“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” enacted under the Clinton administration in 1993, was repealed in 2010 by an act of Congress signed by President Barack Obama. Carpenter said Mathews suffered from depression and PTSD for years as a result of his discharge. Mathews also fought the Department of Veterans Affairs for a decade, eventually receiving the benefits that were denied him because of his discharge. Mathews went to court and ultimately won back an honorable discharge, Carpenter said. “This broke Brett’s heart because all he ever wanted was to be an Air Force officer,” Carpenter wrote. Mathews was given a dishonorable discharge under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which barred LGBT service members who didn’t keep their sexual identity a secret. The officer, who was in the Air Force Reserve, reported Mathews to his superiors. One night in 1998, he ran a stop sign off the base, and the police officer who pulled him over noticed a local LGBT magazine in the back seat. That week, though, Mathews said, he “quit fighting the feelings I was having” and admitted to himself that he was gay.Ĭarpenter, in his Facebook post, described what happened when Mathews was a 1st Lieutenant stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. He also was the president of the Elder’s Quorum in his campus ward, which served 280 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he felt responsible for “the spiritual welfare of all of them.” He was a week from graduating from Utah State University, where he was in the Air Force ROTC, and about to go on active duty in the U.S.
DEEPFOCUS DOCUMENIARES FULL
Mathews, who grew up in Tooele County, said in a 2002 interview with The Salt Lake Tribune that his life was full and rich in June of 1996.
“He was such a good man and would give you the shirt off his back if you needed help,” Tom Carpenter, a friend of Mathews’, wrote in a Facebook post. 24 at his home in Tooele “suddenly and accidentally,” according to an obituary written by his family. Brett Mathews, a Utah man who fought the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that targeted gay service members and allowed his conflict with his conservative Latter-day Saint family to be chronicled in an acclaimed documentary, has died.
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