WASHINGTON — With the ban on gays serving openly in the military inching closer to repeal, gay soldiers and their advocates scheduled a dinner this November on the Air Force Academy campus, planning to invite the academy’s superintendent and a member of Congress.

The two groups sponsoring the event signed a contract and put down a deposit, but the dinner was canceled last month by the academy’s alumni organization, which controls the venue where it was to be held.

A spokesman said the event placed the school’s leadership in the tough spot of appearing to endorse repeal of the current ban, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The turnabout has set off a fusillade of charges and countercharges, focusing attention on the institution that is known as the most conservative of the service academies just as the military studies the possibility of welcoming openly gay fighters.

A spokesman for the group OutServe, one of the dinner’s sponsors whose members include gay Air Force Academy graduates currently serving, called the cancelation “blatant discrimination.”

The event was meant not as a political statement but to recognize the contribution of gays and lesbians to the country’s armed forces, said the spokesman, who is a lieutenant in the active-duty military.

Gary Howe, executive vice president of the alumni association — known as the Association of Graduates — said the groups are trying to embarrass the Air Force Academy at a delicate moment in the debate.

“To think that holding such an event on the United States Air Force Academy (campus) would not be political, I think they’re blowing smoke,” Howe said.

Colliding perceptions

The dinner and cancelation underscore the complexity of the issue. The Pentagon endorsed repeal early this year, but the ban remains in place. The House has approved it, but repeal awaits a vote in the Senate.

Impatient and increasingly active, gay service members and advocates are pushing boundaries at every level. OutServe, for example, is made up of hundreds of active-duty personnel who would be discharged if their identities became known before repeal was implemented.

The dinner’s organizers say the event — scheduled for Nov. 12 — would have been limited to highlighting the biographies of several gay and lesbian AFA graduates who had had successful military careers but are now out of the Air Force.

Opponents “perceive the dinner as being something very different than what we perceive it to be,” said Greg Mooneyham, a former combat pilot and the director of Blue Alliance, a group of gay and lesbian academy alumni and the event’s other sponsor.

The dinner was scheduled at Doolittle Hall, which is at the center of the Air Force Academy campus but can be rented by the general public for events. The hall and grounds around it are leased from the Air Force by the academy’s alumni group.

U.S. Sen. Mark Udall was invited but had yet to accept. And at least one of the groups had begun to reach out to cadets to invite them to attend.

The scale of the event honoring gay fighters would have been unprecedented at the Air Force Academy — and a highly unusual event on any military installation.

But its supporters say it would serve to lay the groundwork for a transition to an open military by showing that gays and lesbians have already made successful soldiers.

Howe said that despite the contract and deposit, he canceled the event when he learned more details, including the invitation to a lawmaker and the participation of OutServe, which he views as a political organization.

“The superintendent of the academy works for the chief of staff of the Air Force, and as far as I know, he hasn’t said what he thinks” about repeal, Howe said.

“We will not support any group who is trying to change Air Force policy. That’s not what we’re about,” he said.

Easing toward repeal

Speaking before a Senate committee earlier this year, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he personally supported ending the policy, enacted by Congress in 1993.

But in May, the joint chiefs of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force asked Congress to hold off on repealing the policy until after a Pentagon study was done.

In recent months, the Pentagon has been careful to ease the tradition-bound institutions of the military toward repeal, surveying more than 400,000 current service members and their families about the move and undertaking the months-long study due to President Barack Obama by Dec. 1.

Don’t ask, don’t scrum

Some of the difficulties ahead are underscored by recent events at the Air Force Academy itself, which critics say has a more conservative culture than the Naval Academy or West Point.

In 2008, a humanities professor was disciplined for inviting members of the Blue Alliance to a class to talk about “don’t ask, don’t tell” without her superiors’ permission.

In the fall of the same year, the academy’s military leadership threatened to disband the women’s rugby team after complaints that it had become a “breeding ground of lesbianism,” a member of the team at the time said.

“They basically said, ‘We’ve heard these accusations, and . . . if there is any truth to it, then there is a possibility that the entire team would be disbanded,’ ” said one of the former team members, now a second lieutenant in the Air Force.

Though he had yet to accept the invitation, Udall said he was “disappointed” to learn the dinner had been canceled.

“Supporting our service members, no matter their sexual orientation, is and has always been a top priority,” Udall said.

Mooneyham said the groups still hope to hold the dinner on the same date — and in conjunction with a Blue Alliance board meeting — but it will be in a venue off the Air Force Academy campus.

Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com