Hayden Powell’s battle for fair treatment by the Department of Defense could result in a change of discharge status for thousands drummed out of service in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. The Air Force veteran and other plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit hope to achieve a level of justice for tens of thousands of service members drummed out of the service.

But when she joined the Air Force in 1999, she was fighting for her own freedom.

Some of that was economic; the GI Bill guaranteed her a college education in exchange for service to her country. But the military also provided her an avenue of escape from Spokane, Wash., where she’d been raised by conservative parents. The U.S. Air Force, it seemed at the time, offered her a path up and a way out, the chance to fly far from the judgment of family, church leaders, and peers she feared would never accept her as she was. 

Powell, then 20, knew serving in uniform meant keeping her romantic life secret. But Powell felt she already lived under “don’t ask, don’t tell” before enlisting.

“Considering the time period we are talking about in the ’90s and where I lived at the time, I was already living a closeted life,” Powell says. “It wasn’t socially acceptable to be gay. You weren’t allowed to be out at work. You weren’t allowed to be out at school. To me, it was basically an extension of the life I was already living. When you’re 20 years old, you’re not thinking about things like, maybe I shouldn’t sign up for an institution that has a systemic problem of discrimination.”

Reality hit less than a year later, when peers reported suspicions about Powell’s sexual orientation up the chain of command. On the cusp of a promotion and her first tour in the Middle East, she instead was separated from any friends and peers and endured an investigation into her love life. Rather than risk a trial she seemed doomed to lose, Powell agreed to abandon her future in the military and leave the Air Force with an entry-level separation. She avoided a dishonorable discharge, but forever, her DD-214, a critical discharge paper veterans must produce to access benefits or prove veteran status, would list the reason for Powell’s separation as “homosexual acts.”

Class of thousands

That makes Powell one of thousands of service members drummed out of the military after the start of DADT in 1994 and under the even stricter ban that preceded it and before Congress and President Barack Obama ended the policy in 2011. 

With the repeal of DADT, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people could serve openly in the military and not risk discharge based on their sexual orientation. But those who lost their uniform during DADT have often been unable to access veterans’ benefits due to having a less than honorable discharge. And to this day, anyone discharged for their sexual orientation during the DADT era still has “homosexual” plastered across their discharge papers like a scarlet letter.

The Department of Defensein September 2023 announced plans to review every one of those discharges and upgrade the status appropriately. The review resulted in the upgrades of discharge status for more than 800 service members, but that came only after many discharged service membersbrought a lawsuit against the military. And it doesn’t affect the lawsuit.

“The DD-214 form is the most important paper that a veteran can have,” says Lynette Miner, a senior staff attorney for the Impact Fund representing Powell and others in a lawsuit. “For people who are discharged based on their sexual orientation, many of them have some form of indicator referencing sexual orientation on their DD-214. We’re asking defendants to remove those indicators. Then, on top of that, for many people, including Powell and many thousands of other veterans who receive discharge statuses that were less than honorable as a result of being discharged, we’re asking the defendants to upgrade their discharge statuses to honorable.”

There’s some debate about how large a legal class that is. When the Defense Department announced plans to review discharge status, officials estimated some 2,000 individuals left the military under DADT for sexually based reasons, but they left with a range of less than honorable discharge statuses. Officials signaled not everyone will see their discharge status upgraded, including individuals who faced other misconduct allegations during their time in service.

Notably, the military only reviewed discharges during the DADT era. The Defense Department knows of more than 19,000 service members discharged for their sexual orientation between 1980 and 1993, before DADT offered at least a promise of privacy regarding soldiers’ personal lives. Precise record-keeping isn’t available for the countless number of individuals potentially drummed out of the service before then. 

Meanwhile, plaintiffs’ attorneys to date found more than 29,000 service members booted from the service between 1980 and 2011 with a less than honorable discharge because of homosexuality or sexual perversion, real or perceived. 

Regardless, Defense officials have no plans to proactively review any of those discharges, although those affected can apply for upgrades, like those discharged under DADT.

Officials acknowledge complications in informing individuals of the review and potentially outing veterans. But anyone who believes their status should be reviewed is encouraged to reach out to the Pentagon directly.

But several LGBTQ+ leaders in Congress say the process has been too slow and too hard for veterans. U.S. Reps. Robert Garcia, Mark Pocan, and Chris Pappas, three out Democrats, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Januarypressing the department on ways to streamline status updates.

“Since DADT repeal, many veterans who sought to upgrade their less than honorable discharges reported a prolonged and burdensome process, often requiring the use of a lawyer, to seek the respect and benefits they rightfully earned,” the letter reads. “And far too many veterans discharged under DADT had no idea they could seek an upgrade or where to start the process.”

The letter notes less than 1,700 veterans have pursued some level of relief from their DADT discharges, and barely 1,400 received an upgrade to date. The congressmen called for the Defense Department to explain what the reasons were for many of those requests being denied, but also to provide a plan to proactively reach out to veterans impacted by DADT to let them know how to make changes to their discharge status.

A judge in June ruled the case can go forward in the Northern District of California, with Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero saying plaintiffs may argue that the process of correcting their discharge papers is both lengthy and re-traumatizing. And the plaintiffs at the center of the case remain have plenty of stories to share.

Different paths

At the same time Powell went through a harrowing experience in training, Jules Sohn joined the Marine Corps, and she admits to facing fewer immediate problems. Following a brother into service, she quickly found a home in the military and ended up on a communications track. She signed up for Defense Information School and was assigned to a first duty station in Okinawa, Japan, where she was serving when the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks took place.

She soon ended up as the lead public affairs officer in the southeastern U.S. during a peak recruiting time, making the closeted lesbian a face of the military in the Deep South. “There were a lot of rumors going around about why this young lieutenant was not in a relationship and that something was odd about me,” she says. She at one point was called in by a “good friend” to inform her of the whispers.

“One of my good friends asked me because he wanted to protect me, ‘Hey, I’m hearing all these rumors. I can’t actually ask you what I want to ask you, and you can’t actually tell me what I want to ask you,’” Sohn recalls. That led to a frank discussion on how to reduce speculation and an effort by Sohn and a network of close friends to quell the rumors. “But that really took a toll on me,” she says. “My blood pressure had gone up. All these physical things were happening to me.”

It prompted her to leave the Marine Corps in 2003, when she enrolled in graduate school. But with wars continuing to escalate in Afghanistan and Iraq, she rejoined the service in 2005 and for a period worked in public affairs in Fallujah. Most associates at that point knew she had a relationship back home, but she would be confronted occasionally by the need to continue hiding her sexuality.

“I remember there was this one time where one of my friends who knew I hadn’t called home the whole time, he basically gave me a satellite phone and said you should call home,” she recounts. “And then he said, ‘Just remember people are listening in, so be careful what you say.’ He thought I was going to call my longtime girlfriend at the time. And I remember thinking to myself, Wow, it’s pretty terrible if you can’t even speak about your loved ones with other people.”

After returning to New York City, she ran into a group of LGBTQ+ veterans publicly advocating for an end to DADT as part of the Call to Duty Tour on college campuses. Members asked if Sohn wanted to be a part of that effort. It’s something she had to think about. She enjoyed a level of comfort in the job, despite ducking rumors, and her instinct in the military was to avoid ever “skylining” yourself. But ultimately, she decided to speak up.

But she had to leave the service first. She was past her active duty and a member of the Reserves at that point. Her work establishing local law enforcement presence in Iraq already had her interested in moving back home to California. She consulted with officers about ending her service in 2008 and taking a job with the Los Angeles Police Department. She did secure an honorable discharge, but as with Powell, her discharge papers listed the reason for ending her service as “homosexual” admissions.

Then-President Obama soon ended DADT. That meant the military as of 2011 could no longer discharge someone based on their sexuality. But that shift did nothing to change the discharge status for anyone who left the service while DADT remained official policy. More than a decade after the policy’s end, the lingering impacts still frustrated those directly hurt by the policy.

President Joe Biden’s administration has taken steps to right the situation. Beyond the policy shift announced in 2023, Biden in June announced he would pardon individuals discharged while the policy remained in effect. “Despite their courage and great sacrifice, thousands of LGBTQI+ service members were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Biden said.

But while the White House predicted thousands would benefit from the action, Military.com recently reported just eight people applied for pardons as of late September. That’s no huge surprise to a spokesperson for the DADT lawsuit plaintiffs. None of those former service members involved in the case applied for pardons because they were never convicted of crimes. “The pardon impacts a very specific and small set of service members,” the spokesperson said.

So the case continues, and the consequences of decades-old discharges linger.

What happens now

Both Powell and Sohn remain part of the lawsuit contending the Department of Defense has continued to subject discharged service members to discrimination, even if it ceased the DADT policy.

For Sohn, her honorable discharge has meant she can access many veterans’ benefits, but the issue of sexuality still follows her around in the form of her DD-214. She had to stop a polygraph test while interviewing with the FBI, for example, when asked if she ever had been forced to resign from a job, and had to explain her discharge from the military under DADT. But she acknowledges she has it better than many of her peers.

But Powell’s experience led to a painful separation while in the military, and she hasn’t been able to access the same benefits as those she trained with years ago. For her, there were no conversations with sympathetic officers about quelling rumors, just aggressive pursuit of the details of her private life.

While stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Powell went out with friends in Great Falls and had an interaction with another female service member. That raised suspicions with the wrong people, and someone reported concerns about Powell’s sexual orientation up the chain of command. At the time, Powell anxiously awaited her first promotion as an airman, a first stripe on her uniform. She watched desert survival videos as she prepared for her first tour in the Middle East. Instead, a commanding officer called her and told her she would be investigated for alleged “homosexual conduct.”

“I was being taken from my normal daily duties and put on to a graveyard shift to isolate me,” she recalls. “I was told I was not allowed to talk to any of my friends there on base about the investigation or at all, and to do so, it’d be a violation of a direct order — and violating orders in the military means jail time.”

Rather than face a trial she was sure to lose, which would result in a dishonorable discharge, Powell opted not to fight and was granted an entry-level separation from service. She thought that would put an end to the conflict, but she found the discharge for “homosexual acts” following her through every future endeavor. Every time she applied for a job, she was ultimately asked if she was a veteran and to produce her DD-214. She briefly found a community when she enrolled at Washington State University and studied sociology and women’s studies. She became involved in LGBTQ+ advocacy at the time, but the unexpected death of a partner largely derailed her academic career, and she left school in 2009. Her once-lofty dreams have been brushed aside, and she has largely worked in customer service and retail jobs since.

In truth, spending less than a year in the service created more opportunities outside the military for individuals to discriminate against her than if she never spent a day in uniform.

“What can I do? Because now I have a DD-214 that is not going to help me get a job,” she says. “If anything, especially given the tone of society at the time, it was probably going to keep me from getting a job. I had already dealt with that in retail and customer service with issues of people finding out about my sexuality.”

It’s striking to Sohn how far behind the military has been compared to other institutions. She still works for the LAPD, and she notes the police agency in the early 1990s reinstated a police officer fired years prior for being gay, just as DADT was put in place in the military. Years before the policy ended, metropolitan police departments had moved beyond discrimination based on sexual orientation. By 2006, the LAPD had a liaison to the local LGBTQ+ community as an official position in the department, but it would be years still before the military ended DADT.

Powell says it has struck her how many people outside the military simply assumed the end of DADT meant the military would automatically erase blemishes from the records of those previously discharged. Knowing the follow-your-orders mindset of the military, it’s no shock to her she has to fight for proper treatment.

“There are so many institutions in this country that are just rooted in things like the patriarchy, toxic masculinity and discrimination, and the DOD isn’t any different,” she says. “You’re talking about trying to overturn how many hundreds of years of thinking?”