There’s a post up at Sadly, No! about wingnut opposition to replacing “don’t ask, don’t tell” with “who gives a fuck?”. I very rarely comment at high-traffic blogs, but this time the spirit moved me:

…your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals who may very well view them with sexual interest.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most about this is that they get the verb tense all wrong.

In the three years I’ve lived within driving distance of an Army base I’ve managed to make teh buttsecks with at least five active-duty soldiers, two of them on post. Every one of them had served at least once in Iraq, and a couple were waiting for a trip back. I’m neither an attractive nor a particularly young man, so I reckon that if I was able to score five then there must be a whole lot more with higher standards.

The military is already chock full o’ gays, bisexuals, and bi-curiouses, so they’re already sharing showers. Removing the demonstrably useless ban will do nothing but end a lot of unnecessary discharges. (And there’s a straight line for you.)

And now I’m following up here with a tale of that rarest of things, a genuinely moving random encounter.

Last year, I think in the late spring, I got a Craigslist response from a soldier freshly back from the desert. He drove down very late one weekend night, said he’d never done anything with a dude before but wanted to try getting head. I was game, and he was frankly hot.

He was nervous, and he couldn’t, y’know, finish. No worries, happens from time to time. What was unusual was that he didn’t want to zip up and leave. Asked if I smoked, asked if I minded him having a cigarette before he left. He settled onto the couch, and we started chatting.

Once he got going, he didn’t stop for a few hours. This was a man who had been brutalized by war, who had experienced things I don’t want to try to imagine. He was clearly psychically wounded, but he wasn’t broken, and what I think he really wanted wasn’t just fleshly release or physical closeness but somebody he could open up to.

I listened the best I could, put on the best neutral face I could manage when he said things that were horrifying or objectionable, and just let him spill. I don’t know how much good it did him in the long run, but I know that when he left he looked like he’d gotten the relief he needed.