Can you hold hands while in uniform?  How about a kiss or embrace?

Believe it or not, those are some of the most often asked questions by new officers and enlisted — and in most cases, the answer wasn’t clear.  Now, however, it’s in plain English:  If you choose to do those things in uniform, you may well be in violation of the new Air Force regulations.

Last year, the Report of the Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with a Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, otherwise known as the report on the DADT survey, noted the ‘sensitivities’ of public displays of affection with respect to homosexuality.  The working group made this observation: 

Rules concerning public displays of affection and proper dress and appearance…are largely unwritten and vary by Service and across commands…However displays of affection — especially while in uniform — are informally discouraged in all the Services as a matter of individual Service culture, traditions, and decorum.

As a result, the team recommended a change:

We also recommend that the Department of Defense instruct the Services to review their current standards of personal and professional conduct to…provide adequate guidance to the extent each Service considers appropriate on unprofessional relationships, harassment, public displays of affection, and dress and appearance.

The Air Force apparently listened, adding a section on PDA to the new Dress and Personal Appearance regulation.

Air Force Instruction (AFI) 36-2903, published just this past 18 July 2011, contains the following paragraph:

2.13.6. When in uniform or civilian clothes (in an official capacity), Airmen must not engage in public displays of affection including, but not limited to, holding hands (except when holding a young child’s hand), walking arm-in-arm, embracing, caressing, and kissing.

In a departure from most military regulations, the next line explains why the rule is in place:

Public displays of affection are inappropriate as they violate a long-standing custom of the service and may be service discrediting since indiscriminate displays of affection detract from the professional image the Air Force intends to project to the public.

In case you’re wondering about kissing the bride at your wedding (in your mess uniform) or the embraces of troops returning home from war, there’s an exception.  Sort of.

2.13.6.1. Brief displays of affection, such as a modest kiss or embrace, may be permitted in situations where physical contact is commonly accepted etiquette such as weddings, graduation, promotion, or retirement ceremonies; and upon departure for or return from deployments.

This is noteworthy because, as the DADT working group noted, the Air Force had never formalized those rules before.  The prior version of AFI 36-2903, still available in some internet locations, never discussed PDA.  In fact, if you web search Air Force PDA, you will likely get many regulations — but they’re almost entirely ROTC or other training-level instructions.  That may be why there is an underlying assumption about rules against PDA — that’s what was taught in training.  As the new AFI notes, however, in the operational Air Force those were actually just “long-standing customs.”

As for the famous photo of the Sailor celebrating V-J day in New York’s Times Square?  He wasn’t returning from war, and he certainly wasn’t getting married.  But he also wasn’t in the Air Force, so he’d have been ok.

Photo by the U.S. Navy, 14 August 1945.