Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s Quiet Anniversary

“My invitations to events now include Tracey,” Brigadier General Tammy Smith wrote in an e-mail to the Army Times. Tracey Hepner is General Smith’s wife, the one who put a star on her in her pinning ceremony, last month, after her promotion in the Army Reserve. “In the Army, family matters. The outpouring of support from friends and strangers alike is amazing.” Smith became, as Stars and Stripes put it, “the first general officer to come out as gay while still serving,” a formulation that left space for the never-to-be-known number of gay and lesbian general officers—and troops at every level—who have served their country at the cost of silence, or of having to lie about their lives.

Thursday marks the first anniversary of the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. In June, 2011, the military branches had certified that they were ready for the change, passed by Congress a few months earlier, and on September 20, 2011, a sixty-day waiting period expired. Even some of the military leaders who supported the lifting of the ban thought that they were in for a struggle—a worthwhile one, out of which a more honest Army would emerge—but still a struggle. What is remarkable, instructive, and even moving is how easy it has actually been, something that the Pentagon confirmed this week—how quiet the anniversary.

One measure of that change is noted in the Stars and Stripes article on General Smith’s promotion. The paper had interviewed her a year earlier, but had then identified her only as a colonel it would call “Allison,” who wasn’t sure yet if she would come out, even with D.A.D.T. gone, after years in which “one slip could ruin my career”:

“The lieutenants and captains you may talk to grew up in a semi-accepting world,” she said. “But I am a pre-DADT soldier. My peers are less likely to know a gay person, and are less likely than the young soldiers to have been exposed to a positive image of a gay person.”

She found her answer, and now Colonel “Allison” can be General Tammy Smith, and we all have a better idea of what our military, at its best, is capable of.

Photograph courtesy Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.