OutServe-SLDN A 79-year-old man dying from cancer’s military service record has been changes from ‘undesirable’ to honourable, 58 years after he was thrown out of the US Marine Corps for being gay. Hal Faulkner’s dying wish when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer a few years ago was for that to be fixed, in the wake of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ being dumped. He’d only come out to his family in 2005, when attending a wedding with his partner of 20 years. "He's been carrying this societal shame with him all these years," his niece Michelle Clark has told NPR. "We as a family had no idea the pain he had inside of him." Support group OutServe-SLDN helped Faulkner get a pro-bono to speed up what can be a long process – and it took just two weeks. It’s estimated more than 100,000 US soldiers received bad discharges from the military for being gay before the death of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 8th January 2014 - 12:55pm