So early one cold Monday morning in December, a kid walked into my shop. He was pale and visibly shaking. I knew him, a little bit - he was in the group I'd celebrated Thanksgiving with. Nice kid, 19 I think, fairly fresh out of boot camp, still an E-2. I'd bought beer for him and the other guys, and we'd stayed up till sunrise blasting '70s music and talking about nothing.

Maybe that's why he came to me. If I didn't rat him out for underage drinking, maybe he thought he could trust me with something bigger. He was really new to the squadron too, so I guess he didn't have a lot of people he trusted yet. I'm not sure if he even knew he was going to talk to me when he came in. It was a gamble. He didn't say a word at first - he just stood there shivering looking for all the world like a beaten puppy. After what felt like a couple minutes of that, I got up and motioned him to follow me outside. He did, and we smoked...probably smoked about four cigarettes in a row, standing in the snow staring at the ground.

He shuffled his foot a little bit.

"Something happened..."

and he just tapered off. I still wasn't quite sure what to say. I'm really not very good at this stuff. So I just started listing off all the really bad things I could think of that would terrify a new Sailor this badly. Did he get a DUI? He just shook his head. Was he arrested? Did he get in a fight? Did he use drugs? Did he sleep with an underage girl? With a prostitute? Did he hurt someone? Rape someone?

I saw a flash of discomfort in his eye at that last one, so I stopped. That was the wrong thing to do, I guess - he just looked hurt and muttered something along the lines of "I'd never do that" and walked off. I didn't know what to do, so I let him be for the rest of the day. I figured I'd catch him the next day when he wasn't so upset. Probably not the right choice, in retrospect.

But he came back. It was the end of the day and I was changing and packing up to leave, and he walked in looking a little less distraught. He asked if I was doing anything that night. I wasn't, so I invited him to come over and have a few drinks.

We talked about random stuff for a while, squadron politics, current events, pointless gossip. We were several beers in before I got around to asking what he'd tried to tell me that morning.

"It's not what you said." He looked down at his feet and practically whispered, "It's the other way around."

It took me a second to make the connection. And when I did, I panicked. I had no idea what to say, what to do. I'd talked to female rape victims, but the extent of those conversations was mostly just getting the information to report and referring them to legal and medical resources. So I reached for that training.

"Have you reported it? Have you been to Medical?"

"No, I can't."

"Why not?"

"It wasn't a girl.."

That one sounded odd for a second. I had assumed that the rapist was male, and I wasn't entirely sure why he'd think he needed to tell me that. And then it clicked.

"You're gay."

He sat there staring at his feet.

"No, it's ok. It's fine. Just tell me what happened. It won't leave this room."

And then he finally started talking. Turns out he'd met someone on a gay dating website. He sort of spun off on a tangent at that point, telling me about his parents and how they believed faggots would burn in Hell, how he'd never felt safe at home, how he'd only started trying to meet guys since he'd been in the Navy, how he'd still never had sex. He wasn't expecting to have sex when he met this guy. But he was too young to go to a bar, so he met this stranger at his place, and he was drugged and raped and woke up alone in a strange bed.

What overwhelmed me as he told this story - what still overwhelms me now as I recall it - was just how utterly alone and without support this kid was. He couldn't go to the cops. he couldn't call his parents or family or friends back home. He couldn't talk to a chaplain. He was even afraid to get medical attention. He had me, the socially-inept poorly-trained EO rep - and talking to me was a huge gamble. I was supposed to report him. I didn't, of course. I just listened to him as best I could, and managed to convince him to at least go get an STD test. But that's all I could do.

Over the coming months I started getting other guys coming out to me. There was one other rape victim, which makes two too many. But there were others too, guys who just wanted to talk to someone. There were guys who were harassed at work and called fags, guys whose boyfriends hit them or cheated on them, and guys who just needed to talk about family/relationships/life. I'm not sure how they knew I was safe. Maybe there was some sort of underground gay social network spreading the word. But I do know that there were literally over a dozen guys - this in a small squadron of only a couple hundred people - who desperately needed to talk to someone in an official support role. I couldn't do anything at all for them. I couldn't even tell anyone why they were talking to me, why I was spending so much time alone with junior enlisted guys who (in most cases) weren't even in my shop. People thought I was sleeping with some of them. Which is fine, if it kept them from suspecting they were gay.

I know there are units where gay servicemembers can be effectively 'out.' Mine wasn't one of them. I don't think most are. And under DADT, gay servicemembers are truly isolated.

There are people who are concerned that ending DADT, allowing out gays to serve, will lead to gay servicemembers being harassed or assaulted. That's fair enough, even if I don't necessarily believe it to be true. But even granting that - what about the ones who already are being assaulted, and who don't dare even tell anyone about it?