NORFOLK, Va. — Raunchy comedy videos made by a high-ranking Navy commander and shown to the crew of an aircraft carrier three or four years ago have suddenly proved an embarrassment to the Pentagon that could blight the officer’s career.
The videos, released Sunday by a newspaper in this Navy port city, feature Capt. Owen Honors using gay slurs, pantomiming masturbation and staging suggestive shower scenes.
They were played on the shipwide television system during weekly movie night when Honors was executive officer, or second in command, of the USS Enterprise. He has since become commander of the ship.
The Navy at first downplayed the videos as “humorous skits,” then called them “not acceptable” and said they are under investigation.
Asked whether Honors’ command of the Enterprise was at risk, Cmdr. Chris Sims of U.S. Fleet Forces Command said in an e-mail: “The investigation currently being conducted will provide the necessary information to make that decision.”
The videos’ existence was not news to Navy higher-ups. In a statement to the Virginian-Pilot on Friday, the Navy said its leadership put a stop to videos with “inappropriate content” on the Enterprise about four years ago.
“They were probably hoping it would all go away, and it didn’t,” said Michael Corgan, a career Navy officer who now teaches at Boston University. Corgan said Honors was guilty not only of an error in judgment but of failing to recognize a changing Navy culture.
The military has undergone a cultural shift in recent decades away from the loutish, frat-boy behavior that was exposed by the 1991 Tailhook scandal. It is now working to accommodate gays in its ranks with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Some sailors who served on the Enterprise are defending Honors. They portrayed him as a man who cared about his sailors and helped them blow off steam with corny and occasionally outrageous videos he concocted every week during six-month tours of duty in the Middle East at the height of the Iraq war.
One offending video shown in 2007 was a compilation of previous videos Honors had shown, sailor Misty Davis, who served on the Enterprise from 2006 to 2010, and others said. “It’s no worse than anything you’d see on ‘Saturday Night Live’ or ‘The Family Guy,’ ” Davis said Monday. “I used to watch all of them. They were freaking hilarious.”
“Capt. Honors is a very professional person, but he knew when to have fun,” Colorado native Jessica Zabawa wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. She served on the Enterprise from 2007 until September.
The Virginian-Pilot quoted unidentified crew members as saying they raised concerns aboard the ship about the videos when they aired but were brushed off.
