Lesbian wants to return to West Point in the open
Ohioan prepares in case ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is halted
Katherine Miller felt that lying about her sexual orientation violated the academy’s honor code. .
FINDLAY, Ohio — Katherine Miller got pretty good at hiding her sexuality in high school, brushing off questions about her weekend plans and referring to her girlfriend, Kristin, as “Kris.” She figured she could pull it off at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, too. After all, “don’t ask, don’t tell” sounded a lot like how she had gotten through her teen years.
But something changed when she arrived at West Point two years ago. She felt the sting of guilt with every lie that violated the academy’s honor code. Then, near the end of her first year, she found herself in a classroom discussion about gays in the military, listening to friends say gays disgusted them. “I couldn’t work up the courage to foster an argument against what they were saying for fear of being targeted as a gay myself,” Miller said. “I had to be silent. That’s not what I wanted to become.”
What she has become is an unlikely activist for repealing the ban on gays serving openly in the military. She resigned from the academy in August and within days was one of the most prominent faces of the debate. Yet her greatest hope now is that she can return to the place she just left. For that to happen, President Barack Obama must make good on his promise to gay-rights groups that he would push to repeal the 1993 law by the end of the year. The House has signed off on the idea, and the Senate is preparing to debate it in the coming weeks.
On Tuesday, the Defense Department will release a report that will help shape what Congress decides.
Miller, 21, grew up in rural northwestern Ohio, where she was captain of her high-school softball team and voted most likely to become president. She started dreaming of going to West Point around the time she turned 16 — more than a year before she came to accept that she was gay. Even after that, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was no more than a passing concern.
Miller wanted to be a leader at the academy, someone with honor. She excelled, ranking near the top of her class of more than 1,100 cadets going into their third year. But she also was hiding. “I realized that I wasn’t becoming the leader of character that I wanted to be,” she said. Other gay cadets in her small circle of friends tried to persuade her to stick it out. Conforming, after all, is a tenet taught in the military. “It was definitely an option,” Miller said. “I just chose not to live my life that way. I’m pretty stubborn in my values. I needed to get out and declare who I was.”
Still, she wonders whether she should have stayed and tried to survive under the policy. “At the same time, I don’t think that I would’ve made nearly the impact that coming out publicly made,” she said. What hurt the most after her resignation were negative comments from people in her hometown, Miller said. Some were hateful. Some accused her of wasting the military’s time and money. Some called her selfish for taking a spot in the academy from someone else. “My intentions were honorable. It wasn’t to become a gay-rights activist,” she said. “It was something I was forced to think about once I got there.”
Miller resigned a week before she would have been required to commit to finish her final two years and serve five years in the military. Cadets who withdraw in their first two years don’t owe the government service or compensation for the education and benefits they’ve received. There was no answer Friday at the academy’s public-affairs office. A West Point spokesman said in August that Miller had done very well academically, militarily and physically. The harshest criticism from former classmates came after she wore her dress whites on the red carpet with Lady Gaga at the MTV Video Music Awards. They felt she was using her uniform to make a political statement.
Miller doesn’t regret the decision. But she doubts she’ll wear her uniform again — at least not until she’s back at the academy. “I’m trying to get back into the military,” she said. “I’m not trying to make that difficult when that occurs.” She calls strangers “sir” and “ma’am.” She wears her black hair tightly pulled back. Miller is now preparing her application to the academy in case Congress acts quickly on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She knows that not everyone will welcome her back. “There’s going to be hostility toward me, and that’s inevitable,” she said. For now, Miller is taking classes at Yale University, including U.S. lesbian and gay history and sexual gender in society — courses not found at the academy. She has found freedom in the school’s gay community and likes staying up late. Still, her heart is at West Point. She misses the respect, the hierarchy — everything but one rule.
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Pentagon survey: Gay troops no issue for most personnel
WASHINGTON — When a majority of troops told the Pentagon this summer that they didn’t care whether gays were allowed to serve openly in the military, it was in sharp contrast to the time when America’s fighting forces voiced bitter opposition to accepting racial minorities and women in the services. The survey, results of which are due out Tuesday, is expected to find pockets of resistance among combat troops to ending the ban on gays. But about 70 percent of respondents are expected to say that lifting the ban would have a positive or mixed effect, or none at all, according to officials familiar with the findings.
The study is expected to set the stage for a showdown in the Senate between advocates of repealing the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law and a small but powerful group of foes in the final days of the lame-duck Congress.
Repeal would mean that, for the first time in U.S. history, gays would be openly accepted by the military and could acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of being kicked out. U.S. troops haven’t always been so accepting. Troop surveys conducted throughout the 1940s on blacks and Jews, and in the 1970s and 1980s on women, exposed deep rifts within a military dominated by white males but becoming increasingly reliant on minorities.
For a study in July 1947, four of five enlisted men told the Army they would oppose blacks serving in their units even if whites and blacks didn’t share housing or eat together. The same study also revealed a deep resentment toward Jews. Most enlisted men said Jews had profited greatly from the war and many doubted that Jews had suffered under Adolf Hitler. But President Harry S. Truman issued an order in 1948 on equal treatment of blacks in the services — paving the way for integration during the Korean War.
It wasn’t until Vietnam, when racial tensions in the civilian world bubbled over, that race riots erupted in all four military branches. By the 1980s, the military faced the issue of whether to allow women to serve on Navy ships and on the battlefield. Troops were generally much more open to serving with women than they had been to serving with blacks 40 years earlier. Still, many expressed concerns that women would cause problems.
In one 1981 study, lower-ranking sailors blamed female crew members for a decline in “discipline, leadership and supervision.” Women still are barred from many combat roles. But allowing women to join most military units never produced the backlash or decline in military effectiveness that opponents predicted. By the time President Bill Clinton proposed allowing gays to serve in the military in 1993, gays had been explicitly barred from military service since World War I.
Foes of lifting the ban argued that the military shouldn’t be used to expand the rights of gays and that allowing them to serve openly would hurt troop morale and a unit’s ability to fight — the same arguments used against women and blacks.
In the end, Congress agreed to let gays serve only if their sexual orientation remained secret. Much of the coming debate is likely to hinge on the results of the Pentagon study, with many senators saying they wanted to see whether troops would support such a change before voting for repeal. Still, it’s unclear whether the bill would advance to a floor debate.
