Dan Choi on Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Your dad is a Baptist minister. Does that explain your first choice – the Bible?

That explains a lot of it, yes. And I should clarify that he’s actually a Korean Southern Baptist minister. If you live in America that marks him out as the most zealous of all!

You say the Bible brings back childhood memories – can you tell me about some of those?

Every Sunday we would go to church twice. My dad would be preaching in the morning and then we would go to the evening service. And every day before we went to school we would have a Bible study group.

How did your Bible studies make you feel about being gay?

Well I think that today you see a lot of people using the Bible for their own political agenda. They interpret it how they want. For example, my room-mate at West Point was convinced that if you read the Old and New Testaments they are clearly against people being gay. But I don’t think that view is following what Christ is saying. Many people in lots of different situations have gone through so much pain and I think that comes from people using the Bible to pursue their own agenda.

For me, when we actually apply the lessons of that book to our lives, we see there is great hope because Christ is talking about those people who have been hurt. While I was going through college I had to apply that message in a very secret way, because I was gay. The politics of the day and the religious establishment of the day might be against you and can strip everything away from you. But Jesus’s message is one of hope and personal love.

Your next choice is a film – Saving Private Ryan.

Yes, for me watching this film is the main reason I decided to join the army. It’s the idea that the man is the mission. In the film their mission is to save a man who has been left behind enemy lines. For us in the military there is a mantra. They always say, What is your greatest weapon system and how can you deploy it?

Well, the most effective and the most important and the most expensive weapon systems are the soldiers themselves and I don’t think that can be emphasised enough. All of the technology in the world can’t compare to the fact that we have boots on the ground.

When I first saw the film, I just saw things on a superficial level. I thought I want to serve my country in the most visible, most obvious way. And for me that’s when you’re willing to give your life for missions, for a country and for an agenda that’s beyond yourself. Those things really resonated with me back in high school.

Do you still feel the same after your experiences in the army?

Well, let me just say upfront – any soldier that has served in Iraq should be forgiven if they say that they hate the war! I don’t know of any soldiers who have gone through their entire deployment who have said, Oh, I just love this war.

Going through some of those very traumatic experiences, which most people will never experience in their entire lives – it makes you question a lot of the mission.

But one thing’s for sure, you know the people going through it with you, they are always there for you, even if they don’t physically say it.

Tell me about your next choice.

This is Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey.

For me the idea that Colin Powell was the first African American to be appointed as Secretary of State, and the highest ranking military man in America makes him a symbol. Even more important than what he was doing, is the idea that an American person can come from any background and go on to achieve so much. That’s a testament to what America is.

So it’s living the American dream, another message of hope.

Yes and I could just as easily put either of Barack Obama’s books as a choice. They’re also stories of hope. But, when I look to my personal story, being in the military and reading Powell’s story about how racist people were towards him, this for me is morally wrong. He was serving and he encountered a lot of discrimination and it was hard for him to find friends. So through the book I tried to piece together where I stood as a Korean American in the military.

And of course the same sorts of things apply if you’re gay in the military. So near the end of my time at West Point I managed to piece it all together. I was very defensive in a lot of ways about my race, about being different. But, throughout my time in the army Powell’s story gave me inspiration and solace.