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So being gay is not quite the same as being Irish. There are shadings; there are changes in the course of a lifetime. I know people who were once brazenly out and are now happily, heterosexually married -- as well as people who have gone in the opposite direction. Or, to generalize beyond genital sexuality to the realm of affection and loyalty: we all know men who are militantly straight yet reserve their deepest feelings for the male-bonded group -- the team, the volunteer fire department, the men they went to war with.
The problem for the military is not that discipline will be undermined by a sudden influx of stereotypically swishy gays. The problem is that the military is still a largely unisexual institution, with all that that implies about the possibility of homosexual encounters even among otherwise straight men. The traditionalists keep bringing up the "crowded showers," much like the dreaded unisex toilets of the ERA debate. But, somewhere deep in the sexual imagination, one has to wonder: Why do they have to have such crowded showers anyway?
By saying that gays are a definite, distinguishable minority that can easily be excluded, the military may feel better about its own presumptive heterosexuality. But can "gays" really be excluded? Do 18-year-old recruits really have a firm idea what their sexuality is? The military could deal with its sex crisis much more simply, and justly, by ceasing to be such a unisexual institution and letting women serve on an equal basis.
Perhaps we have all, "gays" and "straights," got as far as we can with the metaphor of gays as a quasi-ethnic group entitled to its own "rights." Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the potential to fall in love with, or just be attracted to, a person of the same sex is widespread among otherwise perfectly conventional people.
There would still be enormous struggle over what is "right" and "wrong," "normal" and "abnormal." But at least this would be a struggle that everyone -- gay or straight -- would have a stake in: those who think of themselves as gay because of who they are; those who think of themselves as straight because of who they might yet become. Quite apart from sex, all men would surely be better off in a world where simple acts of affection between men occasioned no great commentary or suspicion, where a hug would be a hug and not a "statement."