A Queer History of the United States (23 page)

While the code regulated the behavior of homosexual service members, it did nothing to keep them out. But by mid-1941 the Selective Service had instituted a policy to screen homosexuals from joining the military (although the policy did not always succeed). This decision had a complicated history. During and after World War I, in which there was little recruit screening, many soldiers were diagnosed with severe emotional trauma. Some of it was certainly “shell shock,” but the military thought preenlistment screening could have prevented the worst cases. To avoid a recurrence, in 1940 the government, in conjunction with psychiatrists—including Harry Stack Sullivan, who was quietly homosexual—set up a psychological screening process to weed out men ineligible for military service.

At first this process focused on mental and emotional disorders; little attention was paid to sexual practices, although effeminate men were suspect. As the screening process was amended by other psychiatrists and the army surgeon general over the next year, homosexuality became a disqualifying category. The armed forces now banned people with “homosexual proclivities” because they had “psychopathic personality disorders.” These new categories conflated the idea of the “sexual psychopath” with stereotypes predicated on gender norm deviation. The result was a government-sponsored definition of the homosexual. The navy broadened these categories by issuing vaguely worded orders that banned people “whose sexual behavior is such that it would engender or disturb the morale of a military unit.”
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For the first time, a direct link was being made between homosexual behavior and a threat to national security.

Although Harry Stack Sullivan refused to categorize homosexuality as an emotional disorder, the army surgeon general disagreed. But both views were irrelevant after December 1941. The immediate need for women and men to join the war effort outweighed any other considerations. Homosexuals eager to join the armed forces found little to prevent them. Ample personal stories attest to how homosexuals enlisted. Historian Allan Bérubé writes of Robert Fleisher enlisting in 1943 and worrying about being rejected: “My God . . . couldn’t they see my curly platinum blond hair that was partly bleached, the walk, maybe the sissy
S
in my voice—all the things that I thought would give me away?” The only question he was asked about his sexuality was “Do you like girls?” to which he answered “yes,” since it was true.
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Pat Bond describes the recruiting sergeant at her 1945 enlistment as “like all my old gym teachers in drag. Stockings, little earrings, her hair slicked back and very daintily done so you couldn’t tell she was a dyke, but
I
knew!”
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Bond claims that many women arrived at recruitment centers “wearing argyle socks and pin-striped suits and the hair cut just like a man’s with sideburns shaved over the ears—the whole bit.” She remembers that when she entered the barracks for the first time, a voice loudly proclaimed “Good God, Elizabeth, here comes another one!”
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Tyler Carpenter remembers how in 1941 his lover, Eddie Fuller, went with him to the induction center in New York, where they waited in line with heterosexual couples:

Finally, it was time to enter. The boys and the girls kissed. Eddie and I shook hands, a convention that feel far short of the kiss we both wanted and deserved. “Tyler, you’ll be fine. You can do anything that any of the other guys can do,” Eddie said. I breathed deep, climbed the steps and entered into an unknown world.
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It is impossible to know how many homosexuals served during the war years. Lillian Faderman argues that the “‘firm public impression’ during the war years that a women’s corps was ‘the ideal breeding ground for lesbians’ had considerable basis in fact.”
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Hypothetically, if Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 study of male sexual behavior was correct, then somewhere between 650,000 and 1.6 million male soldiers primarily had sex with other men.
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Millions of young women and men, many of whom may never have heard the words “fairy,” “invert,” “homosexual,” or “lesbian” and may not yet have discovered all aspects of their sexual desires, had enlisted. Being thrown together with so many different people of the same sex gave them an opportunity to understand their lives in new, radical ways. Bérubé weaves a broad, textured tapestry of the lives of same-sex-desiring service members during the war. Many speak of erotic, affectional, and sexual relationships with their fellow enlistees. Some of these relationships—like that of Tyler Carpenter and Eddie Fuller—began before the war and lasted for decades. Others occurred during the war, ending when the partners reentered civilian life. Many were brief sexual encounters, similar to heterosexual liaisons on the home front. Many women and men enjoyed same-sex romantic and physical relationships during the war, but for the reminder of their lives engaged in different-sex relationships.

In spite of potential harassment and prosecution, homosexual women and men began forming communities within the military. Maxwell Gordon, stationed at the San Diego Naval Training Station, remembers feeling a sense of recognition:

Here’s all these interesting people from all over the United States. . . . There were some teachers and some clerks and office workers. For the most part they were rather “sensitive” boys. . . . I thought, “Oh, these are more my kind of people. You know, we can communicate.” . . . We became very chummy, quite close, very fraternal, very protective of each other.
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Homosexual men, especially if effeminate, were often harassed, but groups such as the one Gordon describes were frequently ignored for the sake of unit cohesiveness. David L. Leavitt, along with his homosexual shipmates stationed in Guam, claimed a secluded island beach as their own. Only a select group of men knew of the existence of this beach, which they called Purple Beach Number 2, reminiscent of a perfume brand.
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While on leave, homosexual men and women also found community in bars, baths, and private homes. This was particularly true for women who were stationed on bases near cities. Jean S. recalls socializing during the war after joining the Women’s Army Corps:

My commanding officer turned every head at the Boston Army base—5´6˝, curly blonde hair, cute as can be and a smart cookie. She played around, but had a partner in Georgia. . . .There were women in the detachment I knew were lesbians, there was no question in my mind, but we never spoke of this. You just didn’t at the time. You just wouldn’t make any reference to it. We would socialize together, both straight and lesbian.
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“Sensitive” men often found one another while working on the extraordinarily popular “soldier shows” for which the USO provided the know-how and the materials. These shows were written, directed, and performed by men in the armed forces. Since there were no women in outlying camps, enlisted men would perform female roles in drag. Performances ranged from comic portrayals of burly men in dresses to realistic female impersonation. For actors and audiences, these performances were a needed relief from the stress of war. For men who identified as homosexual, these shows were a place where they could, in coded terms, express their sexual desires, be visible, and build a community. These lyrics for a “female” trio in a soldier show demonstrate
how homosexual enlistees introduced their own humor into skits:

Here you see three lovely “girls”

With their plastic shapes and curls.

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?

We’ve got glamour and that’s no lie;

Can’t you tell when we swish by?

Isn’t it campy? Isn’t it campy?
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Later in the war, when WACs were available to perform with men, their involvement was limited; usually they worked backstage to help the men be made up as women. An indication of the popularity of female impersonation in soldier shows is evident in Irving Berlin’s
This Is the Army.
Written for an all-soldier cast, it premiered on Broadway in 1942 and a year later became a hit Hollywood film with Ronald Reagan. Both the Broadway and film versions featured soldiers dressed as women.

Surprising images of military male bodies appeared in advertisements for popular products in the national press. The most startling of these, placed in
Life
and
Better Homes and Gardens,
was a series of six “True Towel Tales”—each based on a story from a serviceman—produced by the Cannon Towel company. Set on different battlefronts, the ads featured men in various stages of undress using Cannon towels while bathing. “True Towel Tales: No. 6” showed a group of presumably naked soldiers in a grounded canoe; the central figure is standing, covered with a palm frond, in a bathing-beauty pose. The advertisement clearly displays the men as sexual objects and highlights their vulnerability, in sharp juxtaposition to the realities of war.

Advertisements for Pullman sleeping cars (civilian train cars used to move troops) featured half-naked servicemen partying. One Pullman advertisement showed two soldiers, following tradition, removing their shoes and socks to enter an Egyptian residence during the day; the sexually suggestive caption was “I never did this in
daylight
before!”
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An analysis of advertising in
Life
magazine demonstrates that “just before the conflict, in 1940, there had been several issues of the magazine with no adult men alone together, without women; by 1943 and 1944, only one issue had no such male-to-male interaction in advertising.”
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Communities of homosexuals in the service and in civilian life mutually reinforced one another. Numerous venues in cities across the nation catered to homosexual clientele. African American servicemen, banned from bars in many cities, were welcomed in the Harlem jazz club Lucky’s Rendezvous, where,
Ebony
reported, black and white patrons “steeped in the swish jargon of its many lavender costumers.”
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The Black Cat in San Francisco welcomed female prostitutes, lesbian civilians, and homosexual servicemen. For heterosexuals, sexual activity outside of marriage was so prevalent that special terms were coined for young women who would socialize and have sex with servicemen as a patriotic duty: “victory girls,” “khaki-wackies,” and “good-time Charlottes.”

The enormous social shifts of this era also changed how people wrote about homosexuality. Medical professionals and popular journalists did not radically alter their views of same-sex behavior, but new ways of thinking about homosexuality were emerging. In 1941 George W. Henry, a psychiatrist and director of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, wrote
Society and the Sex Variant,
one of the first comprehensive scientific studies of homosexual behavior. Based on interviews with homosexual women and men starting in 1935, the study frequently reaffirms stereotypes of homosexuality as inverted behavior. For instance, it describes male homosexuals’ speech as “excessive, chatty, gossipy, mincing,” with “many sexual innuendoes” and “extravagant superlatives,” whereas lesbian speech is “cautious, businesslike; response prompt, precise, often monosyllabic.” With all of its flaws, the study gave the 1941 reader interviews with female and male homosexuals who spoke honestly about their lives. Henry’s vision—he thought it unscientific to classify persons as fully male or female—was startling for the time.

A year later, Philip Wylie’s enormously popular, and harsh, critique of American culture,
Generation of Vipers,
was published. Not particularly sympathetic to homosexuals, his view, like Henry’s, was guardedly tolerant. Attacking sexual ignorance, Wylie stated that “America is still populated with male ignoramuses who stand ready to slug a nance on sight and often do so.” He argued that homosexual activity was increasing in the United States and was “common in the navy, the army, and in colleges both for men and for women,” and that “a very large portion of the upper-class and upper-middle-class citizens of the nation have made one or more experiments in that form of erotic activity.” Suggesting that all people have homosexual feelings and that “inborn sluggers of nances” are repressing their own homosexual tendencies, he noted that most Americans find homosexual acts “horrible, repulsive, loathsome, and altogether beyond the pale of thinkability. . . . The fact that it goes on all the time means only that millions of people have dangerously guilty consciences.”
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Even the government displayed its own ambivalence. In 1943 the federally funded National Research Council, Penguin Books, and the
Infantry Journal
jointly published
Psychology for the Fighting Man.
A guide for young men new to the service, it forthrightly and calmly addressed men’s fears about homosexual impulses:

A soldier can take what comfort he may in the knowledge that other men are confronted with just about the same problems as he is and that, while they may never find an escape from them, most men manage to endure them and do not allow them to impair their efficiency seriously.

It helps to work hard.

It helps to avoid the company of those preoccupied with sex.

It helps to get as much fun as possible. Companionship with the other men and the varied social activities of camp life keep a soldier from lonely brooding and day-dreaming. So does the intensive activity of campaign and battle. For those who enjoy them, athletic sports—boxing matches or ball games—are diverting and healthful.
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