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Two gay British sailors spoke in Washington this week to buttress claims made in a new study that openly gay soldiers who served in multinational units with American forces in Iraq did not harm unit cohesion.

Lt. Rolf Kurth and Lt. Cmdr. Craig A. Jones, both of the British Royal Navy, served alongside American troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and shared their experiences in the British armed services and what military life is like where they were allowed to be open about their sexual orientation. The U.K. armed forces have allowed gays to serve openly since 2000.

 Jones, 34, of Brighton, England, said he became aware of the policy change when he was an operations officer aboard HMS Fearless in 2000. He said the announcement released him “from the wearying requirement to guard the detail of my life for fear of repercussion.

“But amidst this feeling of release I was presented with the dilemma of how to react,” Jones said. “For me, secrecy and a lack of openness goes against the grain of the enduring friendships we enjoy in service life, and I had never been comfortable with maintaining economy of truth.”

Kurth, 37, of London, who served as an openly gay officer in joint operations with U.S. forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said the policy change was a “resounding non-event” and added that the integration of gay men and lesbians in the U.K. armed services has been “a remarkable success.”

“I can’t help but think that many of our most senior officers will look back and wonder why so much time, effort and legal expense was committed to the case against lifting the ban,” Kurth said.

Both men described the cantankerous debates between gay activists and senior military commanders prior to the lifting of the ban in 2000.

“Let me say from the outset that this policy has been a total success, implemented within stride, bringing considerable benefits to our team, not least by recruiting and retaining the highest quality of personnel available in an increasingly competitive employment market,” Jones said. “This was a policy born in a storm and implemented by obligation rather than because it had been commonly accepted in the highest echelons of the U.K. military.”

The European Court of Human Rights settled the matter of gays serving openly in the U.K. armed forces on Jan. 12, 2000. Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities (now Palm Center) in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, released a study, “Multinational military units and homosexual personnel,” that concluded openly gay soldiers did not compromise unit cohesion during Operation Iraqi Freedom. - A summarised abstract pertaining to NATO homosexual personnel policy is included on proud2serve.

“We found through academic investigation and analysis that the presence of acknowledged gay service members clearly has not compromised unit cohesion or operational effectiveness among U.S. military personnel,” Belkin said. “In fact, all of our evidence comes from situations where the U.S. military ordered American units to serve with these openly gay allied soldiers and officers in multinational units, such as those recently deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Authored by CSSMM’s assistant director Geoffrey Bateman and Sameera Dalvi of the University of Southampton (U.K.), the study found through documented case studies, American service members interacted and worked successfully with openly gay personnel from foreign militaries. They also note that when conflicts arose, they were “minor” and “resolved successfully.”

Both men noted that by speaking about the policies of the U.K. armed services, neither was representing the U.K. government or the Royal Navy. And the sailors were unwilling to make any comment or judgment regarding the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the U.S. military. But Jones said that there were “no issues” between he and his American colleagues and Kurth echoed Jones’ sentiment calling his sexual orientation a “non-event.”

When Jones came out in 2000, he said “reactions were individual, some were immediately supportive” and others “were very unsure of how to react.”

“Over the 18 months that followed the issue of my sexuality was ever-present, not because of any incident or event, but because people take time to adjust, it was a process of education at the pace that each individual found comfortable,” Jones said.

Kurth described his “coming out” experience as a painful one. At the time, he was a senior naval officer in Hong Kong in 1997 where he was second in command of a ship. He was discharged within 24 hours but readmitted to the Royal Navy three years ago. He described his original dismissal as “history” noting that he would not “want to trawl through the gallons of spilt milk.”

“The important point in this story is that I am now sitting before you once again in uniform,” Kurth said. “On a personal note, since the overturn of the ban on gay men and women serving, I have rejoined the Navy.

“Although only one man, when the navy discharged me, they lost a man in whom they had invested seven years of expensive training from a branch seriously short of people of my seniority. Think of the significant contribution that all the other gay men and women who were discharged from the armed forces could have made, had they not been discharged.”

Originally published in the Washington Blade online (13 Feb 04)