Gay teens turned away from military recruitment center

Two gay teens who say they want to serve in the armed forces, but won’t lie about their sexuality, were denied applications on Wednesday, August 9, at the local recruitment center on Zan Road. Wyatt Fore and Rachel Miller, both 19, acting as part of Soul Force’s national “Right to Serve” campaign were turned away when they tried to apply to the Navy and Air Force, respectively.
    The teens sent information to local media outlets and held a sparsely attended press conference, but the recruitment storm was mostly uneventful—recruiters weren’t in their offices when the pair arrived.
    Miller called an Air Force recruitment officer from her cell phone and waited at the office for about an hour. When she finally sat down with the recruiter, she says, “I was very up-front with him. I said ‘I’d like to join the Air Force, but I’m openly gay.’”
    Her honest, if somewhat contrived, confession makes her ineligible for duty under the military’s longstanding “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Policy.
    Miller says she told the recruiter, “I would like to be able to at least fill out an application. Is it not worth the effort to you to do that?” According to her, “he said no.”
    Fore had more luck with the Navy recruiting office, which also kept him from applying, but “went so far as to say ‘I respect what you’re doing,’” Miller says.
    Neither Fore nor Miller is enrolled in an ROTC program at UVA, where they are undergraduate students. “I didn’t want to join, and I knew they wouldn’t let me in if I told them I was gay. Military service is always a thing I sort of thought about, but I never got the initiative to do it because I knew I’d be rejected,” Miller says. Both students say they are serious about the military.
    The students pulled the stunt as part of the Right to Serve campaign under Soul Force, a spiritually-based national organization that fights for fair treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.