Army captain Brett grumbles through the show along with his pack, a mix of military officers and civilians. He enjoys a good drag show, but nobody on this stage is ever going to challenge RuPaul. For a man born in Manila, the Philippines, raised in Seattle and stationed on three continents since joining the Army, Colorado Springs can feel a bit like Mayberry sometimes. But it isn't the unintentional comedy that bothers them -- Ginger's miniature-football breasts popping out of her lime-green Saran Wrap tube top actually is the highlight of the show -- it's the constant repetition of the same tired routines from the same dozen drag queens, nearly every Friday and Saturday night in the only gay bar in town.

The last diva waves goodbye after last call, just before 2 a.m. The lights go down, the house music goes up and the T-shirts come off. All week they've been waiting for this moment, and nobody's holding back now. Brett sidles up behind a trim young Hispanic, wraps his enormous arms around the thick, sweaty torso, arching the spine back to lower the mouth toward his lips.

And then the strangest thing happens. Straight kids pour in -- hundreds of them, small-town girls and boys lined up across the parking lot and around the corner, hyped up for the hottest after-hours, underage club for 70 miles in any direction. No one appears disconcerted. Pretty soon Brett and his buddies are surrounded by swarms of young, tattooed straight couples, writhing unabashedly around bare-chested soldiers grinding in tight little gay-boy clusters.

The scene plays out every Friday and Saturday, with a handful of GIs almost always there. One wrong soldier strolling in with the straight kids could make Brett forget his painful decision to remain in the combat arms. In March he spotted a sergeant from Fort Carson prowling the bar. He kept his distance from his date all night: no close dancing, no holding hands, definitely no making out. But the sergeant was back the next week and several more times, and it has really started to piss Brett off.

"Five weeks he's been showing up there, and he won't make a frigging move on anyone," he says. "I'm not moving till he does." And months later, toward the end of May, three Air Force sergeants from Marine captain Alex's unit showed up for after hours.

The after-hours mixed club raises the same puzzling questions as the Thursday Night Club, but ratchets up the stakes several notches. With so many opportunities available for anonymous gay sex, why would the men possibly risk this?

"Personal happiness," Alex explains. "Optimism for meeting somebody that I can't bear to be more than 2 feet away from. Finding a soul mate." Sex is the easy part. Ironically, Brett, Alex and Army captain Drake feel free to revel in all the raunchy gay sex they please. They can find it online, they can find it in Denver, they can quickly stalk Hide & Seek and drag home a trick in a manner of minutes -- it really doesn't take long in a gay bar if sex is all you're after.

Initially, sex was all they were after. They were perfectly happy with their military lifestyles and had no desire to hang out with a bunch of homos. Except for those urges, increasingly insistent urges, driving bolder and starker fantasies, which they finally had to acknowledge. All three captains put off the urges well into their late 20s. Each one finally sneaked off to a gay bar, touched a man, kissed a man, slept with a man -- and eventually returned for another. They were quick, targeted missions -- get in, get out, grab your prey and don't get caught -- the standard modus operandi of adult-onset homosexuality.

But once they satisfied those cravings, a whole new set of urges sprang to the surface. The captains have to struggle with the usual social challenges of adulthood -- finding a satisfying relationship, developing a close, supportive circle of friends, being all that they can be on the job -- from deep inside a closet. This requires a level of secrecy and deception that makes happiness in love, friendship and work virtually impossible. And, cruelly, it also makes promotion through the ranks virtually impossible.

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