Born in 1987, Bradley Manning was brought up in Crescent, a small town in the Bible Belt of Oklahoma that he later joked had ‘more pews than people’. His father Brian was in the military and would spend long periods away. His mother Susan found it hard to make the transition from her native Wales, where she met Brian whilst he was stationed there. She drank too much, neighbors have said. Even at a young age Manning had a festering lack of respect for authority and refused to recite part of the Pledge of Allegiance to God. According to his older sister Casey, their mother’s drinking got worse and she would take vodka with her tea and rum with her coke all day until she went to bed. The children learned to look after themselves. By the age of six Manning was dressing himself and making his own cereal. He built his first website at 10 and come the age of 13 he was messing around with the code on video games to change how characters looked - the first steps on a lifelong interest in hacking. He had few friends and preferred to spend his time with his computer. Manning was scared of his father who was reportedly ‘far too strict’ whenever he was home. His mother was ‘far too soft’ to make up for it.
Note: Parts of this story are from the classic gay-boy background: inattentive and dysfunctional parents; especially a brutish or disinterested father; tendency towards isolationism; rebelliousness; then a swerve towards homosexuality and the structure provided within the gay world. Oddly enough, many of these same guys, and I knew quite a few, turned to the military and its male-only world of supreme masculine authority. According to these same men, some of whom I met as fellow porn actors, revealed a saturated underground of heated homosexuality in all branches of the service. Some got caught, and in the era of DADT, they were discharged. Now, in the post-Obama age of being out and proud: What caused Manning to turn against the newly gay-ified administration? I am guessing, like myself, there comes a point when Big-Daddy government just doesn’t fill the void anymore. And then, you reject the one you once cherished. It’s the never-ending restless searching for the cure; this is the illness plaguing all gay men.