Coming Out Under Fire (1994) (review)

This documentary, produced over a decade ago, details the lives and experiences of American homosexuals, both men and women, during World War II. Extended interviews with soldiers from a variety of backgrounds are edited together with documentary film clips, photographs, and music from the era. Here, director Arthur Dong attempts to demonstrate how it was possible for gays to exist within the military during a time when the U.S. government specifically targeted them for exclusion. Although many of the interviewees discovered their homosexuality for the first time in the service and found military life exhilarating, others succumbed to the crushing oppression of a government that did not appreciate their patriotism in time of war. Dong's film personalizes Allan Bérubé's 1991 book Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, unless you missed the sexual revolution during the last half of the twentieth century, but this film presents little in the way of groundbreaking information or historical insight and mostly repeats existing scholarship on the history of gay life in the military. Viewers in 2007 will most likely find that the interviews of nine gay men and women about their experiences in the U.S. military during World War II are not much more than a series of touching personal reminiscences.

At the time of its publication, Bérubé's book was a powerful challenge to historically preconceived notions about sexuality in the American military that altered how many historians viewed homosexual activity during World War II. This documentary, however, seems reluctant to accept one of the book's dominant themes: that not all gays faced discrimination. In fact, many homosexuals during World War II found love, happiness, and a shared sense of camaraderie previously unavailable to them in small-town America or in their families. This is where the film falls flat. The film is structured into two themes. The first theme becomes clear in the pleasant interviews with individuals who recount that they enlisted in response to the call to war because "[a]ll young men liked to fight, even gay guys." Life for homosexuals was certainly not easy, especially because the U.S. government aimed to exclude them from service—a seemingly impossible task. Stern music underscores the cold voice-over narration that informs viewers that U.S. military interviewers specifically asked potential draftees if they were homosexual and slapped any who answered affirmatively with a "not fit for duty" label, which continued to stigmatize them as sexual perverts into the postwar. Several interviewees admitted that they "lied for the war" in order to serve their country. One rare insight came from a black homosexual soldier who claimed that whether you were gay or black "we weren't allowed to serve as equals" and that he tried "to avoid the spotlight" as much as possible after the military stringently began enforcing Article 93, making sodomy a military crime.

What Coming Out Under Fire does illustrate is that military life for homosexuals during World War II was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, although the war offered opportunities to discover new personal experiences, these experiences and loves had to be conducted covertly. The military actively promoted heterosexual lifestyles as normative and healthy. They directed that condoms be freely distributed to GIs instructing them that intercourse was acceptable as long as one practiced safe sex, an idea symbolized by the slogan "Put it on before you put it in." Gay soldiers, however, were prohibited from flaunting their homosexuality, even though it was the military that afforded many of them their first contact with other homosexuals on a large scale. One interviewee stated, "We felt liberated, found, discovered our own secret." At one point near the start of the war, several gay soldiers began writing each other letters, which later developed into a personal newsletter entitled, in successive order, The Myrtle Beach Bitch, The Myrtle Beach Belle, and The Myrtle Beach Bitch's Camouflage. Eventually, when military censors discovered the...