Second World War
Homosexual men in the armed forces
Stephen Bourne reveals some of the varied experiences of homosexual men who served in the armed forces during the Second World War
In 1942, the heroic Battle of Britain pilot Flight Lieutenant Ian Gleed published a memoir called Arise to Conquer. It proved to be a remarkably honest account of his exploits, given the restrictions imposed on him by wartime censorship and propaganda: twice he bailed out of blazing Spitfires, and twice King George VI congratulated him.
Gleed loved the RAF, and for his bravery he received the DSO and DFC. But in 1943, he would make the ultimate sacrifice when his Spitfire was shot down over Tunisia.
With the publication of his memoir, Gleed’s ‘confirmed bachelor’ status caused concern for the publisher of his memoir, so he agreed to create a fictional girlfriend called Pam.
She was a surprise to his family and friends, but Gleed explained to them that she didn’t exist and that he put her in because “readers like a touch of romance”. What his family probably never knew was that Gleed was homosexual, and that he could not be open about his sexuality and talk about his boyfriends.
It was not until the 1990s, when one of his lovers, Christopher Gotch, was interviewed for BBC television, that the truth came out. When Gotch was posted to Gleed’s RAF station, he found himself the object of Gleed’s affections:
“He gave me a kiss which took me by surprise but being a product of a public school, it wasn’t exactly strange. So we started having sex together.”
Gotch explained that no one ever talked about same-sex relationships because they were against the law. In the armed services they were court-martial offences and servicemen could be kicked out if discovered. It was widely believed that homosexuality would destroy morale, something Gotch decried as “a load of rubbish”.
Another wartime myth concerned the inability of homosexual men to show bravery under fire. Conscripted in 1941 at the age of 20, Dudley Cave joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He later recalled a conversation he overheard between two of his comrades.
One referred to him as a “Nancy boy” while the other protested that Dudley couldn’t be because he was “terribly brave in action”. Dudley understood that in their minds he could not be brave and homosexual, that the two were incompatible.
Bravery was not the preserve of fighting men because others in the services had to keep a stiff upper lip when they were confronted by the horrors of war. Alec Purdie discovered this after he joined the army. When he received his call-up papers, his gay friends told him he didn’t have to join up.
“Tell ‘me you’re queer!” they said, but Alec didn’t want to avoid conscription: “I was determined to do my duty.” Little did he know he was going to spend half his army career in a dress and high heels.
Homosexuality in PoW camps
Wearing ‘lashes and slap’, he joined a troupe of army entertainers that brought a smile to troops serving in remote parts of India, “because it was too dangerous for civilians and women”.
Alec also went to many field hospitals where he entertained “these lovely boys who had had terrible things done to them and were trying to clap and laugh at me. It was too awful.”
The unpublished memoir of JH Witte offers some revealing insights into homosexuality in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. A heterosexual, Witte describes the love affairs of the “boy friends” and their “girlfriends” (female impersonators who entertained in shows in the PoW camp’s theatre).
He also mentions a corporal in the Military Police who was “violently” in love with one of the “actresses”. When they went missing during roll call, the Italian guards who found them snuggled under a blanket put them together into solitary for a week.
Witte testifies that homosexual liaisons existed between all kinds of prisoners in the camp, and took many forms, from parcel sharing, holding hands and heavy petting to full-on sexual relationships
A corporal in the Military Police was “violently” in love with one of the “actresses”. When they went missing during roll call, the Italian guards who found them snuggled under a blanket put them together into solitary for a week
After his rejection by the army on the grounds that he was “suffering from sexual perversion”, Quentin Crisp enjoyed the war years, especially when the United States entered the conflict and began to flood Britain with handsome GIs. Crisp described this exciting arrival in his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant (1968):
“Labelled ‘with love from Uncle Sam’ and packaged in uniforms so tight that in them their owners could fight for nothing but their honour, these ‘bundles for Britain’ leaned against the lampposts of Shaftesbury Avenue or lolled on the steps of thin-lipped statues of dead English statesmen.”
Parading the streets of London in the black out, and enjoying brief encounters with the Yanks, Crisp commented: “Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few.”
During the Second World War, the popular entertainer Noel Coward wanted to do his bit, and sought official war work, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted that Coward could do more for the war effort by entertaining the troops: “Go and sing to them when the guns are firing – that’s your job!”
Coward proved to be a popular figure with the troops, and in 1942 he made – and starred in – the patriotic film drama In Which We Serve, inspired by the exploits of his close friend Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Brief Reform, Followed by the ‘Lavender Scare’
In October 1945, the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper, published an article that accused the U.S. military of handing out blue discharges due to racial prejudice.
The report sparked an investigation by a seven-member special committee from the House Committee on Military Affairs. In January 1946, the committee published a report lambasting the blue discharge system as over-used and for bringing long-lasting discrimination on its victims.
When veterans were forced to show their blue discharge to potential employers, companies assumed “that there is something radically wrong with the man in question,” the report stated, or that they committed an act “so mysterious that it cannot be talked about or written down but must be left to the imagination.”
Blue discharges, in other words, created cascading discrimination that haunted the job prospects of ex-service members for decades to come.
The report also criticized the Veterans Administration for blocking homosexuals from receiving G.I. benefits, insisting the agency should not be in the business of “passing moral verdicts on the history of any soldier.”
For a moment, the House Committee on Military Affairs report seemed to promise real reform. Between late 1945 through 1947, soldiers removed from the armed forces for homosexuality received discharges under honourable conditions, making them eligible for G.I. benefits.
But the policy wasn’t retroactive, meaning that thousands who had already received a blue discharge for homosexuality were still denied benefits.
And at the end of 1947, the military reverted to dismissing homosexuals under ambiguously honourable conditions. Instead of “blue discharges,” it labelled them simply “other than honourable discharges.”
The Cold War ushered in a new gay panic, reversing those reforms. In 1950, as Senator Joseph McCarthy stirred fears of Communist infiltration in the U.S., he focused on queer people as a cause for concern, suggesting that their often-closeted secret made them susceptible to blackmail by foreign enemies.
In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which required the federal government to fire queer people. What followed came to be known as the “lavender scare,” during which thousands of queer workers were driven out of their U.S. government jobs.
‘Scientific’ Attempts to Identify Homosexuals
In this increasingly hostile climate, soldiers who had received blue discharges for homosexuality had their hopes for reform dashed. And the military continued giving them. In total, between World War II and 2011, when the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law was repealed, at least 100,000 more soldiers were removed for homosexuality. Among them was Harvey Milk, a Korean War veteran who went on to become the first openly gay political official in the United States.
In their effort to screen out queer conscripts, military officials ran into a problem: They didn’t have a conclusive way of identifying them, beyond a set of subjectively interpreted “signs” such as “feminine bodily characteristics” and “effeminacy in dress and manner,” according to Allan Bérubé, author of Coming Out Under Fire:
Gay Men and Women During World War II. During World War II, out of some 18 million potential enlistees, the military only identified between 4,000 and 5,000 homosexuals, a severe undercount, estimates Bérubé.
Military scientists began devising dubious tests to measure sexual orientation. In 1944, according to Bérubé, an Army doctor tested tongue depressors on patients who were being treated as “sexual psychopaths”—one of the code terms for homosexuals.
Their conclusion: 89 percent of homosexual patients who had performed oral sex in the past didn’t have a gag reflex. The doctor proclaimed that a tongue depressor test could screen out gay people not just from military service, but from other federal agencies as well.
Other doctors began exploring whether they could diagnose homosexuality—through Rorschach tests or by measuring sexuality through hormone tests. (One Army psychiatrist theorized that homosexual men would show higher levels of estrogenic than testosterone—and lesbians the reverse.) None of these theories panned out.
In part because of the difficulties of scientifically measuring queerness, the War Department in January 1944 began to allow discharges based on “latent homosexuality.” That gave officials license to eject someone for homosexuality under the blue discharge system simply because they seemed gay—even if the military lacked proof.
