We spoke to Michelle (she/they) via video call while she was in Columbus, OH on May 8, 2026 (her portraits were taken earlier in Rochester, NY). Michelle served as an E-3 in the Air Force, working in crypto linguistics, from 2000 to 2001. She was medically discharged through a technicality after her superiors suspected she was queer and “maladapted for service.” 

Michelle enlisted when they were 18, and they remember that they were “pushed into it by my mother.” Although she wasn’t out, she told us that “I knew I was different.” Michelle was bullied in high school for being queer, and she was apprehensive about joining the military because she “had no idea what I was getting into.” They eventually found other queer people in the Defense Languages Institute that gelled into a sort of “group within a group,” but they also noted that “it was not a friendly time… we were all treated with a certain degree of suspicion and hostility.”

Michelle served during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and they recollected numerous instances of friends who were reported, reprimanded, and punished on suspicion of their queerness. “They had their eyes on us,” she said. “They were trying to figure out what was wrong with us and what they could nail us to the wall for.” Michelle told us that they and their friends navigated this atmosphere “as best as we could. We tried to keep eyes away from us. Or, if they were looking, to be looking at the wrong things.” Queerness was not discussed among the general population of service people, and Michelle recalled that “people talked more openly about drugs than they talked about being queer.”

Today Michelle lives as a masculine nonbinary trans woman in Columbus, Ohio. She came out as queer in her 20s and as trans in her 40s. When she thinks back to her time in the Air Force, she told us that it was her “coming of age story” that shaped her ideas of freedom and friendship. At the same time, however, they carried memories of “how scary it was in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell days. It was the feeling of literally being hunted.”