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I should've known better. Yesterday, I wrote that DADT would die not with a bang but a whimper. Wrong! There was, indeed, a media fanfare, with general agreement that this was a very good thing. Apparently, I'm an anachronism; but after spending my early adulthood in the Jim Crow era of LGBT issues, it still kills me that mainstream America has come to agree that treating lesbians and gay men equally is worth celebrating.
Here, then, are the most interesting DADT pieces I saw:
- On YouTube, a young man who says he's a service member based in Berlin comes out to his father in Alabama on a phone call and posts it, live. This went viral. Have your hankies ready. (Cynic alert: Am I the only one who thinks it's creepy to webcast such an intimate moment? Or wonders if the dude is who he says he is?)
- Chris Geidner at MetroWeekly asked some of the pioneering opponents of DADT for their thoughts here, notably including Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer and Michelle Benecke, who helped found the first nationwide group opposed to DADT, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. (It's easy to forget, since most of the attention is on the men, but women were disproportionately discharged under DADT -- often, they say, in retaliation for speaking out about sexual harassment.)
- DADT got a nice epitaph from The New York Times, with a moving profile of the man who founded OutServe, a group of active-duty gay and lesbian service members. For the first time, "J.D. Smith" comes out publicly as Air Force Lieutenant Josh Seefried.
- OutServe's Seefried also came out in Stars and Stripes. My favorite quote: "You can only bring your 'roommate' to so many functions before people start to figure it out." Ah, I remember those days!
- And no news day is complete unless The Onion has a little fun with it. Here is its piece called "First-Ever Gay 'Dear John' Letters Begin Reaching U.S. Troops Overseas."
