My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

7. Rediscovering Our Forgotten Past

Rediscovering Our Forgotten Past A recurring characteristic of Bérubé’s research and writing is the uncovering of stories that defied common assumptions about the past. As with “Lesbian Masquerade” and its accounts of women who successfully passed as men and loved other women, “Rediscovering Our Forgotten Past” recounts the incredible story of a few gay men—“queens” in the language of the time—who performed in drag and even published a few issues of a “campy” newsletter while in the service during World War II. Bérubé inserts himself into the essay in ways that allow one to see the relationships he built with his oral history subjects , so that past and present interact in these efforts to recover lost histories. The essay also helped to bring together aspects of Bérubé’s own past. It was published in the 1984 Pride Issue of the Front Page, a gay community newspaper produced in the Triangle area of North Carolina, where Allan Troxler and Carl Wittman, two close friends from Bérubé’s gay liberation years, were then living. Most histories of the gay movement and gay life in America focus only on San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and other northern and West Coast cities. The South has an equally rich gay past, but it is often locked in the memories of men and women who are only now feeling safe enough to talk about the years before “gay liberation.” World War II may have transformed gay life in the South more than any other event before the 1970s. The massive war mobilization threw millions of young men and women from all over the country onto the military bases that sprung up almost overnight in every southern state. The army and navy used these southern bases to train recruits before shipping them overseas. Many young men crowded onto these bases soon discovered they were homosexual and began to meet other soldiers and sailors like themselves. In 1943, two of these gis stationed at a South Carolina air base had met so many gay servicemen on other southern bases that they decided to start a newsletter for their new friends. Because they were stationed at the Myrtle Originally published in the Front Page, June 26–July 9, 1984, 1, 9–11. 7 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • 114 : a national historian Beach Bombing Range, they named their newsletter the Myrtle Beach Bitch. Campy, patriotic, and naive, these young pioneers had no idea they had put together one of the first gay papers in the United States. They also weren’t prepared for the high price they’d have to pay for their innocent project. Last Christmas in San Francisco, two of the men associated with the Myrtle Beach Bitch—Woodie Wilson, one of the editors, and his war buddy “The Bitches,” a Myrtle Beach, S.C., gi newsletter, 1940s. Courtesy of the World War II Project Papers at the glbths, San Francisco. rediscovering our forgotten past : 115 Norman Sansom, a “subscriber”—had their first reunion since the end of World War II. Norman had told me about the Myrtle Beach Bitch and his good friend Woodie when I had interviewed him in 1981 for my book on gay Americans during World War II. So when Woodie arrived from Pennsylvania , Norman invited me to take my tape recorder over to his house to preserve Woodie’s story about how he started the Myrtle Beach Bitch. I arrived early in the afternoon. Norman fixed us drinks, and all three of us gathered around the dining room table. As Woodie started talking, I began to realize that his story not only captured the spirit of gay life in the wartime South but also revealed some of the hidden origins of the gay press in America. Woodie’s story began like the stories of millions of other young Americans who served in World War II. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps just before his twenty-first birthday in June 1942. By the end of the summer he was stationed at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he was trained as an airplane engine mechanic to service the new b-24 bombers. At Keesler Field, Woodie met a “gang” of gay gis, especially the “tall mp.” Woodie remembers well the day he first met the tall mp. During his free time after classes, he told me, he would walk over to the War Department Theater to...