Did He Wiki-Leak Because He’s Gay?
That’s the kind of reductive, simplistic question being asked today, with the publication of a New York Times profile. Bradley Manning (pictured), the soldier accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, had a tough childhood split between Oklahoma and Wales, The Times reports in a piece with new details of his life. Manning was politically opinionated early on, refusing to do homework that involved the Bible and preferring to hack video games instead of playing them. He was an angry kid, reacting passionately if a fellow student challenged his political views or called him gay. His father kicked him out of the house when he found out Manning was gay. Later, he struggled to adapt to keep secrets about his life in the Army under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, as well as put up with doing menial tasks like getting his officers coffee. Two years ago, Manning went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit a man he’d fallen in love with, and while there he made a circle of friends who gave him moral support. (His detractors will undoubtedly blame “those Ivy League liberals” for corrupting him.) They included politically motivated hackers. Those hackers now say that Manning’s desperate need for acceptance may have motivated his leaking. And though he desperately hoped his actions would make a difference in the war, he described himself as “emotionally fractured†and a “wreck.†Dear Bradley Manning: many of us around the world support you!
