Uncle Sam Wants YOU

Huffington Post
KD Friedman
Uncle Sam Wants YOU

President Bush, despite growing protests from Members of Congress of both parties, is calling for 21,000 more troops to be sent to the Hot Zone of Iraq. Better duck for cover all you gays, lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuals, intersexed, outer-sexed, over-sexed, whichever-sexed people. Because you're next. Uncle Sam will soon want YOU.

With Iraq descending into new depths of violence and chaos everyday, the military is having a hard enough time recruiting enough folks to meet its current demands -- let alone new soldiers.
So what's the overstretched military to do? I think it's only a matter of time -- probably moments -- before they rescind the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, recognizing that our community is filled with dare-deviling, hard-bodied potential recruits, many of whom have a fetish for uniforms. Soon the Bush Administration will ignore the pressure from its right wing evangelical base and recognize the inevitable: gays and lesbians are the only ones left to serve.

I can see it now, the Administration will create a new "Department for the Recruitment of Gays" which will be led by propaganda czar Karen Hughes who will be redeployed from her current job working to change the image of Americans in the Middle East (we've seen how effective she's been). She'll send out terse one-page memos throughout the military with talking points that say, "Gay men and lesbians etc. are strong and they're good for morale, despite what we've been saying for years. Compliment the men, flirt with the women. Gays and lesbians are so desperate for mainstream acceptance, they'll gladly respond. And we need these people. So be nice."

Next thing you know, gays in the military will be all the craze. We'll see National Guard posters on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village and in the Castro in San Francisco. The Army will start recruiting men in gay bars, sending in hundreds of buff guys with buzz cuts, unbuttoned uniforms and Calvin Klein ribbed briefs, blowing whistles, dancing to house music singing the old theme song, "You can be all you can be in the Army." Or riffing on the new slogan, "We're Army strong... we've got army Schlongs." And for the lesbians, the Marines will remix their anthem so the "Halls of Montezuma" sounds like a Thievery Club version of "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge.

And who knows, maybe the military -with instructions from Karen Hughes-- will start a new television show, "Queer Eye for the Shiites," with the premise that the U.S. government will send in hordes of gay men with great taste, and butch lesbians with tool belts, to help with the reconstruction effort in Baghdad -- recognizing that they'll do a far more efficient and much cheaper job than Halliburton.

And then all the Republican candidates supporting the war - flip-flopping Mitt Romney among them - will proclaim, "Gay is the Way toward Victory."

So when "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" comes tumbling down (which it will because it's a ludicrously unfair, unworkable policy) gays and lesbians and straight folks alike should say, "Hey until this unnecessary, hopeless war is over, we don't want to be part of this macho club." And when the Bush Administration realizes they're throwing a war party that no one wants to attend, then maybe they'll finally bring all the troops home. Because they will have no choice.