a salute

You I'm thinking of today, who gave so much of selves unseen, do you know the power of your sacrifice?

Some of you signed up, knowing it was against regulations for our military forces to enlist men or women like you.    You signed up anyway, defying the rules to defend American soil or American allies.    You served and died in 1775, and 1861, and from then to now.

In World War II and Korea, you died before you had the chance to be dishonorably discharged.    You never knew that your brothers and sisters in arms were not only discharged but reported to their local draft boards, and thus revealed to their entire communities —– communities they sometimes couldn't then return to.    Many stayed in the cities they landed in, groups of unmoored veterans gathering in New York's Greenwich Village or the San Francisco Castro, the army of the banished, forming gay ghettos where you could have lived less hidden, if not entirely free, had you lived.    Those communities have lasted to this day.    People who speak dismissively of them may not realize how they got started.

Jesus of Nazareth said there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends;  you laid down your life for those who never accepted you, and who would have drummed you out of service if they'd known.    Many would have cruelly mocked you, and did, and worse.    But they owe you their gratitude, as do we all.

Soldiers who survived returned to embrace their loved ones as a grateful public looked on —– but not the ones like you.    Other servicemen and women retired and received pensions that are every soldier's due —– but not the ones who got dishonorably discharged for being gay, and struggled for the rest of their lives, some even today.

But you never faced those later-in-life things.    You fought, and died, and now you lie beneath the earth.    We who remain must remember.

You may never have been saluted in life by anyone who fully knew who you were and what you gave to serve.    Today let us, at last, salute you.