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  • Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, and Queer Collaboration
  • Victoria A. Brownworth (bio)

Every minority community has their causes celebre—issues or people that define civil rights actions and movements within that community. Consider political prisoners Nelson Mandela for black South Africans, Aung San Suu Kyi for Burmese freedom fighters, or Ai Wei Wei for Chinese dissidents. For LGBT people, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning1 should have been such a cause celebre, a role model of political purpose as well as fortitude, a role model whose struggles didn’t just mirror our own, but illuminated them.

Yet for the 41 long months prior to trial during which Manning was incarcerated (and at times held in conditions so extreme that the International Red Cross demanded to see him, as they would a prisoner in a hidden “black site” prison post-extraordinary rendition), Manning, a gay man, was a near cipher to his own community, and to many within that community, an actual pariah.

Why did we fail Bradley Manning so badly as a community, even as we have embraced the now-sentenced, imprisoned-for-35-years Chelsea? Why was a young gay man—isolated as a soldier questioning whether he was a gay man or a transwoman, then isolated still more as a prisoner—not someone we felt passionate about or compassionate towards during a time which would have, and has, driven many prisoners to literal madness? [End Page 105]

Why was Manning the World’s Prisoner of Conscience, but Not Our Own?

I’ve written a lot about Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning over the past three-plus years since Manning’s arrest in May 2010. It’s been a mixed bag of work: straight news reports, opinion pieces, and discursive mixes of the two. I’ve even written about Manning in my weekly column on LGBT TV, The Lavender Tube, under the heading “the news you’re not seeing.” The stories have been ongoing: Manning arrested, Manning transported to the United States, Manning kept in solitary confinement, Manning tortured, Manning strip-searched, Manning awaiting charges, and on and on.

Anything to keep Manning’s case in the news even as the Obama administration and the president’s own war on whistleblowers was intent on burying that news, much as they have in the time since with Edward Snowden (albeit Snowden fled the United States and Manning was always imprisoned).

My articles on Manning have appeared in various publications, straight and gay, but I reported on Manning regularly for the Advocate throughout the time between his arrest and his sentencing, and the day after the sentencing.2 I note this, because I was the only reporter in the LGBT media writing about Manning over the entirety of the case. As recently as the beginning of September 2013, nongay readers of those pieces told me they’d learned things from my reporting that they hadn’t seen elsewhere about Manning, like the five medals then-Bradley received while serving in Iraq or that there is a long history of U.S. presidents pardoning military personnel charged with treason, espionage, or leaking classified information, or that Manning was wooed by WikiLeaks at a time when he was desperately lonely and concomitantly increasingly concerned over what he had learned about U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s been a quixotic journey, writing about Manning. I won’t—I can’t—pretend dispassion or a lack of bias. To me, Manning was and is heroic. Every piece I’ve ever written about Manning has stipulated that, either overtly or subtextually. What the United States learned as a nation because of the documents revealed by Manning meant none of us could any longer ignore the facts: The United States was neither innocent of aggression nor innocent of killing innocents. As Daniel Ellsberg, himself arrested on the same charges as Manning in 1971, told me for a piece I wrote in February during Manning’s preliminary hearing, Manning’s revelations helped end the Iraq War, saving countless lives, just as Ellsberg’s own had shifted American consciousness about Vietnam.

My belief in Manning’s heroism and vital importance to U.S. history is what led me to...

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