coyotegoth | (no subject)

Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Morgan kept it simple and sweet. She was eight months into a nine-month assignment in Kuwait, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had just informed Congress that the U.S. armed forces were ready to integrate openly gay troops.

Morgan decided the time was right to come out to her commander. The photograph of her wife and 4-year-old daughter she kept hidden on her desk helped her do it.

"I said, 'Sir, I would like to introduce you to someone. This is my family,'" Morgan recalled of her July conversation with her boss, an Army colonel leading a 2,400-solider brigade. "He said, 'Charlie, you have a beautiful family. You know, "don't ask, don't tell" prevented me from getting to know you.'"

Nearly four weeks after the U.S. lifted its ban on open service by gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, similar stories of secret-shedding, relief and acceptance were swapped Saturday at the first-ever national convention of gay military personnel on active duty.