By any measure, Karen Solt is an exemplar of discipline, dedication, and determination. She acquired and developed these admirable character traits during her distinguished career in the Navy (1984–2006), throughout which she was forced to hide her sexuality. In her debut memoir, Hiding for My Life: Being Gay in the Navy, Solt, now a retired senior chief petty officer who lives in northern Arizona and works as an emotional health coach, brings to vivid life her experiences as a “Combat Hideologist,” as well as her yearslong battle with substance abuse and eventual commitment to sobriety.
According to Kirkus Reviews’ starred review, the author’s “remarkably readable narrative details a stint in the United States Navy that she began as a reluctant recruit and concluded as a high-ranking noncommissioned officer, emphasizing the price Solt paid for having to keep her true self a secret. Her account highlights the real-life consequences of military policies forbidding gay people from serving, and of the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ era, which required gay service members to pretend they didn’t have personal lives and denied them the accommodations offered to heterosexual military couples. Solt’s memoir is also a heartwarming story of survival, through finding fellow gay service members and straight allies who kept their secrets.”
The author’s memoir, named an Indie Best Book of 2024, takes us directly inside the strict, often suffocating culture of life in the Navy, an existence made infinitely more difficult due to her inability to express her true self. As she points out, being gay in the military at that time was illegal, and discovery meant discharge and the loss of any accumulated benefits for her service, regardless of duration. Nonetheless, she persevered and adapted as necessary, climbing the hierarchy even as she remained internally conflicted.
“My early days were pretty out of control,” she says. “But I also know how to adapt to systems. I think many humans—well, we figure it out, right? You learn how to adapt within a specific environment. One of my fears was, if I had gotten in trouble [i.e., BEING GAY], then all of my freedoms would be taken away. It was challenging to go from zero structure to structure within a system, but at least my first four years, probably my first eight years, I still was fairly unstructured within a structured system.”
Working diligently to maintain the grueling demands of the Navy while also coping with having to constantly hide her personal life, she sought solace and escape within clandestine relationships with fellow closeted gay women on board and, increasingly, binge drinking. “We partied a lot....But I was always really good at my job, and so the people I worked for kind of took care of me, and they watched out for me.” As the narrative progresses, Solt demonstrates the intertwining of her burgeoning professional success and the torment of her emotional struggles and escalating alcohol abuse. “Solt’s narrative,” noted Kirkus, “is at its most riveting when conveying the challenges of trying to maintain a relationship while serving, which are increased exponentially when having to keep it under wraps.”
The significance of having to “keep it under wraps” cannot be overstated. “What I try to impress upon people are a couple of things,” says Solt. “No. 1: For someone like me, who made it through 22 years and never got caught. I have full benefits. I have the rewards of serving. I go to the VA for my therapy. When I call USAA, they call me ‘Senior Chief.’ I had people for my whole career thanking me for my service. So there’s some sort of survivor’s guilt because so many people were serving honorably, and the only thing that happened to them was somebody turned them in, and within 24 hours, they’re stripped of everything. They’re stripped of their identity and their uniform; they have no benefits anymore, and they could have been serving for 15 years. Now they have no rent, no food, no nothing, and they have to go get a job.”
Near the end of the book, the author intimately encapsulates this sentiment:
“I had been in hiding for so long, it was painful to expose my truth, my vulnerability—my secrets—but what I learned through this process is that facing all of it has given me a level of freedom I’ve never before experienced.
To my fellow gay veterans, especially those appearing in these pages, thank you. It’s not lost on me that my hiding helped me make it to retirement when tens of thousands of you were hunted and discharged and never received compensation or acknowledgment for your service. My hope is that, by uncovering and sharing my truth, my words will validate that your journey was not only difficult but also harmful and unjust. One of the greatest joys of my life was serving with you, and I’d like to thank you for finding me and leading me to my special underground family. I’m honored to call you my sisters and brothers.
A major component of Solt’s truth, which she expresses in an unvarnished yet emotionally charged fashion, is her protracted battle with alcoholism and her eventual journey to sobriety—and, just as important, the maintenance of that sobriety. “I’m 32 years sober now,” she says. “I am one of the lucky ones that the desire to drink was removed from me immediately. But I also think about how everyday I’d wake up and say, ‘God, please don’t let me drink today.’ ” The author’s straightforward, candid prose ably captures the agony she has faced fighting off her demons, a battle that began at an early age and lasted through her late 20s.
“I started [drinking] when I was 9,” she notes. In her teen years and early years in the Navy, she was “a daily drinker, and I wrote the chapter about impending doom. I knew that if I didn’t stop drinking, something terrible was coming. I could feel I was going to hit somebody with my car or hurt somebody, which would have been a horrific outcome.” As she continues to discuss her recovery, Solt’s calming stoicism echoes the evenhanded tone of the book, which will prove to be a boon for anyone hiding their sexuality or wrestling with substance abuse or addiction. “I’ve always had this idea that things will work out, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy,” she says. “There are many times in your recovery when it’s hard to stay sober. There are times when staying present in the world is very painful.”
In addition to accessibly laying out her own story, and that of gay service members in the Navy, Solt touches on universal truths such as liberation, validation, self-acceptance, and tolerance. “I want people to understand that hiding hurts everybody, and some of us hide because we’re not safe in the world,” she says. “When I hide, I hurt you because I’m not having an honest relationship with with my fellow humans. When one person isn’t free, nobody’s free. If my liberation is at the expense of anybody else, it’s not liberation; it’s privilege. I just don’t get how we’ve gotten to this place. My hope is to put out a story that probably makes me less safe in the world in some ways, but also makes other people safer, because it opens minds and hearts.” In that, Solt has succeeded.
Eric Liebetrau is a freelance writer and editor based in Charleston, S.C. He is a former longtime managing and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, and his work has appeared in a variety of national publications.
