[walrus01]

Not my experience at all - prior clearances and NDAs preclude me from going into detail, but I personally saw a number of people who wasted a lot of time going through the process and getting denied for things in the same category as the first part of your statement.

It's true that almost any randomly chosen member of the DoD can get a regular 'secret' clearance for things that aren't especially super sensitive (I've met some very immature 20 year olds who only had Secret probably by virtue of the fact they were too young to have made any major mistakes in their life yet), but when you go beyond that, the requirements are greater.

Re: being flamingly out and kinky, the key part there is out. This isn't the 1950s were getting blackmailed over being gay is a super high risk to somebody if they're already voluntarily flamingly out.