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'During the interviews they revisited difficult experiences, sometimes experiences they had forgotten about. 'Participating in the project served to regain their dignity and their history of serving. 'At times, their entire record of serving in the military was expunged as if it never happened. 'In many cases, the people I interviewed and photographed had no recourse to their discharge,' Cianni said. He has served since 2002 and is still servingīefore DADT, which was enacted in 1993, homosexual behavior was considered a criminal offense within the military. I’m not any different.' Don Bramer, of Washington, DC, a Lieutenant O-3 in the US Navy, says. I want the same things: a home, family, everything else. The bill was designed to protect the soldiers by keeping their sexuality a secret, however it forced them into the closet and further internalized their struggles. Many were discharged because of their sexuality, others were raped, assaulted and bullied, causing ongoing psychological damage.Ī major turning point for gay people in the military came in 2011 with the overturning of Dont Ask Don't Tell (DADT), a discouraging policy signed by Bill Clinton in 1993 that continued a ban on gay soldiers enlisting, but stopped investigations and 'witch hunts' into whether soldiers were gay.
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Pieced together, Cianni's photos show commonalities between the subjects despite their different journeys, from a 92-year-old WW2 veteran to young soldiers who recently returned from Afghanistan. 'I couldn't understand why anyone would join the military, much less why gay people would join the military, an organization that shunned them.' 'It seems I spent most of my life uninterested in knowing about the military because I supported peace, the fight to end violence and injustice, and the sanctity of life,' the photographer told Vice. Vincent Cianni, 63, said he embarked on the project, Gays in the Military, to better understand why homosexuals would enlist in the military to begin with voluntarily signing up for a system that did, and in many ways still does, oppress them. photographing and interviewing gay veterans and servicemen to share their stories of suppression, sadness and silence in a moving photo essay. A New York-based documentary photographer has spent three years traveling the U.S.