Three years after Ben Koehler’s death, the Army regimented discrimination: Class I “aggressive” gay men were subject to general court-martial. Class II active but nonaggressive homosexuals could avoid court-martial by accepting a dishonorable discharge. Class III was the most pernicious. It gave the Army the power to oust a man through general or honorable discharge simply for professing or exhibiting homosexual “tendencies”—the same word Samuel Hudson had used in his closing argument in 1914.1
In this way, the government assumed broad authority to say what made a “real man,” for unacceptable “tendencies” ranged from physical traits (such as lack of body hair) to emotional ones (any apparent form of weakness, maybe even a penchant for flowers). Decisions were subjective and made without higher review. Meanwhile, in England, fifty-five years after Oscar Wilde’s undoing, a brilliant mathematician and codebreaker, Alan Turing, was convicted of homosexuality in 1952. He underwent chemical castration and committed suicide two years later.2
Ben Koehler had entered the Army to protect his country from external threats. In the end, for him, domestic attitudes about masculinity and sexuality proved the bigger threat.
“It’s bad for the military to kick good people out.” That is Sue Fulton’s number-one reason for inclusiveness in the armed services.3 Fulton graduated West Point in 1980 in the first coed class, served in Germany, came out as a lesbian in 1993, and began chairing the U.S. Military Academy Board of Visitors in 2015, the first woman and openly LGBTQ veteran to do so. Her message is simple: “If you’re willing to serve your country and you’re qualified, other factors don’t matter.”4
It took a while for other leaders to reach the same conclusion.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton altered the rules, beginning the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Ben may have been the first allegedly gay commander to be publicly vilified by the modern federal state, but the pain of many more people inspired Clinton’s change, including a woman who became an activist after her son was bludgeoned to death by other soldiers who thought he was gay.5 In 2010, Congress repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell at the urging of President Barack Obama, who said it was “time to recognize that sacrifice, valor and integrity are no more defined by sexual orientation than they are by race or gender, religion or creed.”6
In 2016, the military announced that transgender individuals would be allowed to serve in 2018, and Eric Fanning became secretary of the Army, the first openly gay person to head a branch of the U.S. military.7
Even the Boy Scouts changed its policies and its name. The organization founded to dilute the influence of women on boys announced in 2017 that it would begin accepting transgender boys.8 Then it invited girls and changed its name to “Scouts” before admitting, in 2020, to hundreds of sexual abuse cases.
Such reforms hardly ended LGBTQ discrimination in the military or in society. Although a majority of Americans support LGBTQ rights, President Donald Trump has appointed federal judges “with explicit, unabashed hostility to gay and transgender rights.”9 He also barred trans individuals from military service effective April 2019, despite a finding by the RAND National Defense Research Institute that service by trans individuals in foreign militaries had “no significant effect on cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness.”10
While violence and suicides involving members of the LGBTQ community have increased, sexual harassers and their enablers have started to face serious consequences. In 2016 came the removal of a university president (Ken Starr, Baylor University) for neglecting claims about sexual abuse by other men, and the resignation of a news executive following reports of his own abuses (the late Roger Ailes, Fox News). Then the dam of denial broke in late 2017 under the weight of the #MeToo series of allegations, and the resignation, firing, or suspension of powerful men in Hollywood, New York, or somewhere in between became a regular occurrence.11 Along with the increased publicity given to women’s—and men’s—allegations of sexual predation came the defensive claim by some, notably Harvey Weinstein, that they were being falsely accused.
The word “falsity” is a big blanket in this context, covering both instances when the accused admits to physical contact with the claimant but says the contact was consensual, and situations when the accused denies any contact at all—as Ben Koehler did.12
As Secretary of War Garrison said in 1913, intentionally false accusations are “reprehensible,” but anyone influenced by the myth that women are less trustworthy than men in matters of sexuality must reckon with the coordinated, premeditated “spite work” by sixteen men on Plum Island over a century ago.13 Nothing alleged by a #MeToo accused against his female accuser(s) comes close to such mendacity.14
Today, when cases of male-female sexual misconduct are reported, whether one’s instinct is to believe the alleged victim or wrongdoer often depends on whether one sympathizes with patriarchal norms. Yet personal and sociocultural attitudes about gender and sexuality are a poor way for cases to be decided. In an ideal world, each and every person would be treated as an individual, free from stereotypes and preconceptions. In an American courtroom, even a military tribunal, the Constitution requires it.15
Since the groundbreaking work of Catharine MacKinnon, it has been recognized that sexual assault and sexual harassment may be more about power than sex, and that for sexual abusers “it is precisely the power imbalance that’s erotic.”16 Tarana Burke, founder of #MeToo, calls “power and privilege” the “building blocks of sexual violence.”17 Priests have power over altar boys, just as studio heads have power over actresses, which brings one back to the real issue underlying the Koehler case: the definition of manhood. What if the definition was not linked to power—or to the “warrior” role?18
In Angry White Men, Michael Kimmel writes compassionately of American men who “are feeling cheated, unhappy, and unfulfilled,” men who “bought the promise of self-made masculinity” only to experience its “foundation . . . all but eroded.”19
Kimmel’s tone turns critical, however, when he writes of the reaction by some: “The game has changed, but instead of questioning the rules, they want to eliminate the other players . . . they fall back upon those same traditional notions of manhood—physical strength, self-control, power—that defined their fathers’ and their grandfathers’ eras, as if the solution to their problem were simply ‘more’ masculinity.”
Kimmel argues that rather than allowing men to pass on to their children “the same tired and impossible ideals of manliness and the same sense of entitlement,” we must recognize the problem “and act both to defuse and to diffuse the anger.”
Kimmel wrote his words before the election of Donald Trump, who conducts himself as though he believes that “more masculinity” is just what the nation needs.
Trump’s rationale to ban trans individuals from the armed services was the same disproven one used against African-Americans, women, and gays—that they could not do the job and would pose a distraction.20 The Trump administration has also reversed civil rights policies and rules intended to reduce discrimination against members of the growing LGBTQ community in such essential areas as access to health care.21 As Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman, wrote in 2019, “There are times—especially since 2016—when all of our progress feels very much at risk. There are times when it feels as if Stonewall were still going on and the battle that began that night can still be lost.”22
Irrational fear of sexual predation underlies some of the antipathy directed at trans people. A trans high school girl lamented that those who sought to ban her from the women’s room had created a “fictional being”: a boy masquerading in female trappings who secretly wanted to molest girls and gawk at their nude bodies.23
The major said to have fondled penises at Fort Terry was also a fictional being created by the fears and self-interest of others. The tragic irony was that the real Ben Koehler presented the sort of egalitarian officer that Army higher-ups said they wanted, but the definition of “desirable men” needed to change for that to happen. For Wood to complain about a surfeit of autocratic officers was like a trainer teaching a dog to kill and then expressing surprise that the dog did not lay down with lambs.
As Frank Bruni wrote in an essay, neither British nor Mexican men surveyed in a recent study “described a [male] gender construct as musky, musty and unyielding as the one that Americans detailed”—a “Man Box, constricted by a concept of manhood that includes aggression, hypersexuality, and utter self-sufficiency.”24
If the aggressive, muscular definition of manhood ascended as recently as the late 1800s and early 1900s, it can be retired and replaced—as many men have already done with it. Today’s men are “less likely to marry and have children, and when they do, they spend a lot more time with those kids than their dads could’ve imagined. They spend more time cooking and cleaning, and worry about work-life balance and spiritual fulfillment.”25 In the political sphere, 2019–20 saw the first serious presidential bid by an openly gay man, Pete Buttigieg, who once thought his sexual identity was the “one thing that might have meant that it would be better not to have any aspirations related to politics,” but who came to believe it “could be the very thing that anchors the moral and emotional purpose of this entire campaign.”26
In the study cited by Bruni, 75 percent of 1,300 men between 18 and 30 said “they’re supposed to act strong even when scared or nervous,” and 63 percent said “they’re exhorted to seize sex whenever available.” While those figures are high and troubling, many men did not agree with the statements.
Bruni observed that the Man Box has consequences not only for other people and the country but also for those inside it, for the study found that “men who registered narrow, clichéd instructions about manhood were more likely to act out in self-destructive ways, such as substance abuse, and in outwardly destructive ones, such as online bullying.”
Perhaps it is not only justice to others that comes from trying to judge each person as an individual but also justice to the self.27
The Man Box was being constructed in 1913 and 1914 when Worcester and his “clique” decided they did not want to keep saluting Benjamin Koehler, and today, the target from inside the Man Box has expanded. While harassment and violence are still directed at individuals, anger is also directed at the institutions and laws that protect individual rights.28 Yet would anyone want to be tried by a court as ruled by stereotypes and manipulation, and lacking in protections for the individual, as the tribunal that convicted Ben Koehler?29
Gross injustice ended Ben and Sophia’s usefulness to the Army, and changes in methods of war ended the perceived usefulness of Fort Terry to the nation. The United States had bought Plum Island to defend against a foreign foe that never showed up. After World War II, the government decided to use the island to fight another unseen enemy: germs. Fort Terry closed and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center came into being, operated by the Departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security (since 2001) with a focus on preventing hoof and mouth disease from entering the country’s meat supplies.30 Take a ferry across Long Island Sound and you can see the lab buildings from the starboard deck shortly after departing Orient Point. (While you are at it, imagine scared soldiers rowing a boat the same distance to avoid testifying.)
On the east side of the island, the buildings Ben Koehler worked so hard to improve sit decaying, as the federal government contemplates what to do with Plum Island, where more than 220 species of birds have been counted and twenty-five natural communities identified.31 A coalition of more than 105 organizations seeks to preserve at least 80 percent of the island and open parts for limited public access when the lab moves to Kansas (scheduled for 2023). Others have golf greens and profits in mind, but the coalition contends that the values of history, nature, and public trust ought to prevail.
If the island, or a large part of it, becomes a preserve, visitors could see and smell the sea as their forebears did, imagine the place when Native Americans came to grow corn, chart the stages of the country, perhaps crawl into a tent on the old parade ground and hear waves breaking as soldiers once did. They could learn about Long Island Sound forts and the changing nature of war. They could be introduced to Ben Koehler and learn of the bumpy road toward inclusiveness in the armed services.
Of course, there would have to be refugia off-limits to people—for seals and endangered piping plovers, roseate terns, and other species that rely on the island, much of which has been relatively undisturbed by humans for decades. These creatures need their space away from us. Granting that space, and telling people why, would be consistent with the Ben Koehler story, encouraging respect for what is different—like a bachelor in an era committed to marriage or women who decide not to marry and procreate.32
History buffs think the remains of Fort Terry deserve restoration. So does Ben Koehler’s reputation. In 1915, Representative Sloan proclaimed to his colleagues, “Justice may not forever sleep. The time may come when this House will be the forum to rectify this manifest wrong.” That time has come. Ben Koehler should be pardoned out of respect for his service and suffering, and all the men and women who have ever been vilified, victimized, or dehumanized on account of seeming different.