Don't Ask, Don't Tell

[jane_elliot]

I just finished a DADT fic that, like most of the genre, was about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (the rest of the genre, meanwhile, seems to be based around how much DADT made a gay soldier's life utter hell and tend to be depressing; I rarely read those).  It was a pretty good fic and I might have recced it, except for one thing: the author

Comments

[love_bug_54]

Thank you for this. I was in the US Navy in the 70s and I vividly recall a friend of mine (also in the Navy) being questioned by the Naval Investigative Service about a sailor she had dated some months earlier. He was suspected of being a homosexual and yes, they did ask her if they ever slept together. She was so intimidated by them that she didn't dare lie to protect him -- in other words, they never had sex -- but she felt awful about it afterward. She never suspected he was gay and liked him as a friend but he had been sent on to his next duty station so they lost touch. We never did know what happened to him. So yes, prior to DADT it was that bad

[jane_elliot]

I get the impression that DADT stories are a lot like the anatomically-improbable artwork in modern comic books. It's not that there aren't resources out there on how to draw people who look like, you know, *people*, but a lot of comic books artists learned to draw by copying comic books and each one made the muscles (and breasts) just a tiny bit bigger and the waists just a tiny bit smaller. After fifty years of this, the muscles (and breasts) are so big and the waists so small that the characters make Barbie look frumpy. Not to mention the fact that female superheros don't have enough room in their torsos for vital organs

[gwendolynflight]

Vital organs are for the weak!

I've never run across a fic in which DADT wasn't a step forward, but then SGA usually ignores such things as rules with gleeful abandon.

[jane_elliot]

I hit a couple of DADT fics in the SGA fandom that are the reason why I tend to avoid DADT fics these days:) Still, they're not all bad, especially the ones that are all about the repeal and less about making the implementation scary oppressive.