The Tipping Point of ‘Telling’
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Major Conflict:  One Gay Man’s Life in the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell Military
by Jeffrey McGowan, MAJ, USA (Ret.)
Broadway Books. 278 pages, $24.95

AT ONE TURNING POINT in this moving and romantic book, author Jeffrey McGowan, at the time a U.S. Army artillery lieutenant, hits bottom as he goes to war in Operation Desert Storm, knowing that he must hide the fact that he’s gay and in love with a fellow officer. He asks himself: “Why could I be a soldier, but not a man?” The story builds as McGowan tells us how he went from choosing to remain silent to deciding that he had to escape from the strictures imposed by the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it was instituted in 1993.