SOURCE: "Americans Fighting for the Right to Serve," in The Observer, November 7, 1993, p. 21.

Below, Smoler offers a positive review of Conduct Unbecoming.

Randy Shilts, the most prominent American reporter to have identified himself as a gay journalist, has written two previous books on American politics, one on HIV and the other on Harvey Milk. (And the Band Played On and The Mayor of Castro Street). Both were compounded of admirable reporting and liberal interpretation.

Conduct Unbecoming has Shilts's customary virtues and occasional limitations—the strengths and weaknesses of liberal American reportage. It is splendid on human interest achieved through interwoven individual biographies, but thoughts on the place of its subject in the larger American political culture are kept under wraps.

Shilts traces the lives of a number of gay men and women through the post-war American military, following them from enlistment—itself often an attempted flight from homosexuality...