Nathaniel Frank

Hearing the news that Dharun Ravi's sentence would be 30 days rather than the maximum 10 years (with deportation still possible but unlikely), I experienced a wave of relief that almost felt as if I knew the perpetrator of the anti-gay spying crime (I didn't). The question of...

Now that Obama has completed his evolution on same-sex marriage (nearly -- he still gives states a pass, echoing the states'-rights argument that justified segregation), Mitt Romney's position on LGBT equality is under new scrutiny. Indeed, Obama's morally courageous (if also politically calculated) announcement that he now supports...

The Blunt amendment, the bill that would have allowed employers and insurers to deny health care coverage for services that are contrary to their "religious beliefs or moral convictions," has created a predictable rift between the left and the right, with each side trading election year sound bites....

When Cynthia Nixon, who became famous for her role on Sex and the City, recently told The New York Times that being a lesbian was, for her, "a choice," her words lit up the LGBT listservs, angering many who believe that Nixon is giving comfort to the enemy....

For years, defenders of anti-gay exclusion in the military have claimed that equal treatment was incompatible with a strong military. For nearly as many years, researchers pointed out that there was no evidence to support this claim that letting gays serve openly would harm cohesion, recruitment, or readiness,...

For years the religious right has done all it could to cast gay people as existing outside the family. It's part of a messaging strategy to define them as shifty, rootless individualists who threaten precious institutions that symbolize group cohesion. But in anointing themselves the champions of "family values" and...

When Rick Santorum said in the GOP debate that he'd reinstate the ban on openly gay military service, it raised some serious questions. Not only did Santorum stand by as the audience booed an active-duty gay soldier's question, but he seemed not to understand a thing about actual...

Today marks the official end of the eighteen-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy and, in a sense, the end of a 233-year-old American shame, as formal anti-gay discrimination in our armed forces is older than the nation itself. As someone who worked to end this policy for more than a...

As I step away from ten years of researching and speaking about "don't ask, don't tell," questions swirl about the fate of a policy that mandates deception in the name of morale; that has wasted the talents of thousands of badly needed personnel while filling shortfalls with ex-convicts and drug...

As a Pentagon working group studies how to end discrimination against gay troops, one of its focuses is the military's broader experience with diversity: how has it met the challenge of transcending old barriers and replacing them with a commitment to putting the best and brightest -- not just the...

As Elena Kagan has emerged a frontrunner for President Obama's nomination to the Supreme Court, the right wing's opposition playbook has not been updated in decades. But the world has changed around it. This creates a test to see if the rest of us--those who live in the real world...

In announcing today that it would make it harder to fire gay troops under existing policy, the Pentagon took a major step toward ending DADT. While the President and Pentagon could have gone further, for instance halting all discharges by executive order or allowing only two-star generals to initiate a...

As the Pentagon begins its year-long study of the impact of ending "don't ask, don't tell," the unaffordable talent loss among gay troops continues to pile up. An Infantry company commander and West Point graduate who deployed three times to Iraq and Afghanistan and received three bronze stars for his...

To a degree that has caught even longtime advocates off guard, the substantive debate about whether to end "don't ask, don't tell" has rather suddenly been resolved. The impassioned statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, the first sitting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to call for an end to...

Remember the poll taken of enlisted personnel asking them if they felt like invading Iraq? The one that political leaders and military brass used to decide if they should pull the trigger or not? No, because there wasn't one. Sure, the military takes the temperature of its troops to help...

For years now a culture war has raged between liberal rationalists and religious dogmatists over whether homosexuality should be treated equally by civil law. Having lost ground in recent years as young people grow up in a world far more familiar with the banalities of what it really means to...

Congressman Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida, has just introduced a bill with 27 co-sponsors to allow gay service members to testify openly at Congressional hearings about "don't ask, don't tell." Rep. Hastings authored the bill to ensure that the national debate will not be stacked against those most affected by...

The most significant thing about the new, anti-gay "Manhattan Declaration" is not that scores of Christians are against gay rights. It's that, recognizing they're on the wrong side of history, they tie themselves in knots insisting they're not anti-gay. And in doing so, they reveal the intellectual and moral...

If I were New York State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., I would not have given that interview to the New York Times yesterday about gay marriage. Of course, Díaz may not care about being morally or intellectually consistent. He may care only about appeasement -- of his constituents with a...

How does Obama the President compare to Obama the candidate on gay rights? It's no secret that GLBT advocates have expressed disappointment and frustration with decisions by the White House to avoid pressing for gay rights during the first year of the administration. No executive order to halt the discharges...