A gay bomb? You’re kidding me, right? And we’re not talking about Lance Bass?
Imagine that you’re a soldier deployed in the field. It’s been a hard day; you’ve been shelled and shot at, and you and your unit are now holed up under heavy cover trying to get an idea of the enemy numbers and whether or not you have enough ammunition left to survive them.
The tell-tale whistle of a plummeting bomb comes too late for you to take cover, and just soon enough for you to brace yourself to die. The resulting impact shakes the ground beneath you, and you close your eyes and steel yourself for the end.
The silence that follows is deafening. Are you dead? Did it happen that quickly, and now you’re floating in the dark nothingness of the afterlife?
No, stupid, your eyes are still closed. Open your eyes and breathe deep, calm down. There’s a strange smell in the air - thick, but not wholly unpleasant. Soft, alluring, but increasingly strong. You pick yourself up off the ground carefully, brushing at a strange pink dust that clings to your gear. Glancing around you, you notice your compatriots doing the same. And suddenly you’re struck by just how dashing Private Smith looks in his uniform, and how he has the prettiest blue eyes that you’ve ever seen…
Think it’s a joke? I did, too; I’ve been skimming various articles on this topic over the past few days, thinking it had to be a joke. A satirical spoof.
It’s not.
Pentagon Had Plans for ‘Gay Bomb’ - Newsmax.com
The Pentagon considered a proposal to create a hormone bomb that could turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
U.S. military officials told KPIX-TV in San Francisco that a “gay bomb” was on the drawing board in 1994 but then subsequently rejected.
I had to check this out before I could buy it. Turns out they were dead serious - at least, on the fact that the incident on KPIX-TV actually occurred. There’s reference to it on Wikipedia, the BBC, and CBS. I honestly don’t know if I believe they ever intended to do this, but I at least believe that they said they did. Maybe. Kinda. Okay, I’m still a little skeptical.
The idea is…well, the fact that someone even came up with it is hilarious, insulting, and mind-boggling. I mean, sure, there’s something hot about a man in uniform. But suddenly turning said man and his compatriots gay is not going to immediately result in an uncontrollable love-fest, not without some artificial stimulation of the sex drive to overcome the primary thought processes that say “Hey! We’re in a battle zone, and under fire! We should be firing at the enemy troops, not trying to find a place to deposit our little soldiers!” Suddenly becoming gay does not turn you into a ravening beast who instantly jumps anything male in sight. We’re human beings, not dogs in heat. You want people to act that way, you’re going to need a pretty potent aphrodisiac and not just a homosexualizing agent.
Yes, I just made that term up.
Reading various articles on it produces conflicting suggestions; some say it was just intended to be a gay bomb, while the aphrodisiac bomb was something entirely different. So I have no idea what the intention was behind it.
Either way, I can still laugh my bloody arse off. Can you imagine an entire metropolitan area saturated by this chemical? It would be like some screwed-up version of Wraeththu (which is, by a large margin, the worst piece of tripe that I’ve ever read short of a Laurell K. Hamilton novel; it reads like flowery yaoi mpreg fanfiction written by a twelve-year-old girl). There would be some pissed-off wives and girlfriends at home, unless the chemical was unisex and also turned them lesbian and quite content with one another rather than their wayward men. Maybe if Isaiah Washington had had a hot dose of this stuff, he’d still have his job.
As hilarious as that would have been, I’m glad that the Pentagon scrapped the idea. To look at things more seriously, we don’t understand enough about human sexuality and what causes it for us to be tampering around with chemically altering it. All the lab tests in the world don’t prepare you for how a chemical agent will behave in the field, and the effect it will have on large populations - especially not in the long term. In an attempt to create a chemical that would change someone’s sexuality, they may end up creating a biological agent that is permanently damaging not only to the individuals influenced by it, but their environment and those who come in contact with them.
Then again, when has a nation at war ever cared about those things?
gay bomb, pentagon, military, chemical warfare, alternative weapons, biological weapons, changing sexuality
June 12th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Heh, the whole thing sounds like something a think tank might come up with after a few too many Jack Daniels.
Sometimes I wonder if this is the real reason why the government fights information disclosure laws–people are weird and come up with weird things they’d rather forget.
Reading the BBC article is great; better than the “gay bomb” you’ve got the “fart bomb” and “rat bomb.”
June 12th, 2007 at 9:42 am
Oh. My. Holy. Mother. Goddess.
It’s good there’s nobody else in the computer lab, because I just -screamed- with laughter. It sounds like a bad sitcom idea, or some “Band of Brothers” fangirl’s latest plotbunny. They actually paid someone to come up with this?
The Pentagon: Ignoring Genetics, One War at a Time!
June 12th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Oh, yes! I’d heard this idea before. It’s still as hilarious as it was then, and yes, I agree there must be an aphrodisiac bomb that went along with the sparkly pink gay bomb.
On a *very* slightly realistic note, perhaps they *were* thinking long-term effects, of whatever country they used it on dying out for lack of procreation? O.o
June 12th, 2007 at 10:19 am
I don’t think this is funny… People can’t really be this stupid, can they? This has got to be the worst joke ever…
June 12th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
speechless. honestly speechless.
Okay, noow that I caught myself again… So then they are saying that they have said hormone picked out? Then I can choose my sexuality and get a shot to be straight/gay, right? I mean that seems to me to be along the same line of thinking.