Don't Tell America! PDF Download

Author: Michael R. Conroy
Publisher: Eagle Publishing (CA)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Author: Kerry Eleveld
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465073492
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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From an award-winning political journalist, the story of how LGBT activists pushed Obama to embrace gay rights -- transforming his presidency in the process Gay rights has been a defining progressive issue of Barack Obama's presidency: Congress repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2010 with his strong support, and in 2011, he instructed his Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, helping to pave the way for a series of Supreme Court decisions that ultimately legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. This rapid succession of victories is astonishing by any measure -- and is especially incredible considering that when Obama first took office he, like many politicians, still viewed gay rights as politically toxic. In 2008, for instance, he opposed full marital rights for same-sex couples, calling marriage a "sacred union" between a man and a woman. It wasn't until 2012, in the heat of his reelection campaign, that Obama finally embraced marriage equality. In Don't Tell Me to Wait, former Advocate reporter Kerry Eleveld shows that Obama's transformation from cautious gradualist to gay rights champion was the result of intense pressure from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists. These men and women changed the conversation issue by issue, pushing the president and the country toward greater freedom for LGBT Americans. Drawing on years of research and reporting, Eleveld tells the dramatic story of the fight for gay rights in America, detailing how activists pushed the president to change his mind, turned the tide of political opinion, and set the nation on course to finally embrace LGBT Americans as full citizens of this country. With unprecedented access and unparalleled insights, Don't Tell Me to Wait captures a critical moment in American history and demonstrates the power of activism to change the course of a presidency-and a nation.

Author: Josh Seefried
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Our Time marks the end of more than a decade of silence, giving voice to the LGBT men and women who served under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” These individuals enlisted knowing that the military would ask them to bury an integral part of themselves and yet joined because of their deep belief that the values of the military were worth the tremendous sacrifice. Our Time shares their stories for the first time, revealing an intimate portrait of military life. Edited by air force officer Josh Seefried, a cofounder of the LGBT active duty military association OutServe, Our Time is a collection of remarkable depth and diversity. We witness the abuse—physical and mental—endured at the hands of fellow soldiers and superiors. We see the hardships faced by their families and partners and feel the pain of the choice between military and self. There are also examples of humanity at its very best: leaders with the courage to support their comrades in the face of tremendous pressure, friendships forged and minds opened, and love that endures the very toughest of odds. Throughout we are reminded of the bravery and selflessness of the men and women who chose to serve our country and defend our liberties while their own freedom was withheld. At once a testament to the wrongs of the policy and a celebration of the good that endured in spite of it, Our Time marks the start of a new era in our national history

Author: C. Dixon Osburn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781737482406
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Under "Don't ask, don't tell," the Pentagon discharged 2-4 service members every day for being gay. Some were subjects of witch hunts. Others faced criminal charges. Many endured harassment, assault and threats. Mission Possible takes readers behind the scenes as Servicemembers Legal Defense Network lawyers repeatedly rushed to the aid of LGBT clients and demanded justice from commanders and Congress. Repealing the ban on open service by lesbian, gay and bisexual service members was a stunning reversal of a law enacted just 17 years prior. It remains the most significant pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual legislation Congress has passed. How did it happen? C. Dixon Osburn's Mission Possible describes the strategy that he and Michelle Benecke, co-founders of SLDN devised to overcome impossible odds. It's a story about the politics of fear and the consequences of a government that tries to muzzle its citizens. It is also a searing, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant story of the power of coming out, building a movement, and political savvy. Mission Possible shows that overcoming the odds is both possible and essential.

Author: Allan Bérubé
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080789964X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding antihomosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontation--not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on GIs' wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fough--one for America and another as homosexuals within the military. Berube's book, the inspiration for the 1995 Peabody Award-winning documentary film of the same name, has become a classic since it was published in 1990, just three years prior to the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has continued to serve as an uneasy compromise between gays and the military. With a new foreword by historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, this book remains a valuable contribution to the history of World War II, as well as to the ongoing debate regarding the role of gays in the U.S. military.

Author: Armin K. Lobeck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226488772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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A guide to discerning the gealogical history of an area through understanding the lines of rivers, mountains, and coasts on maps.

Author: J Ford Huffman
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 0160915589
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Featuring 4 reports and 25 personal essays from diverse voices—both straight and gay—representing U.S. Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Air Force veterans and service members, this anthology examines the impact of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and its repeal on 20 September 2011 in order to benefit policy makers, historians, researchers, and general readers. Topics include lessons from foreign militaries, serving while openly gay, women at war, returning to duty, marching forward after repeal, and support for the committed same-sex partners and families of gay service members.

Author: Steve Estes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807889857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was the directive of President Clinton's 1993 military policy regarding gay and lesbian soldiers. This official silence continued a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. Ask and Tell recovers these lost voices, offering a rich chronicle of the history of gay and lesbian service in the U.S. military from World War II to the Iraq War. Drawing on more than 50 interviews with gay and lesbian veterans, Steve Estes charts the evolution of policy toward homosexuals in the military over the past 65 years, uncovering the ways that silence about sexuality and military service has affected the identities of gay veterans. These veteran voices--harrowing, heroic, and on the record--reveal the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans, men and women who simply did their duty and served their country in the face of homophobia, prejudice, and enemy fire. Far from undermining national security, unit cohesion, or troop morale, Estes demonstrates, these veterans strengthened the U.S. military in times of war and peace. He also examines challenges to the ban on homosexual service, placing them in the context of the wider movement for gay rights and gay liberation. Ask and Tell is an important compilation of unheard voices, offering Americans a new understanding of the value of all the men and women who serve and protect them.

Author: Michael R. Conroy
Publisher: Trafford
ISBN: 9781412001571
Category : Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Author: Eric Bennett
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.