Navy Hospital Corpsman Jeffry Priela’s first duty was to his job, but as a gay man, there was the stress of hiding who he was from the U.S. military and the integrity gap that created in his adherence to the Navy’s “core values” of honor, courage and commitment.

Jeffrey Pound said he was so cautious about being gay that fellow sailors on the submarine USS Newport News thought he was standoffish. Pound couldn’t bear the wall he had built up, told his command he was gay, expected to be kicked out — and found acceptance.

Bryan Clark, a Marine Corps staff sergeant based at Kaneohe Bay, said he was caught up in a wide-ranging investigation of Oahu of gay service members and was discharged in 1996. He’s now trying to get back into the military as a 47-year-old.

The military ushered in “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 1993, prohibiting openly gay individuals from serving in uniform. Its repeal last week has brought a seismic shift in military policy and practice.

Suddenly, there is a public face to being gay in the military. Whether there is widespread acceptance of the new mandate remains to be seen.

On Sept. 20, the day “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed, OutServe, a nonprofit network of actively serving gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender military members, published online “101 Faces of Courage” featuring the names, photos and duty stations of currently serving gay service members.

Among those are two Air Force airmen and two Navy sailors stationed in Hawaii. Priela is one of them.

“We served in silence, never doubting that one day, our country would give back to us that same freedom for which we fight,” an introduction to the OutServe article states. “Now we’re stepping forward, to a new day, a new life, a life of openness, of integrity, of honor.”

Not all desire to announce their sexuality, for a variety of reasons. But Priela, Pound and Clark are among current and former Hawaii-based service members who have stepped forward in a desire to be truthful about who they are and speak up about the military ideals they stand for.

Priela, 29, who works at Makalapa Clinic at Pearl Harbor as a work center supervisor and previously worked at Tripler Army Medical Center, said his job and mission always came first, but there was also the inevitable stress of dealing with questions about whether he had a girlfriend or was married.

“I tried to avoid those (relationship) questions — especially if I didn’t know the person,” Priela said.

That changed Sept. 20.

“Whenever somebody asks me now, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I’ll say, ‘No, I have a partner,'” said Priela, the leader of OutServe’s Hawaii chapter, which he said has about 160 members.

Priela, who was born in the Philippines and grew up in England, has been in the Navy for five years. He said he was mostly able to tune out the stress by carefully choosing who and who not to tell that he is gay.

“I just didn’t pay attention to it because I’ve been trained to execute the mission,” he said. “The mission is the ultimate goal. I have to take care of my patients come hell or high water. Personal issues come second.”

Still, what really affected him was that he couldn’t be himself.

“Because of that, your integrity dies a little bit,” he said. “Being in the service, integrity is a big thing.”

A memo issued Sept. 20 by the Pentagon said, “All service members are to treat one another with dignity and respect regardless of sexual orientation. Harassment or abuse based on sexual orientation is unacceptable and will be dealt with through command or inspector general channels.”

Priela said there will be work ahead.

“Education is a big thing,” he said. “We’re going to try and educate those that are not fully convinced that it (the repeal) is a good thing. There’s a lot of diplomacy that’s going to be involved.”

OutServe’s Hawaii chapter adopted a stretch of highway near Kahana Bay for cleanup and dedicated the portion of roadway to Army Cpl. Andrew Wilfahrt, a gay Schofield Barracks soldier who was killed in February in Afghanistan.

A commemoration service is expected to be held Saturday, Priela said.

Clark, the Marine who was discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said he was a Gulf War veteran and “picture perfect” Marine who was caught up in an investigation of gay service members in 1995 that eventually reached into Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps ranks across Oahu.

Clark, who lives in Denver, said an airman at Hickam was turned in for being gay.

“The Air Force hauled him in and told him they were going to put him away for the rest of his life unless he turned in a list of everyone he had sex with,” Clark said.

The airman provided a list of 17 names, and Clark’s was one of them, he said.

The investigation grew so big it started to receive national media attention. At that point the Pentagon put a halt to it, Clark said.

Clark, based at Kaneohe Bay at the time, said he and two other service members received honorable discharges, with Clark getting a note in his service record stating that he was discharged “due to incompatibility with homosexuality.”

“From what I understood ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was, every single thing they did violated the policy. Basically, they pulled (the airman) into a dark room and threatened him,” Clark said. “The accusation that you are gay is not supposed to be enough to start an investigation, but yet all the other service branches went after (the group of individuals named as being gay).”

Clark said he helped evacuate embassy personnel from Liberia in 1990 and was in northern Iraq and then Israel during the Gulf War in 1991.

He received seven campaign and good-conduct medals and was “never in trouble my entire life.”

“It’s about time,” he said of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. “It’s crazy that such a fuss was made of (being gay) outside the military. But if you actually talk to people in the military, nobody cared. As long as you did your job and you weren’t a slacker, people could absolutely (not) care less what you do on your own time.”

Clark still works for the government as a human resources manager for the Small Business Administration.

He still wants to serve in the military. With the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he contacted a Navy recruiter to see whether he could get an age exemption that might allow him to be a Naval Reserve officer.

“I’m glad there’s at least a slim chance that I might be able to get back in,” Clark said. “At least everyone that’s in (and gay) won’t have to go through all the stuff that I and the 13,000 to 14,000 others went through (who were discharged).”

Pound, 30, the submariner, said he’s been out of the closet as a gay man for about six years in the Navy.

He’s now a petty officer first class and nuclear field electronics technician at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

When he was assigned to the Los Angeles-class attack submarine Newport News out of Norfolk, Va., in 2005, however, he said he did not reveal his sexual preference.

On a submarine in close proximity to about 130 other sailors, secrets are hard to keep, and it quickly cost him in terms of relationships.

“I was there for about six months and just had a really hard time with it, seeing how everyone was so completely open about every aspect of their lives, and I felt I couldn’t be,” he said.

It was isolating, he recalls. The majority of people he worked with thought he wasn’t a likable person because he never talked about himself.

After about six months of hiding the truth, Pound said, he had had enough. He said he decided he would reveal he was gay and expected to be kicked out of the Navy.

He told the “biggest blabbermouth” on the submarine, and “as I predicted, about five minutes later the rest of the boat knew and was wanting to talk to me about it.”

He figured it was a prelude to discharge.

Instead, over the next two weeks, practically no one among the crew “made a big deal of it at all,” Pound said.

The tension over what would happen next led Pound to talk to the top enlisted chief on the submarine.

“He listened to me for a few minutes and was like, ‘You’ve been having these issues with everybody since you’ve been here, and now finally everyone’s just accepting you and taking you for who you are. Why are you still trying to get out?'” Pound recalled.

As a result of that acceptance, he stayed in.

A couple of guys on the Newport News “initially had some issues with me,” he said.

Generally, people had no idea Pound was gay — until he told them.

Pound has held a job at the shipyard for about 1½ years.

His command here in Hawaii has been “really supportive,” he said.