VIDEO KILLED THE MILITARY STAR

Shit is hitting the fan over this news.

Captain Owen P. Honors, Jr, the commander of the Norfolk-based USS Enterprise, used government equipment to produce and broadcast a homemade video.  While the ship was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006 and '07, the video was televised to all on board, around 6,000 servicemen.

The video content contains anti-gay subject matter along with sexism and just plain raunchiness.

Now the Navy is stepping in with an investigation.

The Virginian-Pilot reports:

In one scene, two female Navy sailors stand in a shower stall aboard the aircraft carrier, pretending to wash each other. They joke about how they should get six minutes under the water instead of the mandated three.

In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.

In the videos, Honors indicates that he's trying to entertain the crew. They were shown roughly once a week on closed-circuit shipwide television, according to a handful of sailors who were assigned to the Enterprise at the time. The sailors requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

One of them said he mailed a complaint about the videos to the Navy Inspector General this week. Others said crew members who raised concerns aboard the ship in 2006 and 2007 were brushed off.

[Honor says:]  "Over the years I've gotten several complaints about inappropriate materials in these videos, never to me personally but, gutlessly, through other channels."

He adds, "This evening, all of you bleeding hearts... why don't just go ahead and hug yourself for the next 20 minutes or so, because there's a really good chance you're gonna be offended."

Then Honors tells his viewers to get ready for something that always pleases: "the F-bomb." The video goes on to show a string of clips edited together in which he uses the expletive.

The next portion is a series of clips displaying Honors and other sailors, including officers, pretending to masturbate. It's set to a song called "Spank."

After that, the video returns to Honors. "Finally, let's get to my favorite topic - something foreign to the gay kid over there: chicks in the shower," he says.

He gestures to the person next to him - who, through a trick of video, is Honors wearing the blue coveralls of a Navy surface warfare officer, or SWO. SWOs include the officers who crew the ship; they don't include fighter pilots and other aviators. Repeatedly in the videos, Honors, a former Top Gun pilot, draws distinctions between aviators and SWOs and refers to SWOs as "fags."

The video then shows two female sailors pretending to shower together and two male sailors pretending to shower together. While the shots imply nudity, they don't show any; the men are filmed from the waist up and the women from their shoulders.