From Homeless to Marine to Ivy Leauge.

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One day Bratton decided that he needed to take huge steps to get out of the homeless shelter. "I looked around and saw all these men who have been dealing with homelessness for decades. There are guys in there who have been there for 10, 20, 30 years and I realized that if I wanted to do something radical and completely different, I had to go against a lot of things that I believed in," he says.
The next morning he got up early around 5:30 when the shelter would put the people out and he made eye contact with a Marine who was standing across the street from him. "He saw me and he walked over to me and asked me if I ever thought about being a Marine before I said to him well, 'If I get to look as good as you look in that uniform, let's do it,'" he says. Bratton join the U.S. Marines in November 2005 and served as a Combat Camera Production Specialist in Camp H. M. Smith in Hawaii shooting videos and taking photography .

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Bratton's last station was in Garden City, N.Y., as an MP. While checking for IDs for people to come in to base, he developed a relationship with a captain at the base. One day that captain forgot his military id and showed him a Columbia University card. "Columbia University is one of those schools that you heard about it, you've seen it in movies but you don't really know people who've gone there. So I said to him, how did you get a Columbia ID?," says Bratton.
The captain ended up showing his transcripts, the paper he was working on and acceptance letter and that's when Bratton said to himself, "If he did that, I could go into Columbia as well."

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He says he started having problems in school and wouldn't show up for class. The school called his mother to discuss the troubles Bratton was having. "When she confronted me about it, I ended up letting her know what was wrong and my mother's response was to slap me and say I don't want a [expletive deleted] in this house," he says.
After that Bratton decided to leave the house. "In my household, a slap can turn into an hour-long ordeal of violence. I just panicked. I didn't know what to do and didn't know how to process it. So I grabbed my book bag, wallet and just left," he says.

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U.S. Marine veteran Elegance Bratton left his New Jersey home at age 16. "If I were to describe my relationship with my family in one word, is silence. Meaningful, heavy silence and the silence revolved around my sexuality," says Bratton.

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