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PROFILE
Taking a Stand
A Portland Air Force veteran recoils living
under "Don't ask. d on 't te ll’’
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On Thursday, May 27, the Senate Armed
Services Committee and the House o f Rep­
resentatives voted to repeal “Don’t ask, don’t
tell”— setting in motion what many hope is
its long crawl toward eventual repeal. The
nearly 17-year-old policy banning gay mem­
bers o f the armed forces from serving openly
has left thousands o f army personnel without
careers simply for being who they are.
“I felt like I was pushed out by the policy,”
says Portland resident Ira Zimmermann, 28.
“When I was a kid I wanted to be a fighter
pilot and that was it, there was no Plan B.
Losing that put me in this situation where I
really had no idea what I wanted to do with
my life.”
Zimmermann was an Air Force avion­
ics technician. He joined the United States
Armed Services following the September
11 attacks, entering boot camp in 2002. But
after acing the Vocational Aptitude Bat­
tery and receiving “very good” performance
reports for the duration o f his enlistment,
he left in 2006— a move he believes wasn’t
entirely voluntary.
At the time of his enlistment, the Penn­
sylvania native hadn’t come to terms with his
sexuality. “I went [into] the military in part
because I thought it would make me more
butch, and then, if there was a chance that I
was gay, then [the military] would fix that,”
Zimmermann says. Once the reality o f his
orientation set in, he found himself the subject
of interrogation and at a loss for support.
“Just being asked often why I didn’t have
a girlfriend,” he explains, “or why didn’t I go
home with a girl that was flirting with me,
it definitely got to me, and I eventually just
started to cut myself off more and more from
my unit and from my military friends.”
In an environment where a unit’s cohe­
siveness is crucial for completing tasks in
potentially life-threatening situations, Zim-
“W ere the ones who
hove been missing
from this movement. I
mean, who con better
advocate against this
low than the people who
have fallen victim to it?"
-FORMER AIR FORCE
SERVICEMAN IRA ZIMMERMANN
OF VETERANS' EFFORTS TO
LOBBY FOR DADT'S REPEAL
mermann felt trapped in a situation in which
“your only way o f dealing with it is to isolate
yourself.”
The U.S. Armed Services offer a wealth of
support at various levels for personnel experi­
encing difficult times in their lives—with criti­
cal exceptions. According to Zimmermann,
“Most of the people in their unit will pull
together and support them, and help them get
through whatever they’re going through, but
because of the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, you
can’t ask your unit to be there for you.”
Zimmermann made the agonizing deci­
sion to leave the military after his enlistment
was up. “I realized there was this huge area o f
my life that I had to understand, and it was
more important to me to be true to myself,”
he says.
He moved from his base at Davis-Mon-
than in Tucson, Ariz. back to Portland in April
2006 (he had lived in Portland for a year prior
to enlisting), enrolled at PSU to study history
and took a job bartending at C C Slaughters.
However, he still wrestled with his decision:
“I felt like I let myself down and my country
down and the military down.”
While no longer enlisted and free from
the pressures of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Zim-
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