Army Times has a great, albeit short, story on the post-DADT world. It starts with a rather moving story of a CWO Morgan and an Army Colonel:
Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Morgan kept it simple and sweet. She was eight months into a nine-month assignment in Kuwait, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had just informed Congress that the U.S. armed forces were ready to integrate openly gay troops.
Morgan decided the time was right to come out to her commander. The photograph of her wife and 4-year-old daughter she kept hidden on her desk helped her do it.
“I said, ‘Sir, I would like to introduce you to someone. This is my family,’ ” Morgan recalled of her July conversation with her boss, an Army colonel leading a 2,400-solider brigade. “He said, ‘Charlie, you have a beautiful family. You know, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ prevented me from getting to know you.’ ”
It seems that the en masse coming outs have been met with positive, neutral at worst, reactions.
Nearly four weeks after the U.S. lifted its ban on open service by gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, similar stories of secret-shedding, relief and acceptance were swapped Saturday at the first national convention of gay military personnel on active duty.
Each of the 200 or so sailors, soldiers, Marines and airmen attending the conference put on by the formerly clandestine group known as OutServe had, to varying degrees, only recently revealed their sexual orientations at work. None had gotten a reaction worse than a shrug.
“Out of the 4,500 members we have, we haven’t had any person come to us about one single problem, which is huge, because right before repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ we had tons of problems,” like investigations and other issues relayed to the Pentagon, said Air Force 1st Lt. Josh Seefried, the group’s co-founder. “But right now, after Sept. 20, there is nothing to relay because everything has been 100 percent positive.”
