Okay, let me tell you about Pitch Wars and fees. I grew up poor. P-O-O-R, living in government housing, poor. My family is intergenerationally poor, which is a real fancy way of saying we been poor as dirt since we ran away from the Potato Famine. We have 0 (ZERO) college graduates. We do have some union plumbers. But most of us have worked service industry jobs and scraped by and made do. I joined the Army to try to break that cycle of poverty. We didn't have the money for college, and I was afraid of loans.

I'm queer and I served under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If you got caught, if someone reported you-- you didn't get a court date, you got a separation date. They gave you a general discharge (instead of an honorable one,) usually on a Section 8: "mentally unfit for service." This