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Until fairly recently, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals did not have a specific month during which to celebrate and commemorate Pride Days in the United States. Once I came out, once I went through that fearful hearing, it turned out so much different from what I feared - that gave me the strength to continue the process of.
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I was officially discharged on April 1, 1968. That was a huge turning point in my life.Īfter the hearing, the Pentagon repeatedly recommended me for a kind of discharge typically used for misconduct, but the hearing board maintained their recommendation and the Pentagon finally accepted it. I was just shaking because I could hardly believe the kind of support I was getting. I signed them, didn’t I?’ The entire hearing room went dead for a few seconds. The questioning officer said, ‘Perhaps you didn’t mean them.’ And he responded: ‘Of course I meant them. When one of the officers was given the opportunity to recant his excellent evaluation of me, his fingers gripped the edges of an armchair and turned white. The fact that my officers stood up for me shocked me. Instead, he reported me.Īt my trial, all of my officers testified that they didn’t care I was gay. So I went to a Navy psychiatrist and asked about conversion therapy. I was 20 years old and coming to terms with my sexuality. I became a hospital corpsman and was stationed at what was then called Bethesda Naval Hospital, now Walter Reed.
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Rather than get drafted, I followed a family tradition and enlisted in the Navy. I graduated high school in 1965 during the Vietnam War. What that meant for me, and what it still means, is that I can be this human being, who is gay. “The Internet lets you have a really big support group, even if you live in an area where it’s not fully supportive,” Darbin said.ĭavid Casker, pictured around 1969, said he was shocked by the support he received from his commanding officers in the military after he came out in 1967. She said that although her children are spread out in different cities so they won’t be celebrating together this year, she continues to observe Pride in the 27,000-member Facebook group Serendipitydodah, for parents of LGBTQ youth. But once they came out, they knew they had the support of their parents,” Darbin said. One is transgender, one is nonbinary, one is gay and one is asexual all have come out at different times in the past decade. Tamara Darbin, 53, of Caldwell, Idaho, celebrates Pride for her four adult children. “For this first Pride that I’m embracing as an openly gay man, it is more about … reflection and examination and trying to let go of the past hurts and honoring the past relationships while looking ahead to what I hope will be a more open and honest future,” Bryant said.įor others, Pride is about supporting their family. Many in-person Pride events in Houston are on hold because of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean he’s not taking part in his own way. And in that time, it really kind of made me think about the scope of my life,” he said. “Like everybody else, I spent a lot of time at home in kind of an isolation. Bryant, who was married to a woman for 34 years, said that although a part of him always knew he was not straight, the pandemic helped push him into deeper self reflection that began his process of coming out last fall.