The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

Security consistently use the term “alternative lifestyle” as a euphemism for homosexuality. While this is an improvement over some of the terms State has employed for gay FSOs such as myself, it is still offensive. Admittedly, if you are not gay, les- bian, bisexual or transgendered, you may not understand why what sounds like a neutral expression is actually pejorative. But suppose I told a female colleague that she belonged to an “alternative gender,” or told an African-American officer that he belonged to an “alternative race,” or said that Jewish officers espouse an “alternative religion.” Then there is the term “lifestyle,” as in the “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” While seemingly innocent, this noun carries the inaccurate and hurtful implication that people choose to be gay—a concept at the very heart of the debate over gay, lesbian, bisexu- al and transgendered people’s rights. In fact, medical, psychiatric and psychological experts are in complete agreement that one’s sexual orienta- tion is fixed and, with rare exceptions, cannot be changed. Yes, there are groups of so-called “ex-gays,” who say that everyone has a choice. They insist that if you pray hard enough, you can permanently alter your sexual orientation. Well, believe me, I’ve done more praying than you can pos- sibly imagine, but I’m still gay. My only “choice” is whether to be who I am, and live openly in a faithful, com- mitted, monogamous, loving relation- ship with my domestic partner — or to pretend to be straight and to suffer severe mental and emotional distress. I realize that some readers may reject the very notion of gay rights, or believe that such discrimination is rare within the Foreign Service and is not really worth trying to extirpate, especially with all the other problems employees face. Still, regardless of what you believe on that score, it has been the practice with regard to other minorities to allow the oppressed group to decide what epithets are offensive when applied to it. In other words, it is not up to the dominant culture to dictate to the oppressed what terms are acceptable. Whether or not State Department officials intend to be neutral or even polite in using the term “alternative lifestyle,” it is deeply offensive to gay people. If officials in HR or DS have any doubts about this, I encourage them to contact the organization Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies for confirmation. Every Secretary of State since Warren Christopher has issued a state- ment declaring that the Depart- ment of State will not discriminate on the basis of “sexual orientation.” The Office of Civil Rights (formerly the Office of Equal Employment Oppor- tunity) uses that term, as well. GLIFAA made the elimination of the term “alternative lifestyle” one of its top requests to Secretary Rice soon after she arrived at State last year. We still hope she will issue a directive ban- ning its use and mandating the term “sexual orientation” in all departmen- tal correspondence and regulations. Will making that change eliminate bigotry against the gay community? Of course not. However, it is a good first step, one which will underscore the department’s commitment to treating all its employees fairly and equally. It is also, quite simply, the right thing to do. Bruce Knotts FSO Falls Church, Va. Iraq and Public Diplomacy Nearing the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the nation is awash in analysis. Since 9/11, public and cul- tural diplomacy alone has attracted 31 studies. In these, the cultural dimen- sion gets conspicuously short shrift. Yet if culture is removed from public diplomacy, nothing but spin remains — some call it “propaganda.” It was culture, not spin, that helped re-educate Germany and Japan and fed the Soviet implosion. Huntington and Nye discovered the dominant cultural issues in world affairs in the 1990s, a bit late. Looking at Iraq since 1945, a decent cultural diplomacy might have nur- tured the very elements we miss today. Those who remember the Near East missionary-educators and Baghdad College know about reser- voirs of good will. A modest cultural investment in Iraq begun in the 1940s might have produced, 60 years later, 2,000 or more sophisticated cultural interme- diaries in Iraq and the U.S. who would have understood each other’s languages and conceptual frame- works. With private support, as well as Fulbright, Defense Department and Education Act funding, new Iraq centers at U.S. universities would have broadened intellectual relations and stretched diplomatic and military minds. The network could have supported a rotating advisory panel of Iraq experts to monitor relations, brief outgoing officers, debate policy options, and suggest growth-areas. Younger scholars could have been recruited for longer- and shorter-term area assignments. State might have tried harder to defend its Arabists against recurrent slander. Instead, the U.S. stumbled into the very holocaust Saddam promised. When the Pentagon trashed State’s multivolume pre-invasion advice, it was clear that the U.S. political cul- ture was again trumping diplomacy. Advice about protecting Iraq’s cultur- al heritage, delivered in the Oval Office several months before invasion by a delegation of scholars, was simi- larly ignored. Early reactions to the impending invasion from some of our closest allies and from neighboring countries, especially Turkey, went 8 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 6 L E T T E R S u