Queers and Nat Security

U.S.
National Security Culture: From Queer Psychopathology to Queer Citizenship

Author(s): Hamilton Bean
Source: QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking , Vol. 1, No. 1, “Chelsea Manning's Queer
Discontents“ (Spring 2014), pp. 52-79
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.1.1.0052
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(((
U.S. National Security Culture: From Queer
Psychopathology to Queer Citizenship
Hamilton Bean
ABSTRACT
The case of Chelsea Manning represents both continuity and change in the history of
U.S. national security culture. Manning’s stated motives are similar to the motives of
other national security leakers; however, pre-court-martial media discourse (June 2010 –
January 2012) often emphasizes Manning’s sexual orientation, implying that queer
psychopathology uniquely explains her decision to provide classified material to
WikiLeaks. Such commentary reflects and reinforces the persistent institutional and
cultural myth that homosexuality endangers national security. Manning’s case,
however, suggests opportunities for the development of queer citizenship within U.S.
national security affairs.
Daniel Ellsberg leaked the top-secret “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times
in 1971. The leak exposed presidential deception concerning the Vietnam War,
thereby undermining public support for the War and hastening its end.1 The leak
also catalyzed a series of events, including the Watergate burglary, that led to the
resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Commentators have under-
standably drawn parallels between Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning. The Guard-
ian’s Glenn Greenwald wrote, “Those wanting the Army Private [Manning]
imprisoned are afraid to condemn the virtually identical acts of Daniel Ells-
berg.”2 The Christian Science Monitor’s Anna Mulrine asked in a headline: “Is
Bradley Manning the new Ellsberg?”3 Ellsberg has, in fact, become one of Man-
ning’s most vocal defenders. He famously asserted in a March 2011 interview with
CNN, “I was that young man; I was Bradley Manning.”4 Ellsberg simply may have
Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Hamilton Bean, “U.S. National Security Culture: From
Queer Psychopathology to Queer Citizenship,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1.1 (2014): 52–
79. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved.
52

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U.S. National Security Culture ) 53
meant to convey his sympathy and support for Manning; however, one objective
of this article is to explore the meaning and accuracy of Ellsberg’s statement in
order to contextualize pre-court-martial media discourse (June 2010 –January
2012) concerning the significance of Manning’s sexual orientation.5
Comparing the Ellsberg and Manning cases reveals the persistent cultural
assumption that homosexuality represents a form of psychopathology. This
assumption, in turn, underwrites the enduring myth that homosexuality pro-
motes the divulging of state secrets.6 In particular, Ellsberg and Manning share
membership within a U.S. national security culture that has long depicted
homosexuality as a destabilizing and dangerous condition. The Nixon adminis-
tration attempted to label Ellsberg a homosexual in order to discredit him,7 and
pre-court-martial media portrayals of Manning often implied that her leaks were
caused by queer psychopathology—an ill-defined condition that presumably
makes homosexuals prone to disloyalty and emotional instability, and, therefore,
more likely to spill secrets.8 The Nixon administration failed in its efforts to
attribute queer psychopathology to Ellsberg. In Manning’s case, however, both
right- and left-leaning commentators succeeded in drawing public attention to
Manning’s sexual orientation. For example, American Conservative Daily’s Gene
Lalor declared, “Being gay is what led him [Manning] to turn traitor and attempt
to embarrass and undermine his country by feeding secret documents to another
lowlife, Julian Assange.”9 In a profile in the New York Times, Ginger Thompson
wrote that Manning’s “social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality
under [the U.S. Army’s policy of] ‘don’t ask, don’t tell [DADT].’”10 Such
commentary deflected attention away from problematic U.S. national security
policies and practices that Manning’s leaks exposed.
Attempts to identify a causal connection between sexual orientation and
national security leaking are both misguided and futile. Manning’s rhetoric is
filled with ambiguity, contradiction, and outright confusion, thereby undermin-
ing commentators’ preferred framings of her leaks. Deterministically attributing
these leaks to the emotional distress that Manning suffered due to homophobic
abuse perpetuates American culture’s longstanding “amputation of personal
complexity into categories of simple identity.”11 Manning’s rhetoric instead
invites audiences to consider the “queerness” of her case.12 Categorical indeter-
minacy and potentiality lie at the heart of queer theorizing; thus, analysis of
Manning’s rhetoric supports a second objective of this article, namely, to identify
opportunities for the development of queer citizenship within U.S. national
security affairs.13
With these two objectives in mind (contextualization of pre-court-martial
media discourse concerning the significance of Manning’s sexual orientation and

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54 ( Hamilton Bean
identification of opportunities for the development of queer citizenship), the

structure of this article is as follows. It first outlines the heteronormative history
of U.S. national security culture. The section describes how interrelated institu-
tional and cultural assumptions about the nature of homosexuals, which arose in
early 20th century, have endured in the 21st. Drawing upon this history, the
second section compares the Nixon administration’s attempt to label Ellsberg a
homosexual with pre-court-martial media commentary concerning the signifi-
cance of Manning’s sexual orientation. I show how both cases draw on the
presumed existence of a queer psychopathology that uniquely endangers national
security. The third section of the article explains that despite the similarity of
Manning’s rhetoric to that of other national security leakers, some of the
epistemological foundations that undergirded leaking in the 20th century have
begun to crumble.14 Nevertheless, Manning’s case points to possibilities for
the development of queer citizenship within U.S. national security affairs. The
article concludes with a gesture toward these possibilities and their implications
for GLBTQ worldmaking.
) ) ) Homosexuality and U.S. National Security Culture

Scholars including Lauren Berlant, Allan Bérubé, Margot Canaday, David
Johnson, Adi Kuntsman, Jasbir Puar, and Jennifer Terry argue that questions of
identity, sexuality, nationalism, and national existence are intimately con-
nected.15 These scholars, and others, have shown that U.S. national security
culture overwhelmingly reflects and promotes heterosexual values and norms.
For example, Canaday traces the influence of homosexuality within U.S. na-
tional security culture to World War I and its aftermath, when military officials
began to note the “problem of perversion” within the ranks.16 In the 1920s,
military psychiatrists, following trends in European sexology, began to describe
homosexuality as “one of the most common markers of a psychopathic person-
ality.”17 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, officials considered how the presence
of “perverts” might harm the U.S. military, but it was only following World War
II, when the massive expansion of national security institutions coincided with
the deepening resources of the state, that homophobia was codified as official
policy and practice.18
Along these lines, Johnson chronicles the government’s repeated campaigns to
purge homosexuals from federal agencies between 1947 and 1969 (the U.S.
military conducted similar purges under its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” [DADT]
policy between 1993 and 2011). The “Lavender Scare,” as Johnson dubs it, was

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driven by “a fear that homosexuals posed a threat to national security and needed
to be systematically removed from federal government.”19 Sparked by Republi-
can congressmen’s anxiety about the presence of homosexuals in the State
Department at the onset of the Cold War (and emboldened by Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s well-publicized conflation in 1950 of the terms “homosexual” and
“communist”), the Lavender Scare developed into a fully fledged “panic” within
American culture that resulted in the decades-long elimination of thousands of
suspected homosexuals from the government.20
Throughout this period, “security risk” served as a euphemism for homosex-
ual.21 Federal security officials characterized homosexuals as “gregarious,” pos-
sessing “a great desire to talk,” “confess,” and “name names.”22 As one State
Department security officer testified before Congress, “It is quite clear to
me . . . that these homosexuals are sick people, and they just don’t know what
they are doing, they do some of the most foolish things, which lead to the
compromising of our particular type of work.”23 Invoking World War I-era
psychiatric discourse, government witnesses called to testify about the dangers of
homosexuality described homosexuals as “psychologically disturbed” as a result
of “maladjustment and early childhood development problems.”24 Johnson
notes, “This was not merely the thinking of psychologists and psychiatrists; it
permeated the culture.”25 National security officials feared that homosexuals
could be more easily blackmailed or coerced into divulging state secrets for fear of
being publicly revealed.
Johnson traces the codification of this myth within the U.S. federal bureau-
cracy to the 1950 Hoey investigation, which focused on the presumed dangers
that homosexuals posed to national security. The testimony of Admiral Roscoe
Hillenkoetter, then director of the newly created CIA, included the story of
Colonel Alfred Redl, a World War I-era Austrian counterintelligence officer
rumored to have been successfully blackmailed by the enemy as a result of his
homosexuality. Commentators (including the U.S. Navy in 1957) later deter-
mined that Hillenkoetter’s account was exaggerated and misleading. In fact, no
witness could provide Senator Hoey’s committee with evidence to support the
assertion that homosexuals posed a greater security risk than heterosexuals.
Nevertheless, Hoey’s final report determined that homosexuals were “intrinsi-
cally weak, cowardly, unstable, neurotic, and lacking in moral fiber.”26 The
consequences of this conclusion were significant. As Canaday explains, “[h]omo-
sexuality was a novel concern in the years that the American bureaucracy took
shape, and so it was etched deeply into federal institutions, giving us a state that
not only structures but is itself structured by sexuality.”27 Thus, longstanding
cultural myths about homosexuals, coupled with distorted and/or fabricated

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56 ( Hamilton Bean
examples of their ostensible disloyalty or instability drew an enduring connection

between homosexuality and espionage that has remained deeply entrenched
within U.S. national security culture.
However, there are gaps and omissions in this history. The role of race is
largely missing from scholarly accounts, and Manning’s case potentially bolsters
the dominance of the “transparent white subject” within queer studies.28 Man-
ning joins a list of U.S. national security leakers who are overwhelmingly white
and male.29 Also missing from these accounts are the connections among
nonnormative sexuality, national security culture, and state-sanctioned violence.
Kuntsman argues that queer members of national security culture may not only
be victims of violence, but also its perpetrators and supporters.30 For Kuntsman,
violence constitutes, as well as contradicts, a sense of institutional and national
belonging. Such claims add a layer of complexity to Manning’s case in that
“access to and performance of violence might become a move away from
margins, carry a fantasy or promise of integration.”31 Such claims compel an
interpretation of Manning’s rhetoric in a way that avoids valorization of her case.
Before providing that interpretation, however, the next section illustrates the
nation’s enduring anxiety about the “tendencies” of homosexuals. Lending
credence to Ellsberg’s assertion, “I was Bradley Manning,” this section clarifies
how the divulging of state secrets has remained linked within the public imagi-
nation to the presumed emotional instability of homosexuals, i.e., their queer
psychopathology.
) ) ) The Persistence of Queer Psychopathology

Homosexuality has long been associated with espionage.32 Rhetorically speaking,
national security “leaking” is espionage’s close cousin, as both evoke images of
anonymity and disloyalty. The connection between the cases of Alger Hiss (an
alleged Soviet spy) and Ellsberg illustrates this claim. In particular, central to the
Hiss case in 1948 were rumors of his homosexual relationship with alleged co-
conspirator and communist sympathizer, Whittaker Chambers. As Johnson states,
“[t]he rumor and innuendo surrounding the Hiss-Chambers controversy . . . linked
communism and homosexuality in the minds of many public officials, security
officials, and opinion leaders.”33 This link was especially strong for President
Nixon, who, as a young Republican congressman, had served on the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and gained notoriety for his role in
the Hiss case. For Nixon, the case offered a blueprint for how to undermine
Ellsberg. “Just get everything out there and try him [Ellsberg] in the press. . . . I

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want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?” Nixon instructed his aides.34 “We
won the Hiss case in the papers. We leaked stuff all over the place. . . . I played
it in the press like a master. . . . I leaked out everything that I could.”35 Nixon’s
leaks presumably included rumors of Hiss’s homosexual relationship with
Chambers. Imploring his aides to follow the Hiss case script, Nixon intimated,
“You’ll see how it was done.”36
Thus, according to Ellsberg biographer Tom Wells, “[t]he White House
would have liked to paint Ellsberg as not only a subversive with foreign commu-
nist ties but a homosexual to boot.”37 Along these lines, Wells describes an FBI
report of an alleged homosexual liaison between Ellsberg and an unidentified
figure who claimed to have blackmailed Ellsberg into giving him a portion of the
“Pentagon Papers” that were later sold to the Soviet Union. Although the FBI
evaluated the story as “implausible,” it nevertheless circulated among reporters,
prompting Ellsberg to deny it.38 In addition, at least two of Ellsberg’s colleagues
told the FBI that he possessed “homosexual tendencies.”39 The FBI ultimately
found little evidence of homosexuality in Ellsberg’s past. Therefore, Nixon’s
chief of staff, John Ehrlichman, approved a plan to burglarize the Beverly Hills
office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. The plan’s masterminds, G.
Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, explained during a meeting with deputy
assistant to the president, Egil Krough, that the covert operation would provide
the “mother lode” of psychological information on Ellsberg that, when leaked to
the press, would thoroughly damage his credibility.40 The Fielding burglary,
however, yielded no worthwhile information.41 As a result, Liddy and Hunt
pressed CIA psychiatrists for their analysis of “the subject’s [Ellsberg’s] sexual
proclivities and how they might be manipulated.”42 The subsequent CIA profile
did not include reference to homosexuality. Unable to identify “how Ellsberg’s
sexual background could be used as a point of leverage” against him, Liddy
concluded that the CIA profile was “of no use.”43
It is mostly forgotten that the Nixon administration attempted to label
Ellsberg a homosexual in order to discredit him. As Charles Morris’s work on
public memory and usable history suggests, however, recovering this element of
the Ellsberg case helps to contextualize pre-court-martial media discourse regard-
ing Manning’s sexual orientation.44 Because some audiences continue to
associate homosexuality with perversion, dysfunction, and deviance, success-
fully labeling national security leakers as homosexual potentially undermines
their credibility. Pre-court-martial media commentary concerning Manning’s
sexual identity provides rich evidence for this claim.45 In particular, conservative
commentators depicted Manning as a “poster boy” for the necessity of barring
homosexuals from access to classified information.46 In a profile of Manning

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58 ( Hamilton Bean
posted on FoxNews.com, Justin Fishel wrote, “Manning is gay and there is some
speculation the military’s policy banning openly serving gays served as his
motivation for leaking classified documents.”47 Fishel implied a causal connec-
tion between Manning’s sexual orientation and her leaks. Likewise, Red State’s
Jeff Lukens directly cited the Family Research Council’s (FRC) president, Tony
Perkins, who stated, “Manning’s betrayal painfully confirms what groups like
FRC have argued all along: the instability of the homosexual lifestyle is a
detriment to military readiness.”48 Invoking Lavender Scare-era institutional
rhetoric, Ann Coulter wrote that Manning is an “angry gay” who, in a “snit,”
“betrayed his country.”49 Echoing the CIA’s Hillenkoetter, Coulter speculated,
“Maybe there’s a reason gays have traditionally been kept out of the intelligence
services, apart from the fact that closeted gay men are easy to blackmail.”50 Citing
Ginger Thompson’s New York Times’s profile of Manning, Coulter wrote: “They
[friends of Manning] suspected ‘his desperation for acceptance— or delusions of
grandeur’ may have prompted his document dump. Let’s check our ‘Gay Profile
at a Glance’ and . . . let’s see . . . desperate for acceptance . . . delusions of gran-
deur . . . yep, they’re both on the gay subset list!”51
Seeking to amuse his radio listeners, G. Gordon Liddy remarked, “The sin that
once dare not say its name now won’t shut up!”52 In contrast to Coulter, Liddy
declared, “I did not see anything about his [Manning’s] homosexuality in the
mainstream media at all when they were covering this breach of security.”53 A
significant amount of media commentary regarding Manning’s sexual orienta-
tion would soon emerge. For example, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima
wrote that Manning “clashed with a roommate he thought was anti-gay and one
he thought was racist” and that Manning’s supervisor “noted that he was showing
signs of ‘instability’ and required him to seek mental health counseling.”54
Likewise, a soldier who undertook basic training with Manning explained in a
Guardian Films profile, “[t]hey’d call him a faggot or call him a chapter 15—in
the military world, being called a chapter 15 is like a civilian being called a faggot
to their face on the street.”55 The soldier added, “[t]o say it was rough is an
understatement. He was targeted, he was targeted by bullies, by the drill ser-
geants. Basically, he was targeted by anybody who was within arm’s reach of
him.”56 Think Progress’s Alyssa Rosenberg stated that Manning had “pretty
serious emotional problems and turned out not to be a particularly effective
whistleblower, the former probably having quite a bit to do with the latter.”57
After her analysis of the Manning-Lamo chat logs, Democratic pundit Joy Reid
asked readers, “Does that sound like someone heroically changing the world, or
a guy seeking anarchy as a salve for his own personal, psychological torment?”58
A Frontline profile suggested that as a teenager Manning concealed her sexual

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orientation in order to avoid being victimized by bullies, who nevertheless

targeted her due to her slight physical build and quirkiness. Frontline reporter
Martin Smith emphasized Manning’s sexual orientation, asking Manning’s
father, “At what point does he tell you about his homosexuality? How does that
go down?”59 Smith chronicles Manning’s history of emotional instability and
fraught relationships, later telling NPR listeners, “He hit a fellow soldier. He
threw chairs. He yelled at superiors. So this was a pattern that might have raised
some concern.”60
Manning, in fact, acknowledged the incongruence of her situation. During an
online chat with gay activist Zack Antolak, Manning wrote, “I’m surprised you
haven’t asked the usual question: why is a gay, libertarian, atheist, computer nerd
in the army?”61 Manning’s defense counsel embraced the homophobic (and
transphobic) abuse narrative, portraying her as struggling with gender identity
issues during the twilight of DADT. The defense argued that Manning’s supe-
riors were aware of her fragile emotional state and therefore should have kept her
away from classified information. One of Manning’s supervisors, Jihrleah Show-
man, testified to Manning’s erratic behavior, citing a time when the private was
“screaming at the top of his lungs and waving his hands.”62 Manning later
punched Showman in the face.
For some audiences, such reports highlighted the obvious danger of Man-
ning’s queer psychopathology; yet, such reports also generated public backlash.
As one commentator sarcastically wrote on the Frontline Web site, “Gee, I am
still waiting to hear about every argument Daniel Ellsberg had with his sister.
When is Frontline going to do that salacious in depth hit? Because it really really
would have changed the way I thought about Ellsberg, as someone not acting on
principle, but acting out of some psychological symptom.”63 This comment
draws attention to a premise underlying pre-court-martial commentary about
the significance of Manning’s sexual orientation; namely, homophobic prejudice
and abuse directly led to her emotional instability, and her disclosures to
WikiLeaks, in turn, served as a psychic balm that helped alleviate her emotional
distress. This framing implies that GLBTQ service members who suffer preju-
dice and abuse are more likely to disclose classified information than heterosexual
members.
Within this framing, the Army’s DADT policy of “institutionalized ho-
mophobia” is assumed to have been a major cause of Manning’s “instability.”
DADT was still in place prior to Manning’s arrest, and homophobic abuse has
indeed been shown to generate low self-esteem or self-loathing, as well as feelings
of confusion and isolation among GLBTQ youth.64 As Daniel Brouwer ex-
plained, “[h]omophobia works to punish at a deep individual level to create

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60 ( Hamilton Bean
psychological distress; it shames the self and requires a young person to deal with
being positioned, because of their sexual desire, as abnormal, dirty and disgust-
ing.”65 Likewise, Josh Gunn stated, “[h]omosexuality as a category is a histori-
cally specific, modern production of sexual deviance, meaning that to recognize
oneself as having a gay identity was and is also to harbor a secret pathology.”66
Thus, the rhetorical dynamics of secrecy and disclosure at work in Manning’s
case appear to mirror the institutional dynamics of DADT. However, Manning’s
references to DADT in her chats with Lamo downplay the policy’s significance.
“DADT isn’t really enforced,” she stated.67 Calling DADT a “disaster,” she
added, “[I] keep my DADT trail semi-secure . . . I figure its plausible deniabil-
ity . . . for the more extreme stuff.”68 Nevertheless, as discussed below in this
article, the dismantling of DADT that followed Manning’s arrest has not
significantly undermined cultural assumptions about the threat that homosexu-
ality poses to national security.
Media commentary concerning the significance of Manning’s sexual orienta-
tion generates a paradoxical dilemma. On the one hand, such commentary draws
needed public attention to the effects of institutionalized homophobia among
GLBTQ youth.69 On the other hand, such commentary perpetuates erroneous
assumptions about the dangerous “tendencies” of people who identify with
anything other that heteronormative sexuality. Although rarely depicted any-
more within mainstream media as innately “psychopathic,” indicators of emo-
tional distress stemming from homophobic abuse nevertheless continue to mark
members of GLBTQ communities as weak, fragile, and unstable. As a result,
some audiences will conclude that the 1950s State Department security officer
cited above was basically correct, i.e., members of GLBTQ communities “are
sick people, and they just don’t know what they are doing, they do some of the
most foolish things, which lead to the compromising of our particular type of
work.”70 Whether members of GLBTQ communities are characterized as
innately pathological (e.g., the 1950 Hoey investigation report) or emotion-
ally damaged due to abuse (e.g., Manning), the implication is clear: Members
of GLBTQ communities continue to represent a “security risk.”71 Media
speculation about the significance of Manning’s sexual orientation either inten-
tionally or unintentionally reduced her acts of conscience to some of the same
“homosexual traits” that Nixon administration officials sought to attribute to
Ellsberg— delusion, foolishness, and narcissism. In this way, Manning’s case
demonstrates continuity with Ellsberg’s case, as well as with the treatment of
homosexuals within the U.S. national security culture writ large. Analysis of
Manning’s own rhetoric reveals both continuities and discontinuities with this
history.

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) ) ) Manning’s Queer Rhetoric and the Trajectory of

National Security Leaking
Wells acknowledges in his biography of Ellsberg that, “without question,” he

hoped to end the war in Vietnam by leaking the “Pentagon Papers.”72 Neverthe-
less, Wells also argues that it is “virtually certain” that Ellsberg leaked the documents
to sooth his ego and to “achieve greater recognition.”73 Likewise, Manning’s
motivations presumably stem from multiple causes that she may not fully
understand or be aware of. This analysis, however, will avoid speculating about
how her sexual orientation and psychological needs influenced her inner conflict.
Instead, the examples of Manning’s rhetoric discussed in this section emphasize
its “queerness.” By queerness, I refer to the rhetoric’s difference and strangeness
in a positive sense—its ability to frustrate, counteract, and undermine established
assumptions.74 Queer theory highlights the shifting nature of identities, the
insufficiency and arbitrariness of binary categorization, intersectionality, and the
possibilities for social change.75 In the same way that queer theory resists
homo/heterosexual categorization, Manning’s rhetoric defies clear-cut labels; it
can be interpreted as heroic and misguided, selfless and selfish. At root, Man-
ning’s rhetoric reflects the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory motives that
human beings share. It is significant that in crafting any interpretation of
Manning’s rhetoric, audiences are easily able to obtain her archived chat logs,
Facebook posts, tweets, courtroom statement, and various other digital traces. As
the most transparent national security leaker of all time, Manning’s digital traces
point to important discontinuities between her case and Ellsberg’s.
Examples of Manning’s queer rhetoric abound. For example, although pre-
court-martial media commentary concerning Manning’s sexual orientation of-
ten echoed Lavender Scare-era institutional discourse, her courtroom statement
of January 29, 2013 made scant reference to sexual orientation. In her 34-page
statement, Manning noted that she occasionally participated in online chats
about “queer rights;” she recalled a disappointing visit with her then “boyfriend”
in Boston during mid-tour leave in January 2010; she explained that she gave the
moniker “Nathaniel Frank” (an author of a book about homosexuality and the
military) to an anonymous WikiLeaks interlocutor; and she emphasized her
social isolation: “For instance, I lacked close ties with my roommate due to his
discomfort regarding my perceived sexual orientation.”76 When given the op-
portunity to affirm the media’s dominant homophobic abuse narrative (as well as
her own defense counsel’s strategy), Manning instead ascribed only minor
influence to either her sexual orientation or to institutionalized homophobia:
“The decisions I made to send documents and information to WLO [WikiLeaks]

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62 ( Hamilton Bean
and the website were my own decisions, and I take full responsibility for my
actions.”77 Her courtroom statement was not the speech of a member of a
stigmatized group testifying to a hostile public “the muted and anxious history of
her imperiled citizenship.”78 In other words, Manning demonstrates queer
theory’s premise that an individual’s placement within a social category does not
necessarily lead that individual to act in a particular way.
Manning declared, “I believed that if the general public, especially the Amer-
ican public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and
CIDNE-A tables [the “Iraq War Log” and “Afghanistan War Dairy”] it could
spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in
general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”79 Such information, Manning
believed, “would help document the true cost of the wars.”80 Of the leaked State
Department cables, Manning explained, “I soon began to think the documented
backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity didn’t seem characteristic of the
de facto leader of the free world.”81 She stated, in a matter-of-fact way, that “[t]he
more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion this was the type of
information that should become public.”82 Manning’s justifications resembled
Ellsberg’s, who stated in a 1973 interview:
The only thing that I could personally hope to achieve by my own efforts was to
make these documents available to the American public for them to read and to learn
from. I couldn’t force them to read the documents—let alone to learn from and act
on them— but I could hope to make it possible for them to read them as opposed to
the situation where the studies were sitting in my safe at the Rand Corporation.83
Thus, similar to other national security leakers, both Manning and Ellsberg
invoked the values of transparency and public deliberation to justify their
disclosures.84 Commentators who emphasized this shared rhetoric, however,
tended to downplay ambiguous statements that undermined Manning’s image as
a heroic national security leaker. For example, in her courtroom statement,
Manning noted, “I once read and used a quote on open diplomacy written after
the First World War, and how the world would be a better place if states would
avoid making secret pacts and deals with or against each other. I thought these
cables were a prime example of the need for more open diplomacy.”85 Here,
Manning referred to the title of a New York Times editorial published January 20, 1919
that she posted without commentary after logging on for a routine chat with Lamo.
The editorial focused on the deliberations then occurring at the Paris Peace Confer-
ence that marked the end of World War I. The first part of the editorial resonated
with Manning’s values of transparency and public deliberation:

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Open diplomacy is the opposite of secret diplomacy, which consisted in the

underhand negotiation of treaties whose very existence was kept from the world.
It [secret diplomacy] consisted also in the modification of openly negotiated
treaties by secret treaties by some of the Powers behind the backs of the others. It
is against this kind of double dealing and secret dealing, the mother of wars, that
the world protested. It has demanded the substitution of open diplomacy for
secret diplomacy.86
However, Manning did not post the editorial’s conclusion:

The conferees, by reserving the right of holding executive sessions while they
admit the [newspaper] correspondants [sic] to open sessions, have gone as far as
the needs of the public demand. The world has intrusted [sic] the Peace
Conference with the work of preparing the treaty. It [the “world”] wishes to
know what is done, and why it is done; but the sensible part of it, at any rate, has
no desire to have spread before it all the heart-to-heart talks and turns of phrase
of men performing the gigantic task of reconciling national differences and
coming to agreement.87
Manning’s leak of the State Department cables did more-or-less what the
editorial writer objected to, i.e., “spread before [the world] all the heart-to-heart
talks and turns of phrase of men [and women] performing the gigantic task of
reconciling national differences and coming to agreement.” In this case, Man-
ning’s rhetoric is queer in the sense that her omission potentially undermined the
stability of her patriotic national security leaker identity.
The widespread availability of these and other examples of Manning’s rhetoric
allude to a shift in the traditional epistemological foundations of national
security leaking. Networked digital technologies reshape (but do not wholly
determine) possibilities for the rhetorical construction of national security leak-
ers’ character/motives, as well as the efficacy of their leaks. Archived messages
across these technologies challenge commentators’ ability to categorize the
identity of a given national security leaker. As professor of government C. Fred
Alford stated, the leaker “wants his or her story told in his or her terms: the
content is everything.”88 However, the examples of Manning’s rhetoric noted
above illustrate how networked digital technologies can leave contradictory
traces (e.g., posts, likes, images, links, comments, chat logs) that rapidly under-
mine the leaker’s preferred story. As Manning’s case demonstrates, when those
traces contain indicators of one’s nonnormative sexual orientation, commenta-
tors can all too easily leverage them to perpetuate erroneous assumptions and
prejudice.
Of course, audiences may willfully ignore contradictory statements, as well as
condone homophobic interpretations of events; nevertheless, networked digital

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technologies create undeniable intertextual challenges for the authors of bio-

graphical narrative. Archived posts, tweets, chats, images, and other messages add
to the volume and complexity of the fragments immediately available to biogra-
phers in constructing preferred narratives of their subjects. Biographers must
nominally account for these fragments because, as Bryan Taylor explains, most
biographers operate as “‘artist[s] under oath,’ sworn to the ideal of transparency
in faithfully ‘capturing’ the subject’s essence.”89 Networked digital technologies
create both practical and ethical challenges for biographers in that the sheer
abundance of digital traces can render a subject’s “essence” indeterminable.
Networked digital technologies therefore reflect and reinforce recent changes in
“the historical and cultural conditions under which biographical discourse about
the subject is produced and consumed.”90 Consider how Ellsberg asserts his
absolute moral clarity, “I have never doubted that, under the circumstances
facing me, I did the right thing when I copied and revealed the contents of the
top-secret Pentagon Papers.”91 Although Wells attempts to undermine Ellsberg’s
assertion, no texts (e.g., letters, memoirs, recordings) have significantly destabi-
lized it. Ellsberg remains a hero of the Left, in part, because there is scant evidence
of contradictions that would challenge his narrative. The narratives of all leakers
potentially are open to reinterpretation, contestation, and inversion; the point
here is that Manning’s case suggests that in the digitally networked era, definitive
rhetorical constructions of national security leakers are evermore unlikely.92
Indeed, a recent high-profile documentary, “War on Whistleblowers: Free
Press and the National Security State,” avoids discussion of Manning due to the
ambiguities of her case.93 A perfunctory acknowledgement is presented near the
end of the film, with Ellsberg providing a brief voiceover about Manning’s
willingness to be imprisoned for her leaks as photos of Manning drift across the
frame. In the film’s commentary, producer and director, Robert Greenwald,
stated,
We struggled with the Bradley Manning [sic] and how to handle it [sic]. Clearly,
it should be a movie of its own, and I believe there are movies being made or
have been made, but I felt it would be malpractice if there wasn’t some reference
to it. And Dan [Ellsberg] had mentioned it in his interview, so we experimented
quite a bit until we found a place for that reference.94
Greenwald’s ambivalence about “how to handle” the figure who undertook the
largest disclosure of classified information in U.S. history demonstrates how
ambiguous and contradictory digital traces challenge commentators’ ability to
valorize national security leakers.

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Another indicator of epistemological shift is the efficacy of contemporary

leaks. The “Pentagon Papers” offered a coherent and compelling narrative about
the U.S. government’s effort to deceive the American public about the course of
the war in Vietnam. The impact of the “Pentagon Papers” was significant.95
Manning, by contrast, disclosed immense and undifferentiated data streams that
were difficult for lay audiences to interpret. Although the Afghan War Diary,
Iraq War Logs, and Cablegate generated widespread media coverage throughout
2010 and 2011, most commentators agreed that the influence of these materials on
both public opinion and official policymaking was negligible.96 U.S. officials
admitted that internal reviews determined that the impact of the disclosures was
minor.97 Some commentators nevertheless claimed that this trove revealed war
crimes (e.g., the torture of Iraqi prisoners of war).98 However, only one official
inquiry resulted from the material that Manning provided to WikiLeaks—an
Iraqi government investigation of an alleged massacre of an Iraqi family by U.S.
soldiers in 2006.99
Although the types of information that Manning disclosed may account for
their lack of efficacy, the concept of “communicative capitalism” also helps to
explain why no official investigations into alleged war crimes or government
misconduct has occurred.100 The term communicative capitalism refers to the
proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative
access and opportunity afforded by networked technologies. As political scientist
Jodi Dean explained, “[i]deals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation
come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications and interconnec-
tions of global telecommunications.”101 According to Dean, however, “[s]pecific
or singular acts of resistance, statements of opinion or instances of transgression
are not political in and of themselves; rather, they have to be politicized, that is
articulated together with other struggles, resistances and ideals in the course or
context of opposition.”102 In other words, the diffusion of Manning’s disclosures
across innumerable Web sites, blogs, social media platforms, and so forth does
not in-and-of-itself affect U.S. politics. Dean suggested that one’s ability to
contribute leaked national security information to the global data stream may
generate feelings of political participation and empowerment, but the “fantasies”
of communicative capitalism reduce political struggle to technological practices.
Berlant anticipated Dean by asserting that “there is no public sphere in the
contemporary United States, no context of communication and debate that
makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on
a state that holds itself accountable to their opinions, critical or otherwise.”103
Indeed, Manning explicitly disavowed the political: “Too many words in polit-
ical spheres . . . too short of an attention span . . . too short of goals.”104 She

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instead celebrated the technological: “The reaction to the video [“Collateral

Murder”] gave me immense hope . . . CNN’s iReport was over-
whelmed . . . Twitter exploded.”105 Despite widespread publicity, the release of
“Collateral Murder” resulted in no formal reinvestigation of the incident. As long
as Manning’s disclosures circulated within the circuits of communicative capi-
talism, they posed little danger to the interests of national security elites.
The same forces of communicative capitalism that simultaneously encouraged
and undermined Manning’s leaks can also be seen to have influenced the
disclosure of her personal, sexual secret. In particular, the Twitter account that
Manning established a few days before her arrest contains two messages. The first
message stated, “I’ve entered a transitional phase of my life. Though, for now I’m
back on the grid.” One minute later, Manning posted a second message,
“[Breanna] is setting up public blog in future. More will follow. :)” The tagline
that Manning chose for “Breanna’s” Twitter account—“Click, move, and com-
municate”— eerily evokes communicative capitalism’s emphasis on intercon-
nected, instantaneous, and mobile communications. “Breanna” is significant
because it illustrates how, under communicative capitalism, where image, affect,
and opinion must ever-circulate, “setting up [a] public blog” and being “on the
grid” are an imperative.
It must be acknowledged that Manning’s disclosures to WikiLeaks at least
afforded audiences the possibility of citing classified documents in their efforts to
promote change, and there is some speculation that Manning’s disclosures may
have been “politicized” by Arab Spring activists in the way that Dean de-
scribed.106 Without initial leaks, there can be no subsequent publicity needed to
spur transformations of national security policy. Thus, a more charitable view of
Manning’s disclosures acknowledges their role as a potential catalyst of a multi-
step process.107 Manning was not simply circulating mundane content among
social networks; through her disclosures, she was actively attempting to spur
citizen awareness and political reform. Nevertheless, despite differences in the
nature of the information that Manning acquired (and the means by which she
acquired it), in the United States, her “efforts at political engagement” were
mostly transformed “into contributions to the circulation of content.”108 Al-
though Manning wanted American audiences “to see the truth” of her disclo-
sures—and presumably become so outraged that they would demand political
reform—readers of this article will find little potential within communicative
capitalism to support such an ambitious vision.109
For Edwin Black, Manning can be seen as a “translator”—albeit an unsuccess-
ful one given the conditions of communicative capitalism— between the world
of U.S. national security culture and the world of engaged citizenship.110 Such

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translators, Black asserts, often disclose secrets “in the belief that such exposure
will work to the detriment of whatever is revealed—that the secret, which is
simultaneously concealed because it is evil and evil because it is concealed, will
shrivel in the luminosity of revelation.”111 Here, disclosure is assumed to have
“purgative power . . . what suppurates and corrupts in the darkness will heal in
the light.”112 Likewise, in Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing, Larry
Gross explained how exposing homophobic hypocrisy to the purgative light of
publicity has underwritten the “outing” of closeted homosexuals.113 Thus, na-
tional security leaking resides within the same rhetorical and ethical terrain as
outing—including those outings officially compelled by DADT. However,
although Manning repeatedly voiced her opposition to DADT, she appears to
have been much more distressed by the immorality of her superior officer’s
decisions, as well as her own complicity within a national security system that
promoted, as she saw it, “incredible things, awful things . . . things that belonged
in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in
Washington DC.”114
Yet, Black cautioned, “In the form of paranoia associated with the overdeter-
mination of messages . . . the world is animated by purpose and the sole barrier
to its disclosure is the imperceptiveness of those who would spurn its message.”115
Manning told Lamo: “[I] recognized the value of some things . . . knew what
they meant . . . dug deeper.”116 She declared: “[I]ve seen far more than a 22 y/o
should.”117 As a translator in Black’s sense, Manning asserted privileged access to
(an unseen) reality that demanded public disclosure: “The magnification of
openness and candor is strongly related to the promotion of sincerity as a virtue.
Behind the reprehension of secrecy and hypocrisy is an abhorrence of any
disparity between appearance and reality.”118 Manning’s leaks were intended to
ensure that audiences juxtaposed the managed appearance of U.S. foreign policy
with its (classified) actuality. The conditions of communicative capitalism
helped to ensure, however, that Manning’s disclosures would not significantly
influence institutional politics.
This section has described examples of Manning’s queer rhetoric to explain
how contemporary conditions undermine commentators’ ability to valorize
national security leakers, as well as diminish the prospective efficacy of their leaks.
A question therefore arises: Why does Manning consistently assert the transfor-
mative potential of her disclosures? In other words, why does leaking have
rhetorical resonance for her? One answer is that Manning’s case represents a
transitional moment in the history of national security leaking—a moment
characterized by the limited efficacy of leaks under contemporary conditions and
alluring images of heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. Manning’s rhetoric

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68 ( Hamilton Bean
reveals that her subjectivity does not neatly fit into any particular category. Even
Manning is unsure of how to categorize herself: “I’m not sure whether I’d be
considered a type of ‘hacker’, ‘cracker’, ‘hacktivist’, ‘leaker’ or what.”119 Just as
when individuals act in ways that fall outside of normative gendered discourses,
they become “queer,” so too does Manning’s rhetoric render her categorical
status unrecognizable. Nevertheless, a task of queer theorists is “to subvert the
unified notion of gay and lesbian identity and to paint a picture of multiple and
conflicting sexual/gendered experiences.”120 The final section of this article
responds to this task in order to identify possibilities for the development of
queer citizenship.
) ) ) Conclusion: From Psychopathology to Citizenship

Queer citizenship within U.S. national security affairs involves foregrounding
queerness “in relation to patriotism, war, torture, security, death, terror, terror-
ism, detention, and deportation.”121 For example, in Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times, Puar identified the contours of an emerging
shift in the way that queer subjects relate to the United States. In contrast to the
Lavender Scare era, according to Puar, the “benevolence” that mainstream
American culture has recently afforded homosexual, gay, and queer bodies
involves a parallel process of “targeting . . . queerly raced bodies for dying.”122
Although some of Manning’s supporters have nominated her for the Nobel Peace
Prize, her statement, “[a]nd the weird part is . . . I love my job . . . I was very
good at it . . . I wish this didn’t have to happen like this,”123 typifies the increas-
ingly “convivial” relations between queerness and U.S. war machines in the
post-9/11 era.124 The vision of queer citizenship outlined in this conclusion
involves critical scrutiny of these relations. Throughout its history, U.S. national
security culture has relied upon heteronormative ideologies, but it now increas-
ingly accommodates “homonormative” ideologies that reproduce racial, class,
and gender prejudices. Manning’s boast to Lamo that she “punched a dyke in the
phace [sic],” as well as her professed “love” for her job as an intelligence analyst,
call attention to the intersectionality of homosexual constituencies and to how
some groups have embraced U.S. nationalist agendas.125
At root, this process of “homonationalization” risks strengthening the “con-
tainer metaphor” that serves as the conceptual basis of national security—a
metaphor that suppresses citizen deliberation and participation within the for-
eign policy arena.126 The container metaphor is based on the opposition of
“inner” and “outer” spheres. Elites have historically prescribed the form of the

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nation’s defense and security from external threats. This rhetorical formulation
has allowed elites to represent the “inside” of the nation and its interests. From
elites’ perspective, Manning’s case confirms their long-held mistrust of the
demos—the people— especially homosexuals. For homonormative constituen-
cies, Manning’s leaks demonstrate that national security requires a muscular
defense against the naïve idealism and ignorant demands of peripheral, unstable,
and irrational citizens.
Nevertheless, leaking is one way that citizens can momentarily upend their
subordination to elites. Moved to publicize classified information as a result of
intense reactions to the hypocrisy, injustice, and cruelty of certain U.S. national
security practices, the cases of Ellsberg and Manning highlight this dialectical
tension. As an act of “risky dramatic persuasion,” leaking is premised upon the
belief that, in a democracy, national security elites must in some way respond to
major shifts in public opinion.127 In this way, leaking somewhat resembles what
Berlant called “Diva Citizenship,” which occurs “when a person stages a dramatic
coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.”128 Like Ellsberg’s
acts before hers, Manning’s defiance of institutional norms potentially placed
elites’ dominant narrative of national security in peril. Manning’s disclosures
challenged American audiences to question the foreign policies of their govern-
ment and to identify with the suffering of others. Her leaks rightly called upon
citizens to better scrutinize their nation’s security policies and practices. Yet, like
Diva Citizenship, leaking potentially involves a “spectacle of subjectivity” that
risks conflating disclosure with social change.129 Ellsberg and Manning exemplify
how leakers who forgo anonymity (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) inevitably
draw public attention to themselves and away from institutional wrongdoing: “Their
testimony remains itself personal, specifically about them, their sensations and
subjectivity.”130 Manning’s public disclosure of August 22, 2013 concerning her
transgender identity illustrates these dynamics (and post-sentencing public dis-
course about Manning is an area requiring further research).131 Leaking may
occasionally rattle national security’s container metaphor, yet it clearly consti-
tutes a risky rhetorical strategy for queer citizenship within national security
affairs.
Nevertheless, both Diva Citizenship and queer citizenship alert citizens to the
possibilities of building an affective politics that keeps our “senses open to
emergent and unknown forms of belonging, connectivity, [and] intimacy.”132 In
contrast to the rational knowledge associated with elite guardianship of national
security, queer citizenship involves “illuminating the importance of rhetorical
affect, instead of merely tracing a message’s persuasive logic.”133 Crystalizing this
point, when asked by Wells about her husband’s motivation for leaking the

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70 ( Hamilton Bean
“Pentagon Papers,” Patricia Ellsberg responded, “It was [that] the children were
burning alive. They were being burned alive. And he felt it.”134 Manning’s
account of her decision to release the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video
(“Collateral Murder”) is similarly affective:
They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value
human life, and referred to them as quote-unquote ‘dead bastards,’ and congratulated
each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is
an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously
wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial
weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a
weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seemed similar to a
child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.135
Manning’s disclosure of the video briefly directed public attention to war’s

dehumanization. Manning’s hope was that the crewmembers’ sickening callous-
ness would undermine the “convivial relations” between queerness and war
machines. In contrast to misleading and sanitized reports of the incident, the
video reminds viewers that war is about cruelty, pain, and death. Behind modern
warfare’s sterile depiction in televised briefings and info-graphics lay the tortured
and mutilated bodies of men, women, and children. Manning’s plea—largely
ignored—was for Americans to be more responsible for the killing and destruc-
tion conducted in their name.
In sum, queer citizenship confronts war in human terms. Like Diva Citizen-
ship, at times, Manning’s statements resemble acts of “pedagogy” in which she
asks fellow citizens “to learn and to change; to trust their desire to not be
inhuman.”136 Queer citizenship involves generating affect and activism in ways
that combat the injustices and cruelties of war. Manning’s acts of conscience, like
Ellsberg’s, were intended to spur public deliberation about such issues. Yet, in
Manning’s case, media commentators tended to attribute her acts to queer
psychopathology stemming from homophobic abuse. Commentary about her
sexual orientation restored a familiar and soothing individualism to events. As a
result, her disclosures mostly reflected and reinforced the atomization of politics
that has occurred within the circuits of communicative capitalism—with its false
promise of meaningful citizenship performed in “simultaneously lived private
worlds.”137 Queer citizenship offers a different vision.
How Manning’s case relates to the development of this vision is likely to
remain an open question. In the end, perhaps Manning’s case can compel
citizens to reconsider the meaning of national security and their personal rela-
tionship to it. Conceptually, it can be said that when citizens— of any sexual

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orientation—are reasonably certain that they, their loved ones, and their cher-
ished values and possessions are free from threat, a state of “security” obtains.
Although the achievement of such conditions appear extraordinarily remote in
the early 21st century, they nonetheless remain an appealing prospect for
GLBTQ worldmaking.
NOTES
The author thanks Thomas R. Dunn, James McDonald, Charles E. Morris III, and
Thomas Nakayama for their guidance in the development of this article.
1. Heidi Kitrosser, “What if Daniel Ellsberg Hadn’t Bothered?” Indiana Law Review
45 (2011): 89 –129; Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life of Times of Dan Ellsberg (New
York: Palgrave, 2001).
2. Glenn Greenwald, “The Intellectual Cowardice of Bradley Manning’s Critics,”
Salon, December 24, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2011/12/
24/the_intellectual_cowardice_of_bradley_mannings_critics/.
3. Anna Mulrine, “Pentagon Papers vs. WikiLeaks: Is Bradley Manning the New
Ellsberg?” The Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013,
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/0613/Pentagon-Papers-vs.-Wiki
Leaks-Is-Bradley-Manning-the-new-Ellsberg.
4. Ashley Fantz, “Pentagon Papers Leaker: ‘I was Bradley Manning,’” CNN, March
11, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/03/19/wikileaks.
ellsberg.manning/index.html.
5. Manning was convicted of espionage and other charges on July 30, 2013. As this
article was going to press, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison; therefore, media
commentary following Manning’s August 22, 2013 statement concerning her
transgender identity is not analyzed herein. Pre-court-martial media discourse
about Manning’s sexuality is significant, however, because it drew public attention
away from the content of her disclosures and their implications for citizen
participation in U.S. national security affairs.
6. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and
Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
7. Wells, Wild Man.
8. Johnson, The Lavender Scare. In this volume, Johnson uses the term “queer” as a
broad, inclusive category of nonnormative sexualities.
9. Gene Lalor, “Pfc. Bradley Manning: Soldier, Homosexual, Traitor,” American
Conservative Daily, December 1, 2010, accessed July 24, 2013, http://www.
americanconservativedaily.com/2010/12/pfc-bradley-manning-soldier-homosexual-
traitor/.
10. Ginger Thompson, “Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in Leak Case,” New York
Times, August 8, 2010, accessed July 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/
09/us/09manning.html.

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72 ( Hamilton Bean
11. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2002), 19.
12. As an umbrella term, “queer” refers to both “culturally marginal sexual self-
identifications,” as well as a theoretical and political project characterized by its
definitional elasticity, indeterminacy, and potentiality. I use the term “queerness”
here to dramatize “incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations” between sex,
gender, and identity. Annamarie Jogose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New
York: New York University Press, 1997), 1–3. I also use the term to evoke its usefulness
in “undermining stable notions of identity and subjecting all categories of identity to
scrutiny for the differences that they mask.” James McDonald, “Coming Out in the
Field: A Queer Reflexive Account of Shifting Researcher Identity,” Management
Learning 44, no. 2 (2013): 5.
13. Some readers may question whether a nonmember of the GLBTQ community
can adequately represent Manning’s case and/or advance queer citizenship.
McDonald’s articulation of “queer reflexivity” suggests that one can; shared sexual
orientation need not be a litmus test for scholarly engagement or political
activism. As a former contractor in the defense and intelligence sector, I share
with Manning the experience of directly witnessing how U.S. security practices
both contradict and undermine the nation’s espoused democratic ideals. I
especially identify with Manning’s interest in intelligence analysis and what
Manning repeatedly refers to in her archived chats and court statement as “open
source intelligence.” In my late twenties, I served as director of business
development for a Washington, D.C.-based open source intelligence contractor.
Some of Manning’s stated interests, experiences, and ideals are similar to my own.
In short, there are multiple ways for people to identify with Manning: as a
GLBTQ activist, Oklahoman, hacker, soldier, etc. My commitment to queer
reflexivity involves questioning how the boundaries of all categories, including
those used to construct my own identity, are created, regulated, contested, and
subject to change.
14. National security “leaking” is a communication strategy that relies on anonymity.
Such anonymity, ideally, preserves one’s career while permitting public scrutiny
of organizational wrongdoing. “Whistleblowing,” on the other hand, evokes
images of urgency, intensity, and publicity. A whistleblower usually draws public
attention to oneself in the process of revealing organizational malfeasance.
“Leakers” do not wish to “go public.” In this article, I refer to Manning as a
“leaker” because, according to the Manning-Lamo chat logs, she did not believe
that she was going to be arrested for her disclosures, did not wish to “go public,”
and did not refer to herself as a whistleblower. She did, however, refer to herself as
a “hacktivist”—someone who uses computers as a means of political protest. I
acknowledge that the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWC) does
not establish “going public” as a precondition for whistleblower status, and the
lack of legal protections for those who disclose government wrongdoing certainly

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accounts for anonymous leaks. Therefore, the terms “leaker” and “whistleblower”
can be substituted for each other without undermining the arguments herein.
15. Berlant, The Queen of America; Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History
of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and
Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011); Johnson, The Lavender Scare; Adi Kuntsman, Figurations of Violence
and Belonging (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in
Modern Society (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999).
16. Canaday, The Straight State, 57.
17. Ibid., 65.
18. Ibid.
19. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 9.
20. Ibid., 2; See also ‘homosexual panic,’ 98.
21. Ibid., 7.
22. Ibid., 8.
23. Ibid., 75.
24. Ibid., 35.
25. Ibid., 35.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Canaday, Straight State, 258.
28. Daniel L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer
about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23, nos. 3– 4, (2005): 12.
29. The 2012 documentary War on Whistleblowers profiles four cases, Thomas Drake,
Thomas Tamm, Franz Gayl, and Michael DeKort. All four figures are depicted as
honorable family men. Other whistleblowers mentioned in the film include Vince
DiMezza, Daniel Ellsberg, Jim Holzrichter, and Ken Pedeleose. Jesselyn Radack is
the only female whistleblower mentioned in the film. War on Whistleblowers: Free
Press and the National Security State, Robert Greenwald, Director (Culver City,
CA: Brave New Foundation, 2013), DVD.
30. Kuntsman, Figurations of Violence and Belonging.
31. Ibid., 4.
32. Canaday, Straight State; Johnson, Lavender Scare.
34. Wells, Wild Man, 417.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 465.
38. Ibid., 466.
39. Ibid., 465.

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74 ( Hamilton Bean
40. Egil Krogh, “The Break-In That History Forgot,” New York Times, June 30,
2007,accessedJune15,2013,http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/30krogh.
html.
41. The burglary nevertheless set in motion a series of events, including the break-in
of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office
complex in Washington, D.C., that would eventually lead to the conviction of
dozens of government officials for burglary, obstruction, and perjury, as well as
culminate in the resignation of President Nixon on August 9, 1974.
43. Ibid., 489.
44. Charles E. Morris III, ed., Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American
Historical Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007).
45. The texts selected for this analysis were chosen from relatively well-known media
commentators or outlets, both Right-leaning and Left-leaning, rather than lesser
known blogs or social media sites. Intertextuality drove their selection, e.g., both
Ginger Thompson’s and Ann Coulter’s discussions of Manning’s sexual
orientation are referenced by scores of online commentators.
46. Ann Coulter, “Bradley Manning: Poster Boy For ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’”
December 1, 2012, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/
2010-12-01.html.
47. Justin Fishel, “Who is Pfc. Bradley Manning?” Fox News, November 29, 2012,
accessed June 15, 2013, http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/11/29/who-pfc-
bradley-manning.
48. Jeff Lukens, “Gay Activists Leaked WikiLinks Documents,” RedState, August 3,
2012, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.redstate.com/jplukens/2010/08/03/gay-
activist-leaked-wikilinks-documents/; See also Chris Johnson, “Gay Soldier
Accused of Leaking Classified Files,” Bay Window, June 15, 2013, accessed June 15,
2013, http://www.baywindows.com/gay-soldier-accused-of-leaking-classified-files-
108933.
49. Coulter, “Poster Boy.”
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. G. Gordon Liddy, “Manning Has An Axe to Grind,” Blubrry, August 4, 2010,
accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.blubrry.com/ggliddy/800418/manning-had-an-
axe-to-grind/.
53. Ibid.
54. Ellen Nakashima, “Bradley Manning is at the Center of the WikiLeaks
Controversy. But Who is He?” The Washington Post, May 4, 2011, accessed June
15, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who-is-wikileaks-
suspect-bradley-manning/2011/04/16/AFMwBmrF_print.html.
55. “Bradley Manning: Fellow Soldier Recalls ‘Scared, Bullied Kid,’” The Guardian,
May 28, 2011, accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/
may/28/bradley-manning-video-transcript-wikileaks.

54.66.212.f:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
56. Ibid.
57. Alyssa Rosenberg, “Bradley Manning and the Drama of Instant Messaging,”
Think Progress, January 2, 2012, accessed June 15, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/
alyssa/2012/01/02/395669/bradley-manning-and-the-drama-of-instant-messaging/.
58. Joy Reid, “The Manning Chat Logs: TMI and Corroboration of Guilt,” Reid
Report, July 14, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/07/
manning-chat-logs/.
59. Martin Smith, “The Private Life of Bradley Manning,” Frontline, February 28,
2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/
bradley-manning/interviews/brian-manning.html.
60. NPR Staff, “WikiLeaks Suspect Manning: A Troubled Home Life,” NPR, March
29, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://m.npr.org/news/U.S./134931695.
61. Steve Fishman, “Bradley Manning’s Army of One,” New York Magazine, July 3,
2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://nymag.com/news/features/bradley-manning-
2011-7/.
62. Ginger Thompson, “Last Witness for Military Takes Stand in Leak Case,” New
York Times, December 20, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/
2011/12/21/us/governments-last-witness-takes-stand-at-bradley-manning-hearing.
html.
63. Smith, “The Private Life of Bradley Manning.”
64. Elizabeth McDermott, Katrina Roen, and Jonathan Scourfield, “Avoiding Shame:
Young LGBT People, Homophobia and Self-Destructive Behaviours,” Culture,
Health & Sexuality 10 (2008): 815–29.
65. Daniel C. Brouwer, “Corps/Corpse: The U.S. Military and Homosexuality,”
Western Journal of Communication 68 (2004): 821.
66. Joshua Gunn, “On Queer Secrecy,” Review of Communication 9 (2009): 116.
67. Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” Wired, July 13, 2011,
accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-
logs/.
68. Ibid.
69. McDermott et al, “Avoiding Shame.”
71. The author thanks Dr. James McDonald for the insight that perceived
emotionality leads not only to institutional prejudice against homosexuals, but
also to women and minorities. Although heterosexuals within national security
institutions also display emotional instability and fraught relationships,
emotionality is often invoked to exclude particular types of people (usually
women) from particular occupational roles and leadership positions. See Gail
Harris, A Woman’s War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy’s First
African American Female Intelligence Officer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2010).

54.66.212.33 on Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:22:28 UTC
76 ( Hamilton Bean

73. Ibid.
74. Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York
University Press, 2003).
75. McDonald, “Coming Out in the Field.”
76. Michael Isikoff, “Defying Court’s Rules, Anti-Secrecy Group Posts Tape of
Bradley Manning Statement,” Open Channel, NBC News, March 12, 2013,
accessed June 15, 2013, http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/12/17276268-
defying-courts-rules-anti-secrecy-group-posts-tape-of-bradley-manning-
statement?
lite.
77. Kevin Zeese, “We Must Not Fail Wikileaks Whistleblower Bradley Manning,”
Eurasia Review: News & Analysis, March 3, 2013, accessed June 15, 2013, http://
www.eurasiareview.com/03032013-we-must-not-fail-wikileaks-whistleblower-
bradley-manning-oped/.
78. Berlant, The Queen of America, 222.
79. Zeese, “We Must Not Fail.”
80. Isikoff, “Defying Court’s Rules.”
81. Zeese, “We Must Not Fail.”
82. Ibid.
83. Manuel Klausner and Henry Hohenstein, “Why I Did It! An Interview with
Daniel Ellsberg: An Interview With Daniel Ellsberg Concerning Government
Security, Government Hypocrisy, and the Pentagon Papers,” June 1973, accessed
June 15, 2013, http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/06/why-i-did-it-an-interview-
with.
84. National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, “NSWBC Press Advisory/Release,”
accessed June 16, 2013, http://www.nswbc.org/press.htm.
85. Micah Lee, “Help Spread Bradley Manning’s Words Across the Internet,” Freedom of
the Press Foundation, March 12, 2013, accessed June 15, 2013, https://press
freedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/03/help-spread-bradley-mannings-words-across-
internet.
86. Walter Duranty, “Paris Conference Guards Secrets: No ‘Open Diplomacy’ in
the Sense of Indiscriminate Publicity,” New York Times, January 20, 1919,
accessed June 15, 2013, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res⫽
F50911F7395511738DDDAC0994D9405B898DF1D3.
87. Ibid.
88. C. Fred Alford, “Whistle-Blower Narratives: The Experience of Choiceless
Choice,” Social Research, 74, no. 1 (2007): 224.
89. Bryan C. Taylor, “Organizing the ‘Unknown Subject’: Los Almos, Espionage,
and the Politics of Biography,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 1 (2002): 34.
90. Ibid.

54.66.212.33 on Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:22:28 UTC
91. Daniel Ellsberg, “Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing,” Huffington

Post, January 1, 2013, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
daniel-ellsberg/secrecy-and-national-secu_b_2469058.html. See also Daniel Ellsberg,
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002).
92. The recent case of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is currently providing
additional evidence for this claim.
93. Greenwald, “Whistleblowers.”
94. Ibid.
95. Kitrosser, “What if Daniel Ellsberg Hadn’t Bothered?”
96. Larry Shaughnessy, “Manning Lawyer Questions How Sensitive Leaked Files
Really Were,” CNN, December 16, 2011, accessed June 15, 2013, http://security.
blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/16/manning-lawyer-questions-how-sensitive-leaked-files-
really-were/; Bill Keller, “Private Manning’s Confidant,” New York Times, March
10, 2013, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/opinion/
keller-private-mannings-confidant.html?pagewanted⫽all.
97. Mark Hosenball, “U.S. Officials Privately Say WikiLeaks Damage Limited,”
Reuters, January 18, 2011, accessed June 28, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/
2011/01/18/us-wikileaks-damage-idUSTRE70H6TO20110118.
98. Ewen MacAskill, “WikiLeaks Disclosure Reopens Iraqi Inquiry into Massacre of
Family,” Guardian, September 2, 2011, accessed June 28, 2012, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-iraq-massacre-inquiry.
99. Ibid.
100. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism
and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2009).
101. Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of
Politics,” Cultural Politics 1 (2005): 55.
102. Ibid., 57.
104. Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed.”
105. Ibid.
106. “USA Must Allow Bradley Manning to Use ‘Public Interest’ Defence,” Amnesty
International, June 3, 2013, accessed June 15, 2013 at: http://www.amnesty.org/
en/for-media/press-releases/usa-must-allow-bradley-manning-use-public-interest-
defence-2013-06-03.
107. The author thanks an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
108. Dean, Democracy, 32.
109. It may be too soon to tell, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures
appear to be no more influential than Manning’s in spurring changes to U.S.
national security policy or practice.
110. Edwin Black, “Secrecy and Disclosure as Rhetorical Forms,” Quarterly Journal of
Speech 74 (1988): 136.

54.66.212.33 on Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:22:28 UTC
78 ( Hamilton Bean
111. Ibid., 136.

112. Ibid., 137.
113. Larry Gross, Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press 1993).
115. Black, “Secrecy and Disclosure,” 138.
117. Ibid.
118. Black, “Secrecy and Disclosure,” 146.
120. McDonald, “Coming Out in the Field,” 5.
121. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xii.
122. Ibid.
124. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 49.
125. Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed.” For a discussion of
intersectionality, see Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard:
Violence, Identity, and Queer Public Memories,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13,
no. 4 (2010): 611–52.
126. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980).
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid., 100.
130. Ibid. It appears, however, that Manning was aware of these dynamics,
preferring to wait until after her sentencing to publicly declare her
transgender identity.
131. The author thanks Dr. James McDonald for pointing out that every individual
can be stigmatized or be deemed nonnormative in a particular way based on
multiple forms of difference, i.e., if Manning were a gay Muslim, for instance,
commentators may have focused a lot less on her sexuality and a lot more on her
religious affiliation.
132. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxviii.
133. Davin Grindstaff, “A Review of: ‘Charles E. Morris III, ed., Queering Public
Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse,’” Southern Communication
Journal 74, no. 2 (2009): 230.
135. “Bradley Manning’s Statement Taking Responsibility for Releasing Documents to
WikiLeaks,” Bradley Manning Support Network, February 28, 2013. Accessed
June 15, 2013 at: http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/bradley-mannings-statement-
taking-responsibility-for-releasing-documents-to-wikileaks.

54.66.212.33 on Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:22:28 UTC

137. Ibid., 5.
)))
Hamilton Bean is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at
the University of Colorado-Denver. His research intersects the fields of
communication, organization, and national security affairs. He is he author of No
More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (2011),
and his essays have appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Intelligence and National
Security, Homeland Security Affairs, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency
Management, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, and
elsewhere. He formerly served in management positions for a Washington, D.C.-
based provider of open-source intelligence and analytical support services to clients
in the U.S. intelligence community.

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National Security Culture: From Queer Psychopathology to Queer Citizenship

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identification of opportunities for the development of queer citizenship), the

) ) ) Homosexuality and U.S. National Security Culture

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examples of their ostensible disloyalty or instability drew an enduring connection

) ) ) The Persistence of Queer Psychopathology

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orientation in order to avoid being victimized by bullies, who nevertheless

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) ) ) Manning’s Queer Rhetoric and the Trajectory of

Wells acknowledges in his biography of Ellsberg that, “without question,” he

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Open diplomacy is the opposite of secret diplomacy, which consisted in the

However, Manning did not post the editorial’s conclusion:

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technologies create undeniable intertextual challenges for the authors of bio-

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Another indicator of epistemological shift is the efficacy of contemporary

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instead celebrated the technological: “The reaction to the video [“Collateral

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) ) ) Conclusion: From Psychopathology to Citizenship

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Manning’s disclosure of the video briefly directed public attention to war’s

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72. Wells, Wild Man, 341.

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91. Daniel Ellsberg, “Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing,” Huffington

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111. Ibid., 136.

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136. Berlant, The Queen of America, 223.

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