could be said for a lot underserved and disenfranchised groups – a major difference, though, is that queers aren’t always visible to the naked eye. With some exception, gay people don’t always bear obvious identity markers, which means that while institutional and systemic discrimination means that mainstream corporations and government offices are less likely to hire and promote minorities of any kind, it’s possible for some gay people to slip past. For instance, it’s possible for a gay man to be given a position where he has access to the classified information of an organization that openly and aggressively discriminates against him. It’s like a Gay Revolutionary’s Cookbook recipe for sabotage and exposure. When you look at it this way, really, what did they think would happen?
When soldiers under DADT are already required to lie about their identity or conversely expose their friends in order to satisfy a wildly conflicting narrative of ethics and honor, how can we act surprised when one of them seems to experience some ethical contradictions of his own?
Looking at DADT and the Bradley Manning Wikileaks scandal together, they seem so perfectly dovetailed that it’s hard to believe something on this scale hasn’t happened before. At its most basic level, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell asks soldiers to lie to their fellow soldiers and superior officers while maintaining a strict moral standard of honor and loyalty in every other respect – unless of course they find out about the lie that their comrades are required to tell, in which case they have to turn their friends and comrades in despite the strict moral standard of honor and loyalty. None of this should ever compromise the intense patriotic dedication they feel towards the US or the army. When soldiers under DADT are already required to lie about their identity or conversely expose their friends in order to satisfy a wildly conflicting narrative of ethics and honor, how can we act surprised when one of them seems to experience some ethical contradictions of his own?
Are we really that shocked that someone affected by it alternately kept an entire personality under wraps and then hemorrhaged sensitive information? It’s not that this leak was some kind of karmic repercussion for the inequity of DADT, not exactly; it’s more of a chickens-come-home-to-roost moment of watching something come full circle, something ugly and complicated and ethically confusing being born from something, well, ugly, and complicated, and ethically indefensible.
PFC Bradley Manning is facing the possibility of life in prison, and the Pentagon has demanded that Wikileaks remove the information that Manning released to them. DADT is still on Step 6,742 of the possibly endless repeal process, and there is no word even on when we will get word on the next phase. There’s one video out there of a military helicopter attack that kills three innocent people.
Maybe those are three tangentially related facts, or maybe they’re part of a bizarre sociopolitical jigsaw that someday, in the wide open future when some of these facts aren’t so painfully close, will make a coherent picture.
