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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In 2008, Season 5 of The L Word premiered with the character Tasha, a decorated Iraq war veteran being investigated under Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Speaker 1: This is really stupid. We should just tell them they're our friends.

Speaker 2: Tell us what? Tasha's being held back because she's being investigated for homosexual conduct, and she has to keep a low profile, so if you could just lay off the PDA.

Melissa: Thousands of LGBTQ veterans faced similar experiences before Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in 2011 by President Obama. During a virtual White House event on Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued new guidance to provide full benefits to veterans who were discharged because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Here's Kayla Williams, an assistant to the VA secretary. During the event, she spoke about her experience of being forced to hide her sexuality while serving in the army, then she announced the new guidance.

Kayla Williams: The VA adjudicators should clarify that service members who have an other than honorable discharge due solely to their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status should be considered veterans who may be eligible for VA benefits including disability compensation and burial.

Melissa: Now, LGBTQ veterans who were other than honorably discharged are newly eligible for benefits from the VA like healthcare, pensions, housing assistance, homeless assistance programs, and a proper veterans' burial benefits. All these vital aspects of civilian life have been out of reach to thousands of queer veterans until now. Jennifer Dane is the CEO and Executive Director of the Modern Military Association of America. Welcome to The Takeaway, Jennifer.

Jennifer Dane: Thank you so much.

Melissa: Richard Brookshire is the Board Chair and Co-founder of the Black Veterans Project. Welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard Brookshire: Hi. I'm really excited for the conversation.

Melissa: Richard, I want to start with a question that I feel has been posed to Black folks, and by Black folks to other Black folks really since the founding of the nation, and it is, why did you want to serve in the military?

Richard Brookshire: That's a hard question to answer. For me personally, because I think it differs for everybody, I served because I lost my scholarship to college. Barack Obama had just become president, and I was young and impressionable and felt like, no better time to serve than under a Black president, and I wanted money to pay for school. I think economic motivations are a large component of why so many working-class people choose to don the uniform. Those are my personal reasons.

Melissa: Richard, that's so helpful. I think, in fact, data and statistics bear that out that when we look at our current volunteer military that in fact, those questions of economic need and concern means that we have a much more working-class military than our overall population where folks with more wealth don't have to serve. Jennifer, can you then talk to me about the ways that we draw working-class kids in, and then for LGBTQ young people who serve, they then don't get those benefits on the backside?

Jennifer Dane: Absolutely. I think the draw is the accessibility and the equity that they gain from serving. You have the opportunity to get education and housing and see the world. I think the working class sees that as an opportunity to get out there and do more. Also, the commitment to service, I think that's a huge thing of giving back to your country. Most folks, especially even me, I'm a veteran myself, and just from a very small town and the draw of just being part of something larger was a huge reason for me to join the military.

For LGBTQ folks, an interesting statistic is the Department of Defense is the number one employer of transgender individuals. Most folks don't know that, but I think the draw is also pretty similar. We face a lot of discrimination from hopefully not so much now, but at least whenever I was growing up from our communities, and especially in smaller towns that are usually more conservative. The draw is just being able to be yourself, but being able to also give back. The benefits, that's a hard topic. It's near and dear to my heart and we're hoping to rectify that because we know that that is a huge, huge stumbling block in our historical narrative of service for LGBTQ individuals.

Melissa: Richard, the VA has said that they were working to "reverse the harm done" to more than 14,000 LGBTQ+ veterans who were discharged under almost 20 years of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. When you think about that "reversing the harm done", what does that mean for you? What would that look like?

Richard Brookshire: Reversing the harm done. First, there's about 100,000 people that are still alive walking around the United States that have been discharged for their gender identity or sexual orientation throughout the history of the military as it stands now. It's not sufficient to just focus exclusively on those that were discharged under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, though I think it's a step in the right direction. I also think that the VA has very antiquated policies. What was announced was that, essentially, it was essentially an announcement to encourage LGBT individuals who had gotten other than honorable discharges to go through the process of attempting to get VA benefits.

That is not the easiest thing for a lot of individuals to do. They have to file the paperwork; they have to go through the hoops there. Then as an LGBTQ individual, thankfully I wasn't discharged under that policy, though I served under it. It changed on my birthday when I was in Afghanistan, so symbolic in that way. I'm going through my disability process now and it's quite antiquated, and it's lengthy, and there are complications that happen all the time. The VA is an imperfect system and it certainly needs a lot of work.

I think lastly, one of the things that I think a lot of people don't recognize either is that there's a racial component even to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell crisis that transpired the witch-hunt that it was, and minorities were disproportionately affected. Women were disproportionately affected under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. These groups already have major barriers to access when it comes to the VA, access to the full breadth of their VA benefits. The VA has to have a policy that's intersectional if they want to actually be able to not only foster trust amongst the LGBTQ community but specifically Black LGBTQ people which obviously, I'm part of the Black Veterans Project. That's my purview.

Melissa: That's so helpful, Richard, both in terms of thinking about what this new guidance actually means, as well as drawing our attention to that intersectionality. Jennifer, I feel like it's been reported primarily in a way that that seems like, okay, open your mailbox and don't worry. Your benefits will be in there. I know they're not all mailbox benefits. I get that. It feels like, "Oh, now it's automatic." To hear from Richard, that you now have to still walk through this process, what is that going to mean for actually being able to access these benefits?

Jennifer Dane: That's one of the main questions we asked the VA yesterday. I was in a legislative hearing to really understand what that looks like. Because like Richard said, we know that there's over 114,000 veterans from World War II until the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 2011 they still don't have any benefits, 114,000. Those folks who served in silence, and some openly, and they served their country with dignity and respect, and we still haven't given them the respect that they deserve.

What they told us is-- I do have to applaud the VA because they are heading in the right direction. I do applaud them for taking this first step, but most of the folks were discharged either dishonorably, or other than honorably, or even bad conduct. It only impacts a small amount of folks. One thing that I really asked them to consider was that there's also was a policy called Blue Discharges. Those disorders were primarily given to those that were of the Black community, LGBTQ, and Jewish. Those were just general discharges basically to push them out of the military. This history goes all the way back.

Then unknown fact that most people don't know is the first person ever discharged from the military for being gay was during the Revolutionary War. To get back to your question, we would love to see them reach out because our organization does help with legal assistance, and upgrading those discharges, and getting the benefits restored. This policy does not upgrade discharges. It simply reviews the benefits, and hopefully gets them reinstated.

The process, like Richard said, takes a very long time. We know that what we are seeing is anywhere from 2 to 10 plus years and that's just from the beginning of the process.

With the pandemic, we also saw that the National Archives were closed, and also the Board of Records Corrections were closed. There's significant barriers. You're talking about people that they need healthcare; they need a place to go especially during a pandemic, and they don't have a place. I had a family that called and said, "We just want burial benefits." I said, "I would love to help you restore those but it's going to take a minimum of two and a half years." It's heartbreaking. People should know that these folks served and they should be given all the dignity and honor that they deserve.

Melissa: Absolutely. It means so much to veteran families to have those burial rights and benefits. I don't know, for folks who don't have veterans in their family may not understand the level of emotion and connection that there is to that particular honor, even beyond all of the other meaningful aspects of these resources that are meant to be made available to our veterans while they are living.

Richard, I want to come to you. As I'm hearing Jennifer and you talk about, with your own experiences as well as reflecting on these disproportionate numbers, again, so often we've heard that the US military was one of the first spaces of racial integration. It's been held up by various communities as a model of the one institution in America that worked right around race. What do we misunderstand when we give that narrative?

Richard Brookshire: I guess we misunderstand the facts which is part of why Black Veterans Project exists is that there are actually really stark racial disparities across the military at all levels. From recruitment to retirement, from promotions to the military's justice system, Black people are marginalized at all levels. Part of what we're attempting to do at BVP is bring light to that, share those stories, force the military to release data that it has tracking around even just present-day racial inequities.

For instance, there's a biannual racial equity climate survey that the DOD administers. It's only released one year of that data. Our advocacy helped to do that but they've been collecting it for well over almost a decade now. We want access to all of that data because the data that did come out from that one year, 2017, was quite damning. It said that one in every three service members had witnessed white nationalism in the ranks. It said that somewhere around 50% of Black service members, minority service members, didn't feel comfortable reporting issues of discrimination. I mean, it said for fear of retribution.

Just these kinds of statistics and to have them on paper to legitimize what a lot of Black service members are actually sneezing about. Our main focus, our central focus, is then looking at the Department of Veteran Affairs and looking at racial inequities at large across the Department of Veteran Affairs. In the months to come, we're actually working on a deep media collaboration investigative report around historical benefit obstruction by the VA and its culpability there.

Melissa: Jennifer Dane is the CEO and Executive Director of the Modern Military Association of America, and Richard Brookshire is the Board Chair and Co-founder of the Black Veterans Project. Thank you both for your service and for your continued work.

Jennifer Dane: Thank you so much.

Richard Brookshire: Thank you.

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