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Servicemembers United (SU), in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, launched its national tour, "Voices of Honor: A Generation Under 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'" with a press conference lead by U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy, primary sponsor of H.R.1283, legislation to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT). He was flanked by several former service members in front of Independence Hall on July 28.  The day concluded with a town hall meeting at the studios of WHYY in Philadelphia.

According to the SU website "this national tour highlights the discriminatory law (DADT) that hurts military readiness and national security while putting American soldiers fighting overseas at risk."

As both a queer civil rights advocate and a gay military veteran, I eagerly attended the town hall meeting but was saddened by the lack of attendance by the many queer "activists" and community "leaders" from the Philadelphia region.  The repeal of DADT is of such major significance to our community I was dumbfounded at how little interest our community seemed to have toward this event.

Those who attended heard firsthand accounts by five former service members, one of them heterosexual, on how DADT impacts the lives queer and hetero service members alike, the readiness of the U.S. Military, and our national security.  All five speakers shared their personal stories of their journey through the U.S. Military's policy on queers. (Read their stories here.)

One speaker, Alex Nicholson told of how an invasion of his privacy revealed that he was a gay man.  He was a 19 year old Human Intelligence Collector (aka, Interrogator) who is fluent in five languages including Arabic who believed he was fully abiding by the DADT policy until a fellow soldier in his unit found and read a private letter he had written, in Portuguese, to a friend. Alex was discharged, in opposition to the support from his Brigade Commander, six months after 9-11.

Another speaker was Jarrod Chlapowski, who finished second in his class at the Defense Language Institute at Goodfellow Air Force Base, where he trained as a Korean linguist and cryptologic voice interceptor.  Chlapowski, a recipient of an Army Achievement Medal and the Army Commendation Medal, came out to members of his unit after coming to terms with his own sexuality while on active duty in Korea where he "experienced widespread acceptance by his peers."  Overtime though he witnessed the "excessive burden" that DADT was placing on queer service members and with the fear of own discharged hanging over his head he chose not to re-enlist in the Army.

Stephen Vossler, a heterosexual former servicemember on the tour, told us about his fear of queers and how he was raised to believe it was unnatural.  His roommate at the Defense Language Institute was a service member who was being discharged under DADT.  While watching his roommate struggle with all the negative affects of being discharge under DADT Vossler became close friends with Chlapowski and after six months discovered that Chlapowski was also a gay man. His new found friendship with this queer service member led Vossler to see just how unjust and ridiculous DADT really was.

Since DADT was enacted in 1993 over 11,000 capable service members have been discharged, including over 300 linguists, 49 nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare specialists, 90 nuclear power engineers, 52 missile guidance and control operators, 150 rocket, missile and other artillery specialists, and 340 infantrymen. This does not include the thousands who did not re-enlist because of DADT.

Disturbingly, queer service members who are returning from combat zones and seek counseling for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are unable to fully participate in such counseling sessions where speaking about personal relations is a part of the process.  Since there is no provider/patient confidentiality in the military, there is the constant fear that they will be unjustly outed by their counselor.  Also troubling to service members who are discharge under DADT is that the reason for their discharge, while honorable, is noted on the individual's discharge papers (DD 214) and in a country where discrimination against queers is still legal in most States, this fact could become a scarlet letter while seeking a job.

As a former service member, I understand the fear and pressure of hiding one's sexuality from friends and commanders, but the reality is queer service members are a fact of life.  We have always been there and always will be. We serve, we lead, and we command with distinction and honor.

For those who make the claim that you or your children will not serve under a queer commander, I would tell you that you already are.  Those who would object to serving side-by-side with queer service members I suspect you would have had the same objections to serving with and under African-Americans and women in the military when their integration into the military took place.  Your homophobia does not serve your country well.

DADT is completely inconsistent with the ethical standards we have come to expect from our military personnel and with those we trust with our security and whom we rely upon to maintain our freedom.

DADT will be repealed; there is no turning back now. I hope this time next year we will be celebrating its complete repeal for a stronger and more ready military force.  God Bless America!

RELATED STORIES: Servicemembers United Executive Director on NPR's 'Fresh Air / Alex Nicholson: Talking About 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

Recommended Reading: Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, By Nathaniel Frank (Purchase here)

I've always adored the Pet Shop Boys. Now they're back in the news, ten albums later, and still following their own style of being, well, the Pet Shop Boys and out Neil Tennant and Chris Love. Journalist Andrew Sullivan interviewed them in OUT (June/July 2009).  "We've maintained that the Pet Shop Boys are always an alternative to what's going on. It's 1992, it's all about Nirvana, but there's still the Pet Shop Boys. It's 2009, it's all about the Pussycat dolls or something, but there's still the Pet shop Boys. And I imagine that people in America hear a song of ours and think, 'Oh, the Pet Shop Boys,' and they buy a song and suddenly find themselves drawn into the world of the Pet shop Boys and the records with their one-word titles and their designs and their videos and the recordings with Liza Minelli and Dusty Springfield and the remixes with Madonna. It's our way of not really competing--and it's why I'm not really bothered about success in America because we really try to exist in our world."

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It's the 40th anniversary of "Woodstock," the live outdoor concert and "happening" in 1969. There's, of course, been "Woodstock," the documentary/concert movie, and next month, "Woodstock Remembered," directed by Ang Lee with a who's who of Hollywood appearing in the film, opens in theaters nationwide. The event is one of the few of its kind that people still talk about, pointed out folk singer/songwriter Arlo Guthrie, a national treasure in his own right of "Alice Restaurant," and the son of American legendary singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie of "This Land is Your Land." In The New York Times (July 26, 2009), he talked with Deborah Solomon about being an iconic figure of the 1960s counterculture (he's now a grandfather and a registered Republican because he believes in the need for "loyal opposition" in our nation's Democratically dominated political world), why he won't be performing his classic song for the reunion concert ("Most of the audience that follows me is already sick of hearing it [Alice's Restaurant]," and the importance of folk music despite it unpopularity today ("Folk music is music that everyday people can play, and it inspired a lot of people to make their own music"). What of "Woodstock" as event itself?  Guthrie recalls that it wasn't just white kids from the suburbs discovering camping and smoking pot in the rain. "If it had been just that, that would have been fun enough, but the truth is it wasn't that. There were all colors of kids and varieties of kids, and these were the very same kids who had been brought up to believe in grade school that when you see the big white mushroom cloud, be sure to get under the desk quickly."  In the age of flower power and free love, there must have been at least a few queer ones in the crowd. Were you there?

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Queer pop film director John Waters and classic American queer playwright Tennessee Williams seem an unlikely pair but in a return to evaluating "The Memoirs" from the author of award-winning plays, "Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Glass Menagerie and "One Arm," an amazing collection of short stories, among others, the ever-surprising Waters recounts the influence of the former upon the latter (The New York Times Book Review, November 19, 2006). "Years later, Tennessee Williams saved my life. The first time I went to a gay bar I was 17 years old. It was called the Hut . . . in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as The Chicken Hut, and it was filled with early 1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters, who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. 'I may be queer but I ain't this.' I remember thinking. . . Tennessee never seemed 'gayly-correct' even then, and sexual ambiguity and confusion were always made appealing and exciting in his work . . . [he] didn't fit into his own minority, so I had confidence not to either. Gay was not enough."