For gays in the military, the status has seldom remained status quo for very long, morphing drastically in the last half-century from a practice utterly scorned and rejected to an increasingly open affair.
In the late 1960s, being ousted inflatable water slide could be life threatening, and even until the ‘90s and ‘00s, discrimination against gays in the military remained strong.
“When I served, if you were found out, your fellow service members would kill you. Literally,” said Denny Meyer, a Vietnam-era service veteran and national spokesperson for American Veterans for Equal Rights and the Transgender American Veterans Association. “With the anti-Vietnam war stuff, the general mentality in America was that, ‘Why would you want to serve?’ But there were patriots who always have wanted to serve, and being gay made no difference whatsoever.”
In an effort to “correct this legacy of injustice,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz drafted a bill entitled bouncy castle the Restore Honor to Service Members Act late last month.
The bill calls for the streamlining of the process to allow gay veterans that were discharged due to their homosexuality to remove discriminatory narratives from their discharge paperwork.
Read more:Glendale Register – Gay Veterans react to Restore Honor to Service Members Act
