After years of wrangling over its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the U.S. military is making strides to be more inclusive of LGBTQ service members. Women, too, are seeing a day in the sun. Although they cannot serve in the infantry, armor or artillery branches of the military, the Army graduated its first females from Ranger School this summer.
The military is growing to be more reflective of the sort of attitudes shared by U.S. society as a whole, but the changes are still new enough for trailblazers to be remarkable. U.S. Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith, as the first openly gay flag officer in the U.S. military, is one of the military’s trailblazing women.
Shortly after “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed, Smith married her wife, Tracey Hepner, in a ceremony. Smith says that she was now free to stop hiding an essential part of who she was. “I always describe it [as] I spent those 25 years living a compartmentalized life where I had my military life and my personal life,” she says.
“The day ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was repealed it was like that fear and that weight got lifted off of me. I no longer had to feel as if a little slipup in language or something I said to someone or something that I did or mentioned would reveal who I really was.”
When Smith joined the military, intolerance of homosexuality did not seem so unusual. The LGBTQ community was marginalized in practically every strata of society. As Smith puts it, she would have had to hide her true self in almost any job or career.
“Whether I hid myself in the military, whether I hid myself had I become a teacher, whether I hid myself being a bank teller like my mom, in the ’80s that still probably would have been my path anyway, because that’s where our society was,” she says.
Smith is very matter of fact about her reasons for signing up for the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) after high school. “It was an economic decision based on a desire to go to college,” she says. Smith grew up in Oakland, a small town in central Oregon formerly known as “the turkey capital of the world.”
