A few weeks ago I featured two clips from the online documentary Silent Partners, the short film that focuses on the effects of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on our military and, as importantly, on the crippling consequences it inflicts on the lives of gay soldiers.
Silent Partners was created as part of the series In Their Boots, which explores how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have profoundly changed America’s servicemen and women, their families, and our communities — gay and straight.
When they were first released, I watched the first first and second preview clips from Silent Partners. The clips featured interviews with the boyfriends of two gay soldiers. The boyfriends had to hide who they were and the lives they lived so that that the gay soldiers could keep serving our country.
At the time I was struck by, as I wrote a few weeks ago, the deceptively simple but aching sense of loss that occurs when one’s home life is desecrated, daily. Forcing our LGBT citizens, forcing our LGBT servicemembers to hide like criminals is a willfully blind and violent brand of dehumanization.
Now, Silent Partners is available to watch in its entirety. If you have half an hour, please sit back and watch the short documentary. It is a reminder that our fight for our civil rights is a fight for our humanity.
Watch it.
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