Gay Airman Randy Phillips Wants His Generation To Talk About AIDS

COLORADO: Openly Gay Cadets Graduate From Air Force Academy

CALIFORNIA: Gay Sailor’s Homecoming In San Diego

USA: Hot Shirtless Navy Guys Climbing The Greasy Pole

To enlarge the pic, click here.

(Via BuzzFeed, there’re more where this came from).

Freedom To Serve, Freedom To Marry: The Story Of Monica & Naomi

USA: Gay Marine Says “I Do” On Base, A First!

LGBT Weekly reports:

Balloons, signs, tears, and joy may not be unusual sights on military bases when family and friends await their returning veteran’s safe return home from a long deployment, but a wedding proposal by a boyfriend to his Marine boyfriend is. That’s what happened Tuesday at Camp Pendleton, when San Diego resident, Cory Huston, himself a Navy veteran once assigned to the Marines as a hospital corpsman asked Marine Avarice Guerrero to marry him. It is believed to be the first proposal of marriage and engagement between two gaymen – not to mention two war vets – on a US military base. In an exclusive, San Diego LGBT Weekly was there to photograph the historic proposal.
April 24, under a bright Southern California sky at Camp Pendleton’s Camp Del Mar near Oceanside, Calif., a full two hours before his boyfriend’s return from the badlands of Afghanistan, Cory Huston waited nervously. Huston, who was discharged under the former Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, chain smoked as he rehearsed the simple proposal he would deliver when Guerrero would arrive.

He told LGBT Weekly that by popping the question, and assuming Guerrero would say yes, he would not only be changing his and his beau’s lives forever, but also the landscape of marriage among gay servicemembers.

“This is a huge step for me,” Huston said while pacing and scanning the crowd of fellow friends andfamily members of returning Marines.
Finally, luggage in tow, Guerrero emerged with a smile on his face. Upon seeing Huston, Guerrero dropped his bags; aimed a kiss toward Huston’s lips; and opened his arms to his boyfriends waiting embrace. The time and distance of 10 months’ separation evaporated in a public show of affection that less than a year ago would have been cause for court martial. After a few minutes of emotional holding and kissing, Huston went anxiously down on one knee; looked up at Guerrero, who was dressed from head to toe in military fatigues; and produced an engagement ring and the time-honored phrase, “Will you marry me?”
Huston’s mild tremble, a result of hours and days of anticipation about this day, was quickly quieted by the one word every hopeful fiancé wants to hear: “Yes.”
“I was blown away,” Guerrero said, staring at the shining ring on his finger shortly after the proposal. “I was shocked that after all we’d been through, he would honestly want to spend the rest of his life with someone like me.”

Gay Photo Of The Week: Afghanistan Pride Flag At US Base 

SEATTLE: Another Gay Military Homecoming

USA: Gay Marine And His Civilian Boyfriend Talk About Their Famous Kiss 

USA: USMC Homecoming

The couple are Brandon Morgan (the US Marine) and Dalan:

“To everyone who has responded in a positive way. My partner and I want to say thank you. Dalan, the giant in the photo, can’t believe how many shares and likes we have gotten on this. We didn’t do this to get famous,or something like that we did this cause after 3 deployments and four years knowing each other, we finally told each other how we felt. As for the haters, let em hate…to quote Kat Williams, everyone needs haters, so let them hate. We are the happiest we have ever been and as for the whole PDA and kissing slash hugging in uniform…it was a homecoming, if the Sergeants Major, Captains, Majors, and Colonels around us didn’t care…then why do you care what these random people have to say? In summation thank you for your love and support. I received a lot of friend requests off this. I don’t just accept requests so if your request was because of this post message me and let me know. Goodnight all, and Semper Fi.” —Brandon Morgan

USA: Manning Formally Charged; Enters No Plea

The Advocate reports:

Bradley Manning, the gay soldier accused of providing classified government documents to website WikiLeaks, was formally charged today but postponed entering a plea, the Associated Press reports.

There are 22 charges against Manning, including aiding the enemy, which in his case carries a maximum sentence of life in prison (it can carry the death penalty, which prosecutors decided not to seek for Manning). The other charges have a maximum combined sentence of 150 years.

A plea can be entered up until the beginning of a trial. Manning also deferred a decision on whether to be tried by a military judge or by a jury. Col. Denise Lind, the military judge who presided over today’s proceedings at Fort Meade, Md., scheduled another court session for March 15-16 but did not set a trial date. Manning’s defense team wants a trial no later than June, while government lawyers said they might not be ready until August. The defense says that would interfere with Manning’s right to a speedy trial. 

Manning, arrested in May 2010, is accused of providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents. His lawyers say he was in a fragile emotional state and should not have been allowed access to such documents, nor should he have been sent to Iraq, where he was serving prior to his arrest. It has been reported that Manning was unhappy about conditions created by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and that he had consulted a therapist about gender identity issues. 

After his arrest, he spent nearly a year in solitary confinement under harsh conditions in a maximum-security military prison in Quantico, Va. Several human rights activists spoke out against his treatment, and he was transferred to a medium-security facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last spring, where his circumstances reportedly improved. Read anAdvocate commentary on Manning’s case here.

OutServe BAF Members: It Gets Better

OKLAHOMA: State Wants To Turn Back Time On DADT

The Huffington Post reports:

After President Obama repealed the controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010, many Republicans quickly promised to reinstate it if they won the 2012 election. But an Oklahoma state legislator is making an attempt to turn back the clock even further on gay rights in the military.
The Tulsa World reported on Tuesday that state Rep. Mike Reynolds (R) of Oklahoma City introduced a bill to bar gays and lesbians from the Oklahoma National Guard. Reynolds told the World that the bill was created “in response to requests from members of the Oklahoma National Guard” and would reinstate DADT among the state’s part-time soldiers.
But according to the Human Rights Campaign and The Equality Network, the proposed bill goes even further. “The bill goes beyond the discrimination contained in the now-repealed DADT statute, and allows government officials to directly question someone about their sexual orientation — essentially removing the ‘don’t ask’ component contained in DADT,” the groups said in a joint statement released Tuesday.
Such a move would effectively reinstate the policies that the military abandoned almost 20 years ago. Gays and lesbians were forbidden from serving in the military until 1993, when President Bill Clinton enacted DADT as compromise between gay rights advocates and military leaders. Before then, potential servicemembers were explicitly asked about their sexual orientation as part of the recruiting process and barred from joining if they said they were gay.
Despite the policy change at the federal level, Reynolds claimed that “the state is allowed to set its own standards for service in the National Guard and is not required to duplicate standards for the rest of the U.S. military.” The Oklahoma National Guard declined the World’s requests for comment.
Meanwhile, gay rights groups are lining up to oppose Reynolds. The Human Rights Campaign and The Equality Network set up an online petition to protest the bill, and Toby Jenkins, the executive director of Tulsa-based Oklahomans for Equality, said that his group will press Oklahoma legislators to vote no.

Out & Proud US Airman Randy Phillips: It Gets Better