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Capt. Daniel Hall (L) and Capt. Vincent Franchino (R) Image via Facebook
Great news to end the work week!
Last Saturday, West Point’s Cadet Chapel hosted it’s first same-sex wedding between active-duty service members.
Captain Daniel Hall and Captain Vincent Franchino, both Apache helicopter pilots, were wed in Cadet Chapel in a ceremony officiated by a Unitarian Universalist minister.
The two met at the academy in 2009, when Hall was a senior and Franchino was a freshman, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still a year away from being repealed.
“We’ve experienced everything from people feeling awkward around us to being called faggots while holding hands and walking down the street, stuff like that,” Franchino told The New York Times. “But despite what we’ve been through, nothing was worse than having served during the ‘ Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ years.”
Through those years he and Hall had to keep their sexuality—and their relationship—secret.
“We couldn’t tell the truth for fear of what would happen to us,” Franchino says. “So we put it in our minds that we were never going to say we were gay. We were never going to get made fun of, and we were certainly never going to get kicked out of the Army.”
“It’s really frustrating when two people have feelings for each other but are not allowed to act on them,” he tells the Times. “We were serving under a policy that was telling all of us—perfectly capable soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines—to lie about ourselves.”
And then came the end of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in 2011 and a gateway to “happily ever after.”
Thirty-four military officers attended the couple’s wedding and honored them by raising their sabers in a military arch for the couple.
It’s important to note that this wasn’t the first same-sex wedding at West Point. That distinction goes to Sue Fulton and Penny Gnesin in 2012.
In 2013, Larry and Daniel Lennox-Choate became the first male same-sex couple to wed at the military academy.
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Two graduates of West Point are set to become the first men to marry each other at the storied military academy.
Larry Choate III, class of 2009, will marry Daniel Lennox, class of 2007, on Saturday at the U.S. Military Academy’s Cadet Chapel. West Point hosted two same-sex weddings of women in late 2012, more than a year after New York legalized gay marriage. But this is the first time two men are being wed at West Point.
“It’s maybe one more barrier that’s pushed over a little bit, or maybe one more glass ceiling that’s shattered that makes it easier for the next couple,” Choate said Friday.
Choate, 27, said the landmark Gothic chapel at the Hudson Valley academy is a special place and it’s an honor to be wed there. He taught Sunday school at the chapel as a cadet and always thought of it as the place he would get married, if he could.
The pair did not know each other as cadets, but met later through a mutual friend.
Both men are out of the military. Lennox, a 28-year-old from Washington, D.C, is getting his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Choate, from Seattle, works at the business school there and is applying to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
