A Queer Life Before WikiLeaks
Chelsea Manning’s memoir “README.txt”
Chelsea Manning’s recent memoir tells her personal story, beginning with her childhood. She also explains how she decided to leak files about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the 1990s, when she was 10 years old and it was illegal to be gay in Oklahoma, she and another boy (n.b., she grew up as a boy) were roughhousing and spontaneously kissed each other. This was witnessed by another child, and “the bus driver reported what he heard from other children, and the school intervened. The next day, the principal pulled me from class.” Both children and their fathers (who had to come from work) sat in the same meeting, where the boys were threatened with suspension and had to promise not to kiss again.
Both of Manning’s parents were alcoholic, and her father was physically abusive. As a teenager in the early 2000s, she learned about computer vulnerabilities and became a hacker. She thought of systems as “my personal Rubik’s Cube.” After coming out to her father as a gay man, she ended up sleeping in a parking lot, showering at community centers, getting sunburned, losing weight for lack of calories, and she didn’t have time for college classes.
In 2010, she became famous. She tells that story in README.txt.
