We couldn’t think of a better way to set Yale’s Her Campus branch on the right track than to feature a girl that even Glamour Magazine calls “The Trailblazer.” Katie Miller is a former top ten ranked Westpoint cadet, the face of the successful repeal of the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, Lady Gaga’s date to the VMA’s last summer, a Truman scholar, and Yale’s very own women’s rugby captain. Not too shabby for a twenty-one year old from the suburbs of Ohio.
Katie’s story is unlike any other. True, it’s not like there’s an average transfer-to-Yale story, but how many were covered on national news venues like The Rachel Maddow Show and The New York Times? Katie’s life-long dream of being in the army led her to Westpoint for her first two years of college before being discharged for violating the university’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy by revealing she is gay. But Katie refused to leave silently- she came out as a lesbian on national television in an illegal interview with Rachel Maddow. Three days later she was discharged. A normal discharge takes about two months, she told Her Campus. Katie described that interview as “terrible and traumatizing…I had to let the screen go to sleep so I wouldn’t have to look at myself coming out to the world.” In some ways, her black screen represented the unknown direction of her future. All she knew was she clearly wasn’t going to be signing the junior year contract that required her to finish out her time at Westpoint.
Katie says she knew she was gay before coming to Westpoint, but she didn’t feel it was a big deal. Once she got to campus, she realized all her perceptions about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” were wrong. “It’s not that they don’t ask you, and you don’t tell them, because the first question a guy is obviously going to ask you is ‘do you have a boyfriend back home?’” She tells us about Westpoint’s strict policy that even the smallest lie was subject to a trial before the board. She was at a catch 22: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was essentially mandating her to lie, so she started changing personal pronouns from feminine to masculine to describe her girlfriend back home.
Things started to change for Katie one day when some of her close fellow cadets made derogatory gay comments at a lunch that left her, “feeling like such a giant coward in a place that was supposed to breed leaders.” She started educating herself on the policy. Katie reached out to Knights Out, an LGBT alumni and support organization, who handled her media coverage once she decided to resign from Westpoint. It was through her extensive media coverage that Lady Gaga found out about and got behind the organization of former military members that were discharged or resigned under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Katie shared that during her backstage experience with Gaga the pop star was brought to tears by the story of their fight to take down the policy. She was so moved, in fact, that she was inspired to honor their fight with the name of her next album title, “Born This Way.” Next thing Katie knew, she had successfully transferred to Yale and accompanied Lady Gaga to the VMA’s all in one fall season!
Katie said she chose Yale because she “wanted to experience a proud, loud, gay community that doesn’t congregate in bars and hidden barracks.” But she points out that she felt ostracized at first in what she calls Yale’s more queer-oriented community. She’s quick to note the difference: the queer movement is a radical challenge to the system that doesn’t necessarily seek to change a specific law (much like the Wall Street protest) while the gay community’s efforts are focused on assimilation. After her discharge, all the media attention, and her high-profile transfer to Yale, Katie is still of mindset that she’s “just the same as everyone else.” (We think she is soooo much cooler.)
Katie will graduate in the spring with a degree in Political Science. After that, she’s headed for D.C. to intern as part of her Truman Scholarship and then straight to officer candidate school to prepare for joining the army. If you haven’t met her (and are star-struck over her like we were!), you might catch her hanging out in her favorite spot on campus, Beineke Plaza, or perhaps checking off what is left on her Yale bucket list: “I’m dying to slide naked across the women’s table!”