Nov 22, 2007  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

I’m being almost forced out, even though ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ didn’t tell me [to leave],” he says.

COL. MARGARETHE CAMMERMEYER was told to leave for being a lesbian, though. Cammermeyer realized, after years of knowing she was different, that she was a lesbian when she met her partner in 1988.

In 1989 Cammermeyer, who worked as a chief nurse at the National Guard in Washington State, was seeking a top-secret clearance. She responded honestly that she was a lesbian on the form and the military began discharge proceedings. Cammermeyer protested, was eventually dismissed in 1991 and then she went to federal court, which ruled her discharge was unconstitutional.

In the meantime, the presidential election race was in full swing and then-candidate Bill Clinton picked up her cause.

“My story became newsworthy because I was old, I was a colonel, I had served with distinction in Vietnam, I had finished my doctorate, I had four sons and it made no sense to discharge me,” says Cammermeyer, now 65.

Cammermeyer’s case helped prompt Clinton’s infamous declaration that he would overturn the military’s gay ban.

“In its place became the quote-unquote compromise of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue,” Cammermeyer says. “That has been an absolutely atrocious failure and in some ways no better than what existed beforehand except that no longer are individuals supposed to be asked questions about sexual orientation on entrance to the military or during security clearances, and yet even though they are not supposed to be harassed or pursued, there are the witch hunts that are continuing in the military and have cost us as a society huge investments.”

Nicholson agrees that the ban is far more complicated than its title would indicate.

“It always seemed so simple. They don’t ask you and you won’t tell anyone and you’ll be OK,” Nicholson says, who was outed when the only other person he knew in the Army who spoke Portuguese read a letter he had written in Portuguese to a former lover. “It’s just a sound bite and it’s more accurately described as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Happen to be Found Out Any Time Any Place Any Way’.”

The cost of the policy — in terms of money and resources — is the angle that activists are hoping will work in their favor.

“Things changed significantly after Sept. 11,” says Steve Ralls, communications director for SLDN. “The public conscience changed and the military  itself began changing as well. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ became not just an unnecessary law but a counterproductive law in the eyes of many Americans. The Pentagon’s own statis