New Yorker Covers Black Gay Serviceman Alan Rogers

This week's New Yorker magazine has a lengthy story (is there any other kind in that magazine?) about Major Alan Greg Rogers, a Black gay man who served in the military that was killed in Iraq earlier this year, as reported here at madprofessah.com two months ago. The article is by Ben McGrath and is titled "A Soldier's Legacy."

It is a fascinating read about a complex and talented individual, who happened to be gay.
Here's a (brief) excerpt:

Shortly after Rogers moved to Washington, in 2004, he joined [American Veterans for Equal Rights] AVER, and served as the local chapter’s membership coördinator and treasurer, participating in “pride” festivals in Baltimore and Washington and organizing rafting and movie trips; among the latter was a trip to see “Gunner Palace,” a documentary about the experiences of soldiers in Iraq. In March of 2005, an AVER member named Tom posted to the organization’s Yahoo discussion group an Army Times op-ed titled “Gays in the Military: It’s a Question of Liberty.” “Thanks for sharing this,” Rogers posted, in response. “It’s nice to see active-duty field-grade officers making a strong case for the repeal of D.A.D.T. and publishing it in the Army Times. Curious to read some of the backlash the subsequent issues will no doubt contain.” (A retired officer, Lieutenant Colonel James E. Schmidt, wrote, “The Bible clearly states that homosexuality is a sin. Leaders must have respect from those they lead. I do not think many soldiers will respect or follow a leader who promotes sin.”) As word of Rogers’s death spread in the gay community, some began to wonder if he might not qualify as the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war. Opponents of the military’s policy, noting his impeccable résumé, and his work with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, saw in Rogers a transformative figure and began soliciting media coverage.

About a dozen gay active-duty personnel, including one senior officer, attended Rogers’s formal burial at Arlington, and joined in a memorial celebration later that evening at a local bed-and-breakfast that was attended by reporters from the Washington Post and from N.P.R.’s “Morning Edition.” The Post’s unusually detailed obituary ran the following week, under the headline “ARMY OFFICER REMEMBERED AS HERO: FRIENDS, FELLOW SOLDIERS MOURN LOSS OF ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ MAN.” It cited his Purple Heart and his two bronze stars, discussed the Persian rug that Rogers’s team in Baghdad had pitched in to buy for Shay Hill as a wedding gift, and quoted Mark Nadel, Rogers’s thesis adviser at Georgetown, saying that he recalled thinking, “This is a guy I’m going to hear from in ten years, and he’s going to be a general.” It did not mention that the subject of the thesis was the effect of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on United States military recruiting and retention rates. The N.P.R. segment was pegged to news of the four-thousand-casualty mark having been crossed five years after the invasion, with Rogers’s story standing in as a kind of Everyman soldier’s. “You should know that about two hundred people came to the burial, soldiers and civilians alike,” the host, Steve Inskeep, said. “Major Rogers had no wife or child to take away the flag that draped his coffin, so soldiers folded that flag and gave it to his cousin, Cathy Long.”

He will be missed.

Sep 21, 1967-Jan 27, 2008