NEED TO KNOW
- Audri Pettirosi’s TikTok went viral after she shared her great-uncle Marshall Belmaine’s decadeslong love story with a fellow veteran
- Belmaine, who became an LGBTQ+ rights advocate with his late husband, Albert Wakefield, received a Purple Heart in the Vietnam War after rushing to help a wounded Marine
- “It’s just a very important story that I feel like really needs to be told,” Pettirosi tells PEOPLE of Belmaine’s journey toward living openly
Nearly one year after meeting her great-uncle for the first time, a woman felt compelled to share the story of his Vietnam War service and his 50-year relationship to his late husband.
“He’s just done so much for this country and for the gay community,” Pettirosi, 21, tells PEOPLE of Marshall Belmaine. “It’s just a very important story that I feel like really needs to be told.”
Pettirosi, a sophomore at Keene State University in New Hampshire, studying film production, says she didn’t think her March TikTok about Belmaine’s love story with Albert Wakefield would go viral and instead just hoped it would “touch a few people’s lives.”
To date, the video has received more than 585,000 views and 67,000 likes — and the comments section is flooded with praise for her great-uncle.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
“I read through basically all the comments,” she says, “and it was just so amazing to see these people just being like, ‘Thank your uncle for us. He is a true American hero, and thank you for sharing his story.’ ”
After dropping out of his Massachusetts high school due to homophobic bullying, Belmaine, then 19, joined the Marine Corps in November 1965 and kept his gay identity a secret.
There was “plenty” of homophobia around him, “including from my own family, including Audri’s grandfather, who was my half-brother,” he tells PEOPLE.
In April 1967, Belmaine’s military mettle was tested when the North Vietnamese Army attacked U.S. troops near Khe Sanh. As they went up Hill 861, the North Vietnamese “opened up on us with mortar fire” and “a number of guys got hit — including myself in my right leg.”
“I ducked down by what was left of a banana tree,” Belmaine recalls. “It only had one leaf on it. I said, ‘Well, this ain’t going to work. That’s not going to hide me,’ because I was right out in the open. But there was a Marine that was ahead of me that was calling out to his friend to come and help him.”
Belmaine decided to help the fatally wounded man. In doing so, he was shot in the left arm, yet managed to survive — and, according to Belmaine, he was awarded a Purple Heart for his actions that day.
He would then go on to serve in the Caribbean and at Fort Meade, Md., where he got a top-secret security clearance to work as a Marine guard for the National Security Agency.
Belmaine remained cautious about opening up about his sexual orientation with NSA officials, but he remembers them asking “all kinds of personal questions.”
Eventually, Belmaine was discharged honorably as a sergeant in 1969.
When he returned to Massachusetts with only an eighth-grade education, Belmaine worked as a janitor, in factories and at a laundromat. Then in 1971, he met Wakefield — who served in the U.S. Army — at a bar. (Pettirosi says her TikTok erroneously stated that the two met while he was still serving.)
By 1976, Belmaine came out of the closet.
Wakefield, who was 13 years older, became the love of Belmaine’s life. The two moved to South Florida in 1999, finally marrying when it became legal in 2015. Together, the two worked as activists for the LGBTQ+ community and those in the military.
“We joined about 27 different organizations,” says Belmaine, the former president of American Veterans for Equal Rights. “When everybody was going out on a Friday or Saturday night, having fun, we were in a meeting fighting for civil rights.”
The couple attended rallies and protests. Belmaine explains that there was “almost nothing we didn’t do.”
And while Belmaine says he hasn’t gone to a lot of protests since his husband died in 2021, he promises he is “still in the fight.”
Pettirosi says she shares that she’s not giving up the fight either as the two share concern over the future of LGBTQ+ rights.
“There’s no room for hate in this world,” she says, “and we got to stand up for what’s right.”
Read the full article here