Film exposes 'canyon' between Washington and reality on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

The military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy has been making headlines lately, with LGBT activists calling on President Obama and Congress to end the anti-gay law, but a new documentary by filmmaker Johnny Symons, Ask Not suggests that the military's culture may need to change before LGBT soldiers will truly feel at home in the armed services. The film airs on the PBS series Independent Lens on June 14 on most public television stations. Check local listings in your area.

In one particularly powerful segment of Ask Not Symons follows a group of openly gay recent veterans as they embark on the Call to Duty Tour, a 2006 cross-country trek that advocated abolishing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The afternoon before a speaking engagement at the Military College of Georgia at North Georgia College and State University the members of the tour are milling around the campus when they spot a group of cadets marching past while chanting their cadences (rhythmic call-and-response chants). The cadets chant, "Oh, there are no Airborne Rangers at the Point/ 'cause they're all fucking fags wearing old Army rags / Oh, there are no Airborne Rangers at the Point."

Alex Nicholson, the founder of the Call to Duty Tour and a former Army linguist who was discharged under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," becomes visibly angry as the cadets pass by. One of the few positive features of the policy is that it prohibits anti-gay rhetoric in cadences.

"You come out here and it's a 110 percent different world than it is in Washington and you realize the gap between how close people in Washington think we are to lifting the ban and how close we actually are on the ground. It's a canyon. ... They're being trained to do this, that's what I'm saying. It's crazy. I think they should be called out for it," Nicholson says in the film.

The tour's co-director, and Nicholson's partner, Jarrod Chlapowski, tells him reporting to academy officials about the homophobic cadence would be futile. Chlapowski, trained as a Korean linguist, had an impressive career in the Army, receiving the Army Achievement Medal and the Army Commendation Medal, but he chose not to re-enlist because of the burden of living under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He tells Nicholson, "If there were many groups of us around the country saying, hey, this isn't pretty cool, maybe something would happen, but this is one instance right before an event where we're supposed to be speaking to these guys about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' anyways. It's pointless. ... You can't attack a singular incident because it's not going to change anything because these incidents are going to keep on happening no matter what you do. You have to attack the source. And that's what we're doing."

Symons, an out gay man, told Bay Windows that when he accompanied the Call to Duty Tour members to the campus he did not expect to capture such a blatantly homophobic incident on film.

"It seems that often when you're filming a documentary amazing things happen but you don't always have the camera on. And these guys were just marching by doing presumably what they do every day. They had no idea that Alex and Jarrod and the rest of the guys were gay men. They just thought they were regular folks watching them doing their cadences," said Symons. "And it's certainly fair to assume this is standard procedure. I had the sense as a director of, wow we've captured an amazing moment, and I also had the sense as a gay man, [of], what? This is awful. Here we have a blatant example of disregarding one of the few good things about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' You're not supposed to do that. Yet it's going on anyway."

Symons has made a career of turning his camera on gay subjects. His Emmy-nominated 2002 documentary Daddy and Papa focused on the social and political impact of gay fatherhood, and his 2006 documentary Beyond Conception looked at the relationship between a gay male couple and their lesbian surrogate as they conceived and bore a child.

When he decided to examine "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" he had little personal knowledge of the military, but working on the film proved to be a powerful crash course. In addition to following the Call to Duty Tour Symons also followed a gay San Francisco soldier as he prepared to leave for Iraq. The soldier, whose identity was kept anonymous, sent Symons video diaries detailing his experience in Iraq, which Symons includes in the film. Symons also documented the 2006 Right to Serve Campaign, a protest sponsored by the LGBT religious advocacy group Soulforce, in which protestors held sit-ins at military recruiting stations.

Symons said he met the San Francisco soldier, referred to in the film as "Perry," by chance when he attended a gay event and noticed Perry wearing fatigues. Perry agreed to let Symons film his departure from San Francisco and to take a camera with him overseas. At the start of the film Symons shows Perry at a good-bye brunch with a group of gay friends, many of whom express their disapproval or concern about Perry's decision to go back into the closet to join the Army. Perry tells them that he is motivated by a sense of duty to serve his country and make a difference in the Iraq war. Yet once he arrives he expresses frustration at having to hide his sexuality. He describes his efforts to alter his speech and his mannerisms and to invent stories about an ex-wife and a pregnant girlfriend to project a convincing image of a straight soldier. Later on Perry's sexuality is the least of his concerns; his main worries are making it back home alive and in one piece.