of whom have opened their minds and hearts to get to know us. Some have been mentors, junior and senior enlisted and fellow officers. We train, fight, bleed, and die the same way and for the same things.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
BEEN THERE: History, Witness, and Some People We Might Never Have Known
Alison Nordström
From the time of their invention, photographs have been appreciated and understood as an undeniable record of what has been. They looked like truth, and possessed what Roland Barthes saw as an inexorable connection to the past, even at the moment of their making in the present. We can, Barthes claimed, “never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.” This may be true of most photographs, but it is especially the case with Gays in the Military, which offers us both reality and the past with the conscious intention of doing so. Vincent Cianni, its author and photographer, has crafted this book as an exercise in witnessing and truth telling. It is already an important historical document.
There are two kinds of portraits in this book and both stand as evidence—on many levels—of what has been. The book leads with an iconic full-page frontispiece of a man in camouflage-patterned fatigues, his back to the camera, his individuality hidden. The image represents, as we shall see, all of the people whom Cianni will introduce to us in the pages that follow: men and women who served in the United States military at a time when revealing their true natures would have cost them their careers, pensions, and other benefits, and caused their expulsion from the group to which they had pledged to be part. The opening image is followed by old-fashioned formal portraits of young men: uniformed sailors in a symmetrical and precise group identified as the May 1962 Recruit Training cohort of Great Lakes, Illinois, and a studio portrait of a young navy lieutenant in dress uniform, staring self-consciously into the camera; his mustache does not disguise his youth but can be read, perhaps, as an effort to affect maturity, bravado, and individual style. These are the photographs one might send home to one’s parents, or see published as grainy offset filler in the back of a hometown paper. We can feel the bored indifference of the commercial photographers who must have produced these generic images day after day.
Alan Steinman’s historical essay is preceded by three black-and-white photographs and followed by two small snapshots, less completely generic perhaps than the commercial portraits that begin the book’s sequence, but no less predictable. American soldiers have carried cameras, with and without permission, since the Spanish-American War, and the American culture of the camera that fascinated all of society in the 19th century has persisted in parallel in the military up to the present day. A young man in uniform sitting casually, legs akimbo, on the launch door of an ICBM capable of killing millions; a group of four women, dressed so androgynously in fatigues and Vietnam-era flop hats that their sex is almost indistinguishable, stand casually, arms around each others’ shoulders in front of a plane; a young soldier poses with a rifle; a young man stands next to a poster for the 1936 melodrama in San Francisco, bewigged and dressed awkwardly and unconvincingly in some vaguely period female costume that could be drag, could be youthful hijinks, or could be both. (It is, in fact, a Halloween costume.) In these images, only the uniform differentiates the subjects from any other young people of their time. As is common in snapshots, the people depicted acknowledge the presence of the camera. They are performing the familiar tropes of being photographed that we all know: “buddies,” “soldier,” “costume party.” These photographs serve to connect us as viewers to the culture of the military. It’s not, the pictures suggest, very different from our own, yet the placement of these images in the context of the book makes them mysterious. We scan the formation of recruits, wondering which of them has a secret he must not share.
The mundane vernacular images stand in contrast to the series of environmental portraits by Vincent Cianni that constitute the core of the book and support the ambitious documentary project of which the pictures are part. As the sequence begins, the first few images are not actual portraits at all, yet they are as biographical and revealing as any well-limned visage. There is a homemade reliquary, shrine-like in its intimacy and contents: a snapshot of men in uniform, foreign coins, military medals, Air Force insignia, and a few heavily armed toy soldiers. The childishly poignant memory box is followed by an image of a cluttered porch that could be anywhere in America, complete with Coca-Cola crate, rocking chairs, and peacefully sleeping dog; a windowsill displaying an owl, an angel, and a houseplant. We are invited to stare into these intimately framed domestic settings and to seek out the consciousness that created them. They train our gaze to look directly at the faces that will appear on the subsequent pages.
In most of the photographs, the subject is a person. Occasionally it is two people. In several instances, at the start of the sequence they stand in shadow, turn away from the camera, or otherwise obscure their faces, a sad necessity for some when the images were made. One couple is represented only by their youthful tattooed legs. These are ordinary people, male and female, black and white, old and young, whom we might see anywhere; yet there is a vital presence to their depiction that makes us curious. Despite their immediacy, the fact that they are photographs permits us to look harder and more closely than we would ordinarily dare to. Unabashed, we try to make out hidden faces, to see through the shadows. When we can, we stare into eyes that seem to look back at us. When we see faces, the expressions are ambiguous, mingling defiance, vulnerability, curiosity, innocence, and awareness. About all of them, there is a curious intensity that indicates both the collaborative complicity between photographer and subject and the seriousness with which the participants treat the moment in which the image is being made and preserved.
We do not generally pay much attention to the act of photographing. It is usually the product of the act that interests us, the images that preserve reality and what has been. Yet it is worth noting that every individual depicted in this book is engaged in doing something special: posing for the photographer. This is an act so familiar, it usually goes unnoticed, but in Cianni’s project, the act of making the photograph itself is significant and triumphant. These ordinary people, who had been forced to hide and lie because of homophobic prejudice and archaic received conventions, are able, with this act of presenting themselves to the camera, to say, “Here I am.”
The genre of documentary photography embraces a long tradition of portraiture. Lewis Hine’s child mill worker turning from her loom to face the man with the camera, or Walker Evans’s sharecroppers collaborating with strangers to reveal and record their lives, are real to us today because they were photographed by people concerned with telling us the truth. Those photographs, like Cianni’s, make us witness to injustice, while personalizing and putting an accessible individual face on what might easily be dismissed as an incomprehensibly vast social issue or somebody else’s concern. The images are collaborations; the photographers’ skill and compassion empowers the people he photographs. They are also collective; brought together in this book, the people in Cianni’s photographs stand shoulder to shoulder to assert themselves as a group.
While the portraits of Gays in the Military are what first engage us, this project is much more than an assembly of faces. It is the accompanying texts and the sequence of images as a whole that make this book historically significant. Begun in the period of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and completed in the transitional months after the policy’s repeal, the interviews set down the stories of men and women who were forced to keep their essential selves secret from their comrades in arms. In recording their fear, isolation, humiliation, and anger, the book helps us understand the imperative rights of all to dignified selfhood, and it records the damage done to us all when such rights are denied. Someday people born long after these times will turn to this book to learn what it was like to be gay and in the military before things changed, as we look now at mid-twentieth century images of racially segregated busses, restrooms, water fountains, and restaurants, with sad wonder that the world could have been like that back then, and a happy conviction that things have finally begun a slow movement toward the good. This book marks
