"Relationships are already difficult in the military," SLDN's Benecke says. "Even married heterosexuals who enjoy the full benefit of all the military support services -- in recognition that deployments and military life can be so stressful for a relationship -- have difficulty making it. Add to that the need to hide your relationship every hour of every day while you're at work -- it makes it extraordinarily difficult to have a healthy relationship over time."

As hard as it is for a soldier to juggle two separate lives, the strain can be much greater for his partner, who can experience only half of his mate's life. The captains foresee having to exclude future boyfriends from military social functions -- such as poker nights and pool games -- having to be careful not to walk the dog together too often or share a cart at the grocery store. "I [will be] making him go back into the closet as well," Brett says. "He might get tired of it: 'I don't have to deal with this!'"

All three captains agree that their boyfriends will have to keep a separate apartment, to which they'll be relegated from time to time. They'll have to maintain their guard as strictly as the captains do. One false move in answering the phone when the soldier isn't home could raise difficult questions back at the base. "Who was that guy that answered your phone? What was he doing in your house when you weren't there?"

"Talk about isolation!" Benecke says. "The relationship has to take place in a vacuum."

The isolation intensifies when the soldier leaves for weeks at a time for field training and climaxes during months of deployment in a combat zone overseas. Brett recalls the emotional scenes as the men in his unit left their wives for an unknown destination in the Persian Gulf War.

"I had these grown men crying!" he said. "They never envisioned themselves ever going to war." While heterosexual wives and husbands have spouses' clubs to support them, gay partners are on their own. Members of Brett's platoon faced several Scud missile attacks during their months in the desert, and the panic back home sometimes rose to hysterical proportions. His buddies' wives were looked after with care packages, visits from the family support group and occasional videoconferences with the soldiers in the field. He wonders how a boyfriend of his would have handled it all alone.

"It's the worry," Benecke says. "Every military spouse worries, and the worry [for gays] is exaggerated because they can't be plugged into the support channels that exist for straight people. Nor are they usually listed on any of the official forms that the military would use to contact the next of kin." Peacekeeping deployments vary widely in the danger they pose, but six months away from home can strain a relationship regardless of any physical threat. During Brett's deployments, soldiers were given free "morale calls" to lift spirits during the mission, but also to maintain shaky marriages for the long haul. The calls were made on Army lines, which can be monitored, so he couldn't have risked calling a boyfriend, he says. And public phones weren't available in several of the war zones in which he has been deployed. Military e-mail is often available, but it's also open to Army surveillance.

"The access is limited and conducted in public," Benecke says. "Everyone knows that you're not married, so who the heck are you calling [to say 'I love you']?"

A particularly depressing moment for gays in a serious relationship tends to be the arrival home after deployment or training. "All the wives are out there screaming, 'Oh, honey!' and the kids are running up to them as they get off the planes or the buses," Brett says. "And you're like, 'Well, I have to see mine at home.'" It may seem like a minor matter to a civilian, but gay service members bring it up repeatedly and emotionally. "It's a big deal when you've been away for a long time, or you've been to war and come back," Brett says. "No one's here to welcome me!"

But if the loneliness and deception are particularly acute when these gay officers are overseas, it's with them stateside, too. After all, they spend most of their time with straight service members, and even as they've begun to find happiness in the gay social networks they've developed and to seek boyfriends, they can't afford to undermine their straight fronts. Brett, Drake and Alex balance their gay and straight worlds differently -- Brett has become an isolationist, Drake's a juggler, Alex is somewhere in between -- but all three are having a hard time feeling comfortable with the emotional trade-offs of their choices.

Drake wasn't at Hide & Seek the night I first watched the straight kids pour in. He was out with his buddies from the post. He's constantly juggling the two groups -- maintaining two separate social worlds, like a bigamist with one wife resigned to the arrangement. It's gays one night, military buds the next, some nights ducking out early from the straight night at the pool hall to hit last call at Hide & Seek.

Brett doesn't have any buddies at Fort Carson. He tried juggling for three years in Italy, but couldn't stand the constant lying or the threats of exposure every time a buddy asked a routine question about what he'd been up to. With no buddies, there are fewer questions. So he gave up juggling when he transferred to Fort Carson and implemented isolationism, the second strategy popular among gays in the military. He made a conscious decision before his arrival to distance himself from his work mates and spurn any potential friendships.

Alex represents a somewhat murky middle ground between the other two strategies. He began a switch to isolationism a year ago, after having already developed several close relationships at Peterson Air Force Base. He loosened those ties by convincing his work friends that he found Colorado Springs stifling, and shifted all his free time to Denver, routinely spending three to five nights a week up there.

But the constant questions of his juggling strategy still dog him -- "What you been up to? What did you do this weekend?" -- requiring an elaborate fictional life. "I have to be careful," Alex says. "I have to be guarded when I come back from a weekend and start talking about where I've been or what I've done."

He has spent enough time in Denver's straight clubs to swap them with the gay bars; dates and tricks are converted to feminine counterparts. "I try to keep it as close to the truth as possible, because if I have to retell the story, I'm not going to stumble over things," he says. "If some guy has a broad chest, she's got a rack. A guy named Clay becomes Claire. Everything else pretty much stays the same."

Eventually Alex came to miss bonding with his straight buddies outside of work, so he reverted to a mild juggling strategy this spring. "You can't be an isolationist everywhere you go," he says. "It's stifling, oppressive; you've completely compartmentalized yourself." He's also trying to prepare for a very different situation at his next assignment. He's moving on at the end of April and doesn't foresee the same freedom he has enjoyed for the past two years.

Drake faces the most constant questions, as he's fully engaged with his work buddies, splitting his social life nearly 50-50 between the two worlds. But he thought he was safe in Denver, until a disturbing incident the last weekend of February, just a few days after our combative lunch interview in Brett's kitchen.

A tough-looking guy accosted him on the dance floor at the popular gay dance club Tracks 2000. "Who the fuck are you?" the guy yelled. "I know you, and I know you're in the Army, too!" That was the end of his career, Drake figured; there'd be no Career Field Designation form to worry about in his future. He recognized the face but couldn't place it until the guy cracked up.

Drake was only mildly relieved to recognize Jason, his best friend from their lieutenant days in the mid-'90s, giving him a hard time. "It scared the shit out of me," he says. "Things that involve morality -- or someone's perception of morality -- you just don't know until it's tested." Jason had left the Army and had come to Tracks with his girlfriend; Drake was dancing with a date. "And the dude had a hand on the back of my neck." "Are you here for this?" Jason asked.

"And I'm thinking, 'Oh, my God! He knows! He knows!'" Drake says. "Well, I guess so," he answered. "You caught me."

Same with them, Jason said: great music, great dancing. And then he stepped back a foot -- literally and figuratively -- and took another look at the situation. "No fucking way!" he yelled. "Are you guys ... partners?" And then he was laughing again, hugging Drake. "Don't worry, don't worry," Jason said. And then he took another step back. "You have got to get out of the Army!" he said. "And make yourself happy!"

Brett occasionally betrays misgivings about the all-gay, all-the-time social world he has constructed for himself, but he's not about to return to juggling. He has doubts about how long a hefty gay social calendar can be successfully juggled. SLDN's Benecke concurs. "Straight friends are not stupid," she says. "A concerned straight friend is going to notice that the gay service member is cutting them off at a certain point, and will want to know why. The safer path is to be an isolationist, obviously -- but that has its costs as well."

Like command. Combat command requires total immersion in the lives of your soldiers, Brett says. "You have to spend every waking minute [with your unit]. You're a mentor, you're a leader; you've got to spend your time with the troops and their families. You give up your life to be a [combat] commander. I really believe that."

Juggling would be difficult if Brett became a combat commander, but isolationism is of course out of the question. He'd be unlikely to ever receive another combat command if he aroused suspicion by pursuing a full- or even half-gay life.

Drake and Alex have plenty of time to tinker with their strategies. Majors never command, so they've each got five to eight years of staff time before they make battalion commander. Unfortunately, Brett's Career Field Designation form was due by the end of May. He had to decide whether he could beat all the odds and stomach a return to juggling -- with a much heavier emphasis on the straight side than the three are enduring now. But if he chose the combat arms and failed to make colonel -- whether because of suspicion or confirmation of his gay identity -- he'd be forced into early retirement.

But a self-imposed exile to the support services could accommodate a decent amount of juggling, maybe even a mild form of isolationism. "I'm not taking my dental staff into war and having them say, 'Fight!'" Brett says, imagining a hypothetical operational support role. "I am the commander of the 24th Dental Group! You're in charge of accountants, or intelligence agents who sit behind a desk and gather intelligence. That [combat] cohesiveness doesn't exist in those administrative jobs," he says, so being gay wouldn't detract so much from his leadership.

Perhaps more important, suspicion of his being gay might not disqualify him from attaining the positions necessary for advancement. "With fighting troops, you're supposed to exude masculinity and machismo and all that," he says. "To know that you're a homo will detract from that. I think that's one of the fears of the higher-ups. Support commanders are not the 'Follow me!' kind of guys. They can get away with [appearing gay] because they're administrative commanders."

He could get away with it, but what's the point? He dreamed of sweeping through the Philippines like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not bustling around a New Jersey accounting office with a stack of insurance forms.

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