One of the worst moments came after a big battalion formation — a gathering of several hundred troops — in the motor pool, the big outdoor area usually used to fix big vehicles. After that, there was a company formation, and then a platoon formation — this means smaller and smaller subunits getting talks from smaller and smaller bosses. Tons of people were milling around during platoon formation when Merrill's platoon leader called him out in front of everyone. "He calls me out in from of 50 people for wearing the wrong boots," Merrill says. "Nine people were wearing the same boots. I'd seen them in the list as authorized."

Remember: in the military, the conformity thing is a big deal. There are officially authorized boots, and there are boots that look nearly identical but are not authorized. If your boots are off regs, you can get in trouble. These rules can vary from company to company. The rules change all the time, and sometimes seemingly for no reason. (You might have read about this kind of thing in Catch-22.)

But Merrill's boots were not really the platoon sergeant's point as his harangue lurched to homosexuality. "He was saying, 'Being gay and being in the Army is fucked up. Being gay and wanting to be married is fucked up.'" Many people outside his platoon could hear. "One, I felt my privacy was violated. And two, I had not officially come out to anyone. He was announcing it for me."

"So I got to tell my team leader and squad leader, and they're wearing the same boots," Merrill says. He didn't mention the gay thing. Later, the platoon sergeant took him aside in the chow hall and told him, "I'm not going to apologize, but you're going to say I apologized." And he continued his lectures on gays. "In the real Army — the old Army not the new Army — they wouldn't let you in," the platoon sergeant told Merrill. "He said that you as a gay person are a disgrace to the uniform." He asked Merrill, "Do you have anything to say?"

"Yes, I find this offensive," Merrill said. "I just want to do my duties." He had two more face-to-face encounters with the platoon sergeant. It got to him. He had trouble eating and sleeping. But three other things happened around the same time that kept Merrill from feeling helpless. One, he took a break one day, walked into a field, and sat in some tall grasses. An older married guy from his squad came out to see him. Lighting his a cigarette, he said, "I can tell something's on your mind... Regarding the way they they treat you — you are who you are. And until you can accept it, they won't either."

"Up until that point, I had refused to accept it myself," Merrill explains. "I was not 'out' because I refused to be limited by labels. I knew what I had been fighting inside for a long time, but I struggled to accept the truth."

The second thing that help was that Merrill's squad leader pushed him to see a counselor. After many meetings, the counselor eventually asked, "Are you gay, straight, or bi?" Merrill hesitated. "I wasn't sure I wanted to answer," he says, because "I wasn't accepting of myself, and I didn't want others to change how they treated me." But the counselor had the same message as the guy from his squad: you are who you are.