"Friends that I've met on campus will ask how 'Nazi' is doing," he says.

Gonzalez bristles at that sort of comparison as inconsistent with the military's or his own service mission.

"It's saying that serving your country in the armed services is just like being a tool of an armed oppressor. I see the military's job as the exact opposite--protecting the innocent like the Kosovar Albanians," he says.

"I've always wanted to serve my country and what they're saying is equating national service, which I deem honorable, with definite evils," he adds.

Gonzalez recognizes that not everyone shares his views on ROTC and the military in general. Eager to discuss the controversy, he feels the issue requires careful consideration.

"Just by saying we don't want ROTC on our campus is not adding constructively to the argument. It's casting it aside in the shadows," he says. "This debate is a great thing that a lot can be achieved from."

While Gonzalez thinks that the armed forces will eventually confront the issue of "don't ask, don't tell," he sees student discussion as an important precursor to policy change.

"I do believe that one day homosexuals will be fully integrated into the military. What is more important for now is to create an atmosphere for debate and acknowledgement that there is a problem," he says.

Out of Service

Laura C. Moore, MIT Class of 1991, was an ROTC midshipman as an undergraduate and served on active duty. Moore says she never came out about her bisexuality while she was saving but saw many cases of discrimination against other recruits.

"The ROTC unit at MIT had students from Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, and Tufts--a pretty enlightened and educated bunch of people," she says. "Yet when the topic came to gays in the military, the level of anger and closed-mindedness I saw was shocking."

Moore says that while she was in ROTC, there was a push by some Harvard midshipmen to bring the program back to campus. She remembers talking about the discrimination issue with one of the students behind the campaign: "He said that the military shouldn't have to accept people who had something wrong with them, whether they were gay or had a leg missing, or whatever--his words."

"There weren't any openly gay people in ROTC to discriminate against, but the atmosphere was certainly homophobic," she adds, saying that among midshipmen, the word "fag" was considered to be the ultimate insult.

She tells the story of an MIT student who was in her company in ROTC for a semester. When the student came out to his unit commander at the beginning of his senior year, the Navy demanded he payback the first three years of his full scholar-ship.

The Navy relented after the student took his case to the press. But Moore says the military is missing out.

"He would have made a better officer than any officer I knew on active duty," she says. "But because he was gay, he couldn't serve and the military lost out. The Navy could have benefitted by someone of his caliber."

Considering All Sides