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- Mitt Romney Ad: "Day 1" May 18, 2012 Bert McBrayer
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- "Sodomy Is Not A Civil Right." May 18, 2012 Bert McBrayer
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- Happy Fifth Blogiversary To Me May 17, 2012 Bert McBrayer
The end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is quickly approaching. On September 20th the repeal and certification process officially is complete and the sexuality that a person is born will no longer be grounds for discharge. As we approach this historic day that marks the end of seventeen years of institutionalized discrimination former and active duty service members are telling their stories of how they made it through and what it was like to endure.
GQ magazine has collected some of these stories and presents them here.
Like the story of Eric Alva, the first American injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When Alva signed up, before "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," he had to lie on his paperwork. "I knew I was lying," he says. "But I loved what I did, I loved my job, and I didn’t want to tell anyone. I said, ‘It’s going to be my secret.’ I knew I was not going to be happy in a way, but I knew this was what I wanted." In 2003 he was deployed to the Middle East, and on March 21 he crossed the border from Kuwait. His unit was part of a huge convoy that stopped outside Basra. Alva got out of his Humvee and went to fetch something from the back of the vehicle. "That’s when I triggered the IED. I was awake, my hearing was sort of gone. My hand was covered in blood and part of my index finger was gone. The chaplain was holding my head and I was telling him I didn’t want to die. I was taken off a helicopter in Kuwait—it was estimated that I was only in Iraq about three hours—and carried into surgery. I woke up later and when I looked down I saw that the right side of my sheet was flat. I cried myself asleep, only to wake up hours later and see that it’s true: My leg is gone."
DADT not only affected the lives of those who risked their lives on the battlefield. It also took a toll on those they loved.
"The relationship lasted for about four years, but I always felt like I was disrespecting him, to have to pretend he didn’t exist when I went to work. When I got deployed, he was there with my family when I left. It kind of sucked—to shake his hand and a little pat on the back and ‘I’ll see you when I see you’ kind of thing. And when you’re getting ready to come back, the spouses were getting classes—here’s how you welcome your Marine back into the family—and my boyfriend didn’t get any of that. I had a really hard time adjusting to being home. We tried to make it work for a year but he was getting more and more paranoid about people finding out about us. It killed me that he felt that way because of me. I don’t think we ever really had a chance, ultimately."
For some DADT became the weapon used by haters.
The harassment grew worse. Of a number of escalating events—Rocha was also force-fed dog food and locked into a shit-filled dog kennel—the most abusive and explicitly homophobic was when he was ordered by his commander to act in a dog-training scenario, repeated over and over so that every dog in the unit could be run through it. "The scenarios were supposed to be relevant to what the dogs or the handlers would experience. Like a domestic dispute, or an armed individual who has been spotted on the base, or someone strapped with explosives. This day he chose that the scenario would be that I would be getting caught giving another service member a blow job and, once the dogs came in, I was supposed to jump up from having been in between this guy’s legs. He would coach as to how exactly he wanted it played out, which was the sickest part of it." Rocha says he had to act this out between half a dozen and a dozen times, about fifteen to twenty minutes each time. As they repeated it, his commander ordered Rocha to make the scenario more extreme. "He wanted me to be very queer and flamboyant. He wanted me to pretend like there was stuff on my face. Loving it so much that each scenario was gayer and more disgusting—the introduction of fake semen, that I would have to wipe my face, or that I would have to make slurping noises. The level of humiliation I experienced that day, that’s when I knew I wasn’t safe in the military."
I highly recommend heading over there and reading more http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201109/dont-ask-dont-tell-gay-soldiers-military#ixzz1WAXDJMrl
Alex the Fly Killer
The afternoon sun filtered through the window and onto the carpeted living room floor. It created a warm, sunny spot that gradually moved across the room as the sun made its daily journey across the sky. Alex had gotten into the routine of sleeping away the afternoon hours in the sun while waiting for his master to come home from work.
Alex shifted his small body to keep pace with the sun as he worked at cleaning one of his front paws. A slight buzzing noise from across the room caught his attention. His hairy brown and white ears perked up, trying to hone in on the sound. But as he looked about the room, he could not make out the small black dot that had zipped through the door and landed on the black computer tower sitting on the large desk near by.
With the noise gone, Alex scratched his head and lay back down, closing his eyes. It wasn’t long before the disturbance was forgotten and he was back to dreaming of chasing birds and chewing on dog bones the size of his master’s car.
* * *
The little back dot wiggled it’s antennas and then slowly walked to the front edge of the computer tower. As a fly, it knew it was in dangerous territory, his friends having warned him of the fly killing dog. From his high vantage point it could see the beast sunning itself on the floor. The fly also knew that the best crumbs of food were to be found in the carpet under the easy chair on the far side of the room where the human always sat while watching the giant light show. The fly stretched his wings and then hopped off the computer and onto the desk, making his way ever so carefully in the direction of the easy chair.
The fly watched Alex closely, trying to calculate the best path around him to the chair. After a few moments of planning, he finally made his move. He leaped into the air as high as he could, his wings beating furiously. Across the room he went, landing on the arm of the chair. He turned around to check for the dog but all he found was an empty sunny carpeted floor.
The fly began to panic. Where was the dog? Did he leave the room? Where did he go? It was long quiet moment before the fly moved even a single leg. But slowly his confidence began to rise and the panic subsided. The dog must surely have left the room while he was in the air. The fly wasn’t quite certain how the beast could have moved without him seeing it, but he finally decided that the coase was clear and he jumped off the arm of the chair and landed on the floor. He turned around to go under the chair and stopped dead in his tracks.
Peering out from the darkness created by the overstuffed leather cushions, two large eyes attached to the snarling face of Alex the Fly Killer. His teeth were bared and ready to strike. The tension mounted quickly. Alex lunged from the darkness at the fly. It leapt back into the air, desperate to get away.
The chase was on.
The fly rocketed from the room and into the hallway, heading toward the kitchen. Alex was close behind, charging at full speed. As he turned the corner to the kitchen he ran into the garbage can spilling it and its contents onto the linoleum. The fly landed on teh edge of the counter and watched as the dog and trash slid across the floor.
After crashing into the wall, Alex regained his footing. He jumped up at the counter trying to reach the fly. The fly didn’t believe that a small dog could reach the? countertop, but when a large group of teeth narrowly missed him, the fly took to the air once again. Apparently Alex could jump higher than most small dogs.
Alex quickly followed the fly back into the hallway and into the game room. A large table covered with styrofoam hills and plastic trees dominated the room. Alex;s master had carefully arranged the plastic model tanks and infantry on the table, poised in a mock battle. The fly whizzed over the table dodging a company of miniture German Tiger tanks. Alex jumped onto a chair and then onto the table. His claws carved deep trenches into teh carefully painted miniature landscape. As he continued the chase, he knocked over buildings and stepped on the tanks and trucks, sending them scattering about and knocking some to the floor where they landed with a crash, leaving much of the amassed forces ravaged and broken upon the devastated battlefield.
The fly tried his best to get through a closed window near the game table but to no avail. Alex jumped from the table at the fly and nearly fell to the floor. The fly was starting to get desperate. Alex showed no sign of giving up the chase and the fly was running out of options. Finally, the fly decided he had no other choice but to try and hide in the laundry room.
It hurried out of the game room and back into the hallway. Upon entering the laundry room, it looked for a place to hide. The laundry room was almost as hangerous as the living room, as it was home territory for a very aggressive and territorial group of Wasps. The fly ducked down behind the dryer as Alex bolted into the room.
* * *
Alex came to a stop, having lost sight of his prey. He looked around the room and perked up his ears, trying to find the annoying little fly. He could find no trace of the fly as he sniffed at the air. The fly kept as still as possible in his hiding place. The fly couldn’t see Alex but he could hear him moving farther into the room. Finally, disapointed, Alex turned to leave the room and head back to his warm sunny spot on the living room carpet, but before he stepped through the doorway he heard a faint buzzing sound once again. This time it came from a shadowy corner near the ceiling.
Alex barked trying to scare the fly out into the open. A black bot moved from teh shadows and gently floated toward the center of the room. Alex barked again and jumped as high as he could. It was then that he realized that this was not the fly that he had been chasing. It was somehing far worse, a wasp!
* * *
The wasp was not pleased that the noisy dog had invaded his territory and it decided that the beast must be taught a lesson. The wasp dived at Alex as he turned and ran from teh room. alex raced down the hallway and to his master’s bedroom where he quickly dug his way under the covers to hide until his master came home. The wasp followed Alex into the room but was too late. Alex was already safely under the heavy blanket. The wasp could not get at him. There would be other times however the wasp thought, and he headed off.
* * *
Once the wasp and the dog were both safely out of the area, the fly came out of his hiding place. This house was just way too dangerous. He searched around until he found an open window, where he flew outside, leaving the wasp and Alex the Fly Killer far behind him.
The End