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Watch: Gay Military Servicemember Comes Out on National TV — During New York's Pride Parade

by Kilian Melloy

EDGE Staff Reporter

Tuesday July 2, 2019

Spc. Brion Houston wasn't in uniform when he came out on national television during a live broadcast of New York City's Pride parade, but he was in the company of friends and family, reported ABC News.

Houston told ABC News that it was the first time he ha attended Pride, and then declared, "This is my coming out," the network reported. "There's no better time to be out in the military than right now."

LGBTQ servicemembers were long denied the opportunity to serve their nation in uniform unless they remained silent about who they really were. "Don't Ask Don't Tell," a compromise between the Clinton Administration and antigay Republican lawmakers, formalized that requirement in 1996.

DADT was repealed in December 2010 after a Senate vote that largely split along party lines. The ban officially ended the following September.

On July 26, 2017, Donald Trump announced a ban on openly transgender troops in a tweet that referenced "tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail." Trump later defended that declaration by citing costs associated with gender reassignment surgery that were subsequently reported to be wildly inaccurate. Trump also said that trans troops "take lots of drugs," and suggested that many trans servicemembers only sign up in order to receive gender reassignment surgery.

Though the courts delayed Trump's trans ban, it went into effect earlier this year.

The end of DADT and the 2015 Supreme Court finding that same-sex couples could not be denied equal access to marriage were two of the landmark developments that followed in the wake of 1969's Stonewall Uprising, in which the LGBTQ patrons of a gay bar in New York City rose up against systematic oppression at the hands of the city's police and, more broadly, a deeply homophobic system of laws.

Houston cited the 50th anniversary of Stonewall in his comments to ABC News.

The Army specialist was wearing clothing emblazoned with the rainbow colors of the Pride flag, noted the New York Post.

Houston was featured in a profile published at DVIDS last year.

Watch the ABC News report on New York's Pride parade, in which Houston's comments appear, below.

Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.