General Comment

Newsweek, March, 2007 by Dan Ephron

Brian Fricke says he played the "pronoun game" for about three years. The Marine Corps sergeant substituted "she" for "he" when he told peers about his relationships, keeping the fact that he was gay from all but a small number in his unit. It wasn't until the day he left for Iraq in 2004 that the pretending got to be too much. Fricke, a Tennessean stationed at Miramar air base near San Diego, was being driven to the departure point by his boyfriend, Brad. The two had been together for several months, and it dawned on Fricke at the staging area that, with the bombings in Iraq, he might not see Brad again. Around them, Marines were taking leave of their own loved ones. Fricke felt the resentment rise. "I'm putting my life on the line like the others," he recalls feeling. "Damn it,...