"Native in the Bush"

The fact that homosexuals no longer seemed so easy to identify made them seem even more dangerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbor could be one. The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America. The new image was invoked to justify a new wave of assaults on gay men in the postwar decade.

-Gay New York, p 360

I'm going to once again draw GNY back to something from earlier in AmCon. Here the homosexual is cast as the "native in the bush," that invisible threat always haunting paranoid America. This paranoia really comes to its peak in the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy; all of our fears regarding secret homosexuals are made manifest. Of course this policy is entirely foolish; if our society tolerated (to a greater extent) homosexuality, then there wouldn't be secret homosexuals in the first place, but all DADT succeeds in is forcing them to keep themselves secret. In other words, DADT doesn't alleviate a fear, it perpetuates it.