We’re all familiar with the official refusal of the American military to permit gays and lesbians to serve in its ranks. Two decades of agitation and litigation have caused legal and social barriers to crumble in many areas, but the armed forces’ bulwarks against gay men and women, although often breached in practice, remain firmly in place officially. Prospects for the future don’t seem much better, given that the Supreme Court recently refused to hear two cases challenging the ban.
The inspiration for Berube’s book came in 1979 when a San Francisco neighbor, knowing of his interest in gay history, gave him hundreds of letters from the World War II era, many from gay soldiers. Most of the dozen or so GI letter writers had met at a Missouri Army base, where they hung out together at the service club. Separated by the flux of wartime soldiering, they’d written each other about what it was like to be gay in the places where they ended up. Berube then began to seek out other gay and lesbian veterans.
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What he found was intriguing and often surprising. Gay men had found themselves tolerated, for the most part, by their fellow GIs–including those who thought it relatively obvious that they were “queer” (the usual term at the time, used by both gays and straights). Even overtly effeminate men–who, though a small minority of the gay population, were among its more obvious representatives–found ways of existing and even thriving in the military. This was especially true in combat units, where good soldiering qualities were perforce valued above all else, and where many GIs engaged in “situational bisexuality.” But it was also true on the military bases and other areas far from the front lines. “Feminine styles in male barracks were rich and varied,” says Berube, who points out that a live-and-let-live ethos usually prevailed among enlisted men, who assigned each other a variety of types and roles. “The most extreme effeminate stereotype was the recruit who assumed the lisping speech and mincing or swishing mannerisms of a ‘fairy.’ . . . A recruit who was more mildly effeminate could be bookish, artistic, spoiled, delicate, a ‘mama’s boy,’ fastidious, unathletic, devoutly religious, sentimental. . . . Even the most extremely effeminate man could be accepted affectionately if he played an asexual role. . . . In the barracks, and particularly during soldier variety shows, men with the most extreme effeminate qualities–especially if they were witty and funny–could be similarly valued as company comedians, clowns, screwballs, and entertainers.”
The effect of the official policies was often the precise opposite of what they aimed to mandate. Together the groups on the bases, the developing bar scene in the cities, and the proliferation of sexual experiences gave a great boost to gay life and culture, not only in bringing together and mixing those who’d already identified themselves as gay, but in “bringing out” many who’d been isolated and hadn’t thought of themselves as gay. It represented the beginnings of the formation of a national group identity.
Gays weren’t the only group to suffer in this way. The more than 100,000 veterans stigmatized by blue discharges included a disproportionate number of blacks in addition to homosexuals. The exposure of this fact, and a campaign against the callous treatment these vets received, was spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Courier, at that time the most widely read black newspaper in the country. This linkage was important for gays, not only in practical terms, but also in relation to their self-definition. On one side was the military-discharge policy, which fostered a gay identity; on the other was the example of the fight of blacks for civil rights, which inspired some gays to begin speaking of discrimination, rights, and persecution as a minority. Out of this confluence came the Veterans’ Benevolent Association, formed in 1945 by four honorably discharged vets in New York City as an organization of and for gay veterans–the first major gay membership group in the United States. It existed until 1954.
As the grim decade wore on, the two groups (particularly the Mattachine Society) grew ever more preoccupied with the pursuit of respectability–a defensive no-win quest that only brought them a dwindling membership. In effect these champions of gay rights devised an abstract concept of “the homosexual” they were defending–a respectable middle-class image that would be acceptable to straight society but that had little to do with the real gay subculture, which had become centered in the bars. In the early 60s some east-coast militants, inspired by the burgeoning black civil rights movement, began to engage in more aggressive direct-action tactics, but it was only in San Francisco that the small movement for gay rights began to converge with the far larger gay subculture.
In doing so he also provides the context for Berube’s story of gays and the military in World War II–a military that now stands as almost the last national or state institution that formally proscribes homosexuality. Berube thinks that its obduracy only ensures that the military services will soon become a new front for the movement. “There’s the beginning of a gay-rights or gay-liberation movement that’s coming from within the military,” he said recently. “And it’s going to have a very different style than the gay-rights movement which grew out of the early seventies.”
