The soldier doesn’t give his name, and in previous YouTube videos chronicling his experience as a gay man in the military is careful not to show his face. But in the latest video, titled “Telling my dad that I am gay,” he faces the camera directly, sitting in a room with a world map draped on a wall behind him.

The Washington Post identified him as Randy Phillips and said the video was recorded with his web camera in his bedroom at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The soldier fidgets nervously as he tells viewers it’s early Tuesday morni

ng and he hasn’t been able to sleep. He then calls home on his mobile phone.

“Dad, I’m gay.”

With those three emotion-drenched words, a 21-year-old U.S. soldier stationed in Germany reveals in a phone call to his father in Alabama what he had long kept secret but could now finally share with Tuesday’s official repeal of the military’s 17-year “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

The soldier, who goes by the online moniker “areyousurprised,” captures himself on video telling his father something he says he’s “known since forever” but was afraid to share. He posted the video to YouTube, and it quickly went viral.

The soldier was among numerous U.S. military members who “came out” on Tuesday, guaranteed that they will no lon

ger be punished or booted out of the service because of their sexual orientation.

In the captivating five-minute conversation that follows, he reveals his sexual orientation to his father.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks.

“Yeah,” the father replies.

“Will you love me, serious?”

“Yes,” the father says.“Dad, I’m gay.”