Marine captain Alex's romantic feelings for men surfaced very quickly. The thoughtful, lean intellectual never touched a man until 1997, but within weeks he broke off a relationship with a woman to pursue the first love of his life. He played it very safe, driving all the way up from San Diego to West Hollywood, Calif., just to have drinks or go dancing. "He was the first person outside my family to say 'I love you,'" Alex says. But he had nearly completed his assignment, and he found himself shipped out to Colorado before the boyfriend was ready to commit.

Alex attempted the same long-distance tactic in Colorado Springs, essentially setting up a 70-mile, gay-free perimeter around the city. "I completely separated my life," he says. "Everything I did here was straight-oriented, and I'd go to Denver and it was gay. My friends here at work think I have a completely separate life in Denver."

His first year fit the classic "slut phase" commonly experienced by gay men just coming out to themselves. "I was a hound dog," he says. "I was just a predator. I would readily do it again, but there's no emotional or spiritual satisfaction. It's purely physical and I'd like more out of it." He began looking for more, but the distance was too great a barrier. "I wasn't finding Denver people interested in dating someone living in the Springs," he says. He discovered a casual weekly dinner group in Boulder that he enjoyed immensely. But though he made the 200-mile round trip frequently, there was no apparent enthusiasm for commuter friendships. Early last year, his frustration drove him to a decision to make his first trip to a gay bar, dropping the gay perimeter. He ventured into Hide & Seek, stopped avoiding locals in the gay-sex chat room and eventually even initiated a Thursday Night Club based on the Boulder model.

Oddly enough, the real breakthrough came in the chat room. He met Brett there one night, hunting for sex. Brett was characteristically cautious. "He had lied to me about who he was and where he worked, and I had been honest," Alex says of the time they met. "He had a plausible denial or some con game going to avoid detection. He was very suspicious about people and was concerned there was some criminal investigative authority out looking for people." Alex wasn't fooled. GIs have their own military version of "gaydar" -- the stance, the walk, the bearing and, of course, the haircut -- and they rarely have trouble picking one another out of a crowd.

The encounter quickly developed into a tight friendship that dramatically changed both their lives. Brett has developed into a hub of the local gay social scene, and Drake has also entered the social circle through Brett's continuing online adventures. Drake was scoping out the Springs while still stationed at Fort Bragg last summer, and Brett then served as Drake's entree into the community when he arrived, acting very much like a commander does for new arrivals in his unit.

Military life is inherently lonely, regardless of sexuality. Brett has relocated six times in nine years, interspersed with 20 extended field trainings and five combat or peacekeeping deployments, from Kuwait to central Europe. Traditionally, soldiers respond by bonding tightly within their units, developing a profound esprit de corps vital to the success of an army. "We tend to be very close-knit," Brett says. "It's totally your social circle. We're a lot like tight immigrant groups or some religious orders. You have an immediate extended family when you arrive."

But gays often pull away from such circles to guard their secret. "The policy imposes severe isolation by prohibiting them from forming friendships with their straight friends," says Michelle Benecke, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. "A service member plays Russian roulette with their career every time they have a conversation with a friend that straight people take for granted. 'Hey, what are you doing this weekend? Where do you go to church?' You can't say MCC [Metropolitan Community Church, a federation of gay Christian congregations]."

Alex never grasped the full measure of his loneliness until he met Brett. He still speaks wistfully about the early days. "We hung out all the time together, because it was such a relief to find somebody else," he says. "We talked about military pasts and boyfriend pasts, and optimistic futures. And it was normal, it was nice, it was like having a wingman around." They introduced each other to entirely new circles of friends -- Brett's in the Springs, Alex's in Denver -- and instilled a mutual confidence in each other that spurred them fully into the gay social scene.

"That was kind of [Brett's] way of getting out," Alex says. "He was a Net hound. He predominantly did stuff online and didn't go out. He was very paranoid. And I think he's eased up quite a bit in the year and a half I've known him. He's not looking over his shoulder all the time. He's not quite as concerned about being out or being seen out or doing some things that might suggest that he's gay."

Less paranoid, but still careful. A dinner party broke up early one night, and I rode to Hide & Seek with Brett, following Drake's Pathfinder. Drake pulled into the lot and Brett smacked his palm against the steering wheel. "Damn! He pulls right up to the club! And he's got that freaking vanity plate, screaming out that he's airborne!" Brett drove around the corner and parked his truck on a dark side street.

They're all highly active in the local gay scene now. Brett still cruises the chat rooms nearly every day, using a separate account, withholding descriptions until he's comfortable and sending only headless photos. But that's fearless compared with some of the soldiers he meets there: Many are still afraid to venture out in public or into Hide & Seek. Brett can't imagine crawling back into a closet that cramped.

Ironically, the captains have begun to develop a form of the very gay ghettos Drake and Alex disdain so much. They have all reached the conclusion that they're unlikely to find their soul mate in bed the morning after a night cruising for anonymous sex. Romantic relationships appear near the top of their priority lists, but two other themes keep recurring as they discuss their progression from predator-sluts to gay social butterflies: fulfillment of the camaraderie that drew them to military life and an emerging sense of their own identity.

"I was trying to learn what I was, and what characteristics of men I liked," Alex says. "It's not like growing up Hispanic and having a grandmother who teaches you about who you are and where you've come from. There is no Hispanic grandmother to teach you about gay culture; each one of us has to learn it for ourselves.

"Some of it has to do with how gay men deal with each other," he says. "It's different from the military. I know how men deal with each other in the military."

Alex has learned a great deal about what it means to be a gay man, but considerably less about being a gay Marine. "I'm really looking forward to the day I meet another Marine in my situation," he says. "I want to see how [Marines] have adapted to it, how successful they are, if they're thinking about getting out or staying in, if they agree with the policy or not. How do they maneuver through the obstacles and the lies?

"I feel lonely," he says. "It doesn't have to do with the gay thing; it has to do with the Marine thing. How does that change being a Marine for them? Can they contain both ideas in one philosophy and one approach to living?"

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