by Stephen Marc Beaudoin

Shortly after Fred Fox enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of 18, he remembers pumping his fists in excitement when President Bill Clinton signed a hotly contested policy development in 1993: “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a new law that prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.

“I was right there with everybody else going: ‘Yeah! No fags!’ ” Fox says over iced coffee at the Ace Hotel Stumptown Coffee.

That sort of hot-headed hate language seems like a lifetime ago now for Fox, a mild-mannered Army veteran and public schoolteacher living in Portland with his partner, Eric Scheuering. But now, with the release of Ask Not, director Johnny Symons’ new documentary on gays in the military, Fox is reliving all sorts of painful memories about his 13-year stint in the Army, before leaving in 2006 “because I didn’t want to be in the closet anymore.”

Fox—who toured the country with other openly gay veterans in 2006 as part of the pro-gay “Call to Duty Tour”—is among a large cast of vets and activists in Ask Not, which screens 7 p.m. Sept. 20 at the Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. After a long day of teaching at Beaumont Middle School, the 35-year-old shared his story with Just Out.

Stephen Marc Beaudoin: What was your reaction to seeing Ask Not?

Fred Fox: I got angry, like I mean, I was tense…shaking. It was sort of shocking to me that here I had served for 12 years, defending freedom and liberty and all this stuff I believed and bought into, and here I watched on screen people get arrested trying to join the Army. It’s an issue that shouldn’t be the gay marriage of this election [cycle]…is it going to be “Look at gays, they’re trying to ruin national security!”

SMB: Tell me how “don’t ask, don’t tell” affected your ability to serve.

FF: There’s a whole part of my life that I’m not allowed to talk about. I can sit around with my soldiers and my buddies and my peers, and they can talk about their wives and their girlfriends all day long. And that’s very sad, because there’s that barrier there of distrust. There’s a lot of joking and bigotry. I mean, sexism, racism, homophobia—it’s all there, and it’s done in a very joking nature. And there’s harm and truth to it, but it’s also just the way things go.

SMB: So after a long career in armed services, why teaching?

FF: It really became frustrating for me [in the Army] that I would get soldiers in who had absolutely no self-confidence and thought that the only thing that they would ever do in their lives would be in the Army—these kids straight out of high school. And then you’d spend six months with them and build up their self-esteem, and suddenly they’re leaders and they’ve got all this potential and they see a future for their lives. The idea was, if I could get these kids before [enlisting in the Army] then instead of going, “I only have one option, it’s the Army and now I’m trapped,” the Army could be an option they could choose.