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prologue Gays in the Military Amid the early debates on what came to be known as ‘‘Gays in the Military ,’’ General Colin Powell was invited to be the honorary commencement speaker at Harvard University in June 1993. Many graduating students were angered by the university’s decision to invite the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta√, who was opposed to President Bill Clinton’s early proposal to allow gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly in the American armed forces. Barely two months after an historic lesbian, gay, and bisexual march on Washington, D.C., in April 1993, when hundreds of thousands of queer people from all over the nation asked the newly inaugurated president to live up to his campaign promises and fight for their civil rights, many Harvard students felt that General Powell’s position represented institutional homophobia in the military and viewed his commencement address as an insulting way to mark the culmination of their college careers. In the spring days leading up to the event, the Harvard-Radcli√e Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Student Association quickly organized a protest for the graduation ceremony that was intended to express its opposition to the ban on gays in the military while not disrupting the commencement exercises for those students and families gathered from across the globe to celebrate many years of study, sacrifice, and hard work. Festive pink balloons marked with slogans such as ‘‘Lift the Ban’’ were distributed to willing faculty and students marching in the procession. Hundreds of student mortarboards were covered with pink protest stickers. Academic robes were adorned with protest pins on which the American flag’s white stars had been replaced with pink triangles. And at the moment during the morning exercises when General Powell was to be presented with his honorary degree, graduating students were asked to stand on their folding chairs, turn their backs to the honoree, and hold up opposition posters for the gathered families, alumni, and journalists sitting in the rows behind, under the lush green trees in Harvard Yard. The protest was a great success. Rather than attempting to block the procession or drown out the speaker, the protesters succeeded in conveying a clear message with their festive balloons and colorful posters, and in drawing the attention of the media. That week, prominent articles appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times describing the event as one of many xii Prologue across the nation that spring where Americans spoke out against the discriminatory military policy that was later known as ‘‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue.’’∞ That June day in 1993 also marked an important milestone in the relationship between my military father and his gay son. As the first in my working-class family to earn a bachelor’s degree, I was acutely aware of what this day meant to my parents. The children of immigrant families from Ireland and Scandinavia, my father and mother had grown up poor in Boston tenements and housing projects, had struggled all their adult lives to raise three children, and were now coming to see their youngest son graduate from college. Like many parents across America, mine had taken on enormous financial burdens, exhausting overtime work, and hefty long-term loans to pay for my college education. Yet, in addition to these financial challenges, my parents had sacrificed a great deal more in their struggle to raise and educate a gay son. When the Gulf War broke out in 1991 during the winter of my sophomore year, there were heated debates in my family about what I and my older brother, Kevin, would do in the event of a protracted conflict and the return of the draft. My father, who had lost an entire generation of his peers to the war in Vietnam, wanted to spare his sons from a similar fate. As the daughter of immigrants, however, my mother felt a keen sense of patriotism and believed that it was our duty to serve the country if drafted into service. Despite what I saw as an ironic gender disparity between a civilian mother who (like Shakespeare’s Volumnia) expected her sons to fight and a military father who (like many parents during the Vietnam era) wanted to save his boys from harm, I understood the logic of my parents’ opposing positions. While my mother’s patriotism grew from an idealistic sense of immigrant gratitude, my father intimately understood—after...

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