A lesbian
soldier’s mysterious death in Afghanistan raises many
questions—including why more fallen service members
have not been identified as gay. William Henderson
investigates.
On Friday,
September 28, Army specialist Ciara Durkin, a 30-year-old
corporal in the Massachusetts National Guard, was found dead
with a single gunshot wound to her head at the Bagram
Airfield military base in Afghanistan. Four days
later, she was outed by her family as a lesbian -- the
first casualty of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq to
be posthumously identified as lesbian or gay. If any
of the other some 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in either
conflict thus far have been gay, their families
haven’t said. But given the mysterious circumstances
of Durkin’s demise, her family felt compelled
to go public.
“Ciara was
a lesbian and that’s bound to come out,” her
sister, Fiona Canavan, said October 2 in a statement
to media outlets in Boston, near the Durkin
family’s adopted hometown of Quincy. “It is
possible that someone over there found that out, and
maybe they were very homophobic.” She added
that Durkin, who had been home on leave from Afghanistan
just weeks before her death, had told her and her
other siblings -- Ciara was the eighth of nine
children in her Irish family -- that “she had
concerns about things she was seeing when she was over
there. She told us if anything happened to her, that
we were to investigate it.”
But the decision
to disclose Durkin’s sexual orientation was not
easy—and perhaps illustrates why other families
have not been as forthcoming. Durkin’s family
was concerned about her survivor benefits. According to
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, “don’t
ask, don’t tell” ends at death; gay and
lesbian casualties receive the same financial
considerations as heterosexual casualties. Even so, the
family decided to hold off on outing Durkin until
after they had met with a military liaison. Relatives
went so far as to ask the two LGBT newspapers in
Boston not to run stories mentioning her sexual orientation,
which was widely known in the local gay community,
mostly because her gay brother, Pierce, is clerk of
the Boston pride committee.
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