A new study issued by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has revealed that despite assertions from the Pentagon that the military takes anti-gay harassment as seriously as harassment against women and other minorities, the actual policies and practices tell a different story.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue and don’t harass” is the official Pentagon position on gays and lesbians in the military; and it is in the “don’t harass” part of the policy that there is a breakdown, according to the new study, authored by Sharon Terman, a recent Stanford Law School graduate.

“‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is supposed to mean that it’s nobody’s business, but that’s not the way it happens,” said Anna Curren, a Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) board member who lives in San Diego. “The fact is homophobia is still a major thing, it’s not just in the military, it’s everywhere. It doesn’t work. Of course people are going to be harassed. Someone gets pissed at somebody and immediately turn around and call them a fag or start calling them names and deliberately outing people.”

In the 39-page report, Terman examined training and education about sexual-orientation harassment; how incidents were measured, reported and processed; and whether the military acted to prevent retaliation and ensure accountability.

Since the implementation of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, SLDN has been at the forefront of protecting the rights of gays and lesbians serving in the military, especially in the area of harassment and training.

“They did get a lot of legislation passed,” Curren said of SLDN. “So it was expanded from ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ to ‘Don’t Harass’, but the military has been very, very slow to implement anything on that. The chief role of SLDN now is to counsel people who are being harassed and being outed.”

Among the incidents reported in Terman’s study on how training and education on sexual-orientation discrimination had failed was the incident of a class on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” taught at Fort Campbell by an Army sergeant just months after the well-publicized, brutal murder of Private Barry Winchell, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat on the Fort Campbell base. Though little time had passed since that event, the sergeant called the class a “fag briefing” and repeatedly referred to gay soldiers during the briefing as “fags”. In another reported incident that took place during an Army equal opportunity training session in 2003, an instructor told anti-gay jokes throughout the session and, following the training, the unit commander asked “anyone who is gay to raise their hand if they felt offended by the jokes.”

In a 2003 survey, SLDN reported that most gay troops “indicate they are afraid to report harassment for fear of becoming the target of an anti-gay investigation or of worsening harassment.”

According to statistics provided by SLDN, more than 80 percent of discharges under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are “statement cases” – gay and lesbian service members who come out to their commanders. According to SLDN, anti-gay harassment is one of the main reasons why gay and lesbian service members decide to come out to their commanders.

Terman concludes her study by saying that the failure to prevent anti-gay abuse “results from the practical and conceptual problems with regulating harassment in a discriminatory institution.”

“I think that the brilliant conclusion of that study … is that the system cannot be fixed until ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is eliminated,” said Aaron Belkin, head of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities, in a recent phone interview. “As long as you have a culture that is dedicated through regulation and law to discrimination and to treating a whole class of people as second-class citizens … it is simply impossible to deal with the problem of harassment and abuse in such an environment.”