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Militarizing US Homonormativities: The Making of “Ready, Willing, and Able” Gay Citizens

This article focuses on the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) repeal movement in order to develop more nuanced strategies for analyzing the entanglement of US sexual politics with war and militarization. To this end, I revisit the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s 2007 decision to name Eric Alva, a gay Latino marine who lost his leg in the most recent Iraq war, as its official spokesperson against the military’s ban on open homosexuality. Through an examination of the HRC’s publicity materials and Alva’s public appearances, I demonstrate how activists negotiate racialized and sexualized notions of normalcy and national belonging to transform the previously pathological homosexual into the respectably gay citizen-soldier. At the same time, however, I am attentive to the ways in which Alva’s body, marked as nonwhite and disabled, disrupts the repeal movement’s investment in military masculinities organized around unwavering patriotism and unencumbered individualism. Rather than simply denouncing anti-DADT organizing for its assimilatory tendencies, this article asks what might be gained by looking more closely at how these projects unfold. By exploring the unintended effects of the repeal movement, I illustrate how a figure like Alva can open space for radically reorienting public conversations about sexuality, military service, and US citizenship.