Conduct Unbecoming

Anyone paying attention could have predicted the subject of Shilts’s last book: whether gay individuals could or should serve openly in the US military. Once again, news events had good timing for Shilts’s new interest: a 1990 battle by Edward Modesto, a decorated colonel in the US Army, to avoid court-martial fell into Shilts’s lap. It wasn’t the first such battle the military had engaged against a gay soldier, Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich’s protracted battle starting in 1974 perhaps being the best known. Colonel Modesto, an Indiana native and an army dentist for eighteen years (just two years