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Why We March: The Long Fight for LGBT Equality in the U.S. Military
Forty-Five years ago I began coming out to myself while serving as a 19-year-old “slick sleeved” Private in the U.S. Army at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts. I was excited to spend my first weekend off base in Boston with a small group of women from “G” Company, under the command of the Army Security Agency training center.
I would make a fateful first visit to a gay bar called the “Other Side” in Boston that would alter the beginning of my Army career and ultimately reshape my values and shift the priorities of how I would live my life.
In this seminal life moment my identity as a lesbian was certainly not solidified as I was in the exploratory stages of acknowledging my attraction to women, something that had occurred to me when I was a sophomore at Indiana University in 1973. But when I was romantically approached by a woman on my dormitory floor, I was immediately frightened of my feelings, burying them almost instantaneously and I avoided this woman until I left.
Four months later when I stepped onto the dance floor at the Other Side to gay disco music, I was at the very beginning of a fragile realization that I might be a lesbian — I had kissed a woman for the first time in the laundry room of Charlie Company, Basic Training at Ft. McClellan, Alabama. But I would soon come to…
