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

8. The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years

The Military and Lesbians during the McCarthy Years Coauthored with John D’Emilio, this piece extends the history of lesbians in the military from the war years of the 1940s into the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Combining an interpretive introduction with documents, it provides a look at military policy as well as at the impact on and response of women in the service. Whereas the war years seemed to open up opportunities for self-discovery, community, and freedom of expression, the anticommunist crusades of the Cold War created a climate that favored crackdowns on any departures from the normative, whether involving political views or sexual and gender expression. Composed during the first Reagan administration and the early years of aids, it seems to carry the warning that progress can be reversed, that good times can turn to bad. The first work of Bérubé directed at a scholarly audience, it was published in a special lesbian issue of Signs, a feminist academic journal. The following documents shed light on a little-known area of women’s history : the policy of the U.S. military toward lesbian personnel during the McCarthy era and its impact on women serving in the armed forces. The first three documents—indoctrination lectures on homosexuality designed for wave (navy) recruits in 1952—both articulate the military’s implicit ideology concerning lesbians and demonstrate the means by which the military implemented its policy. The second set of documents—1951 correspondence between the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) and lesbians being purged from the waf (air force)—records the effects of military policy on individual women in the air force. These letters and lectures are evidence of the “homosexual scare” of the 1950s, which was a side effect of Cold War tensions and American fears about national security. Early in 1950, a State Department official testified before the Senate that several dozen employees had been dismissed on charges of homosexuality. The revelation provoked an uproar, and for the remainder of the year Republican leaders exploited the homosexual issue Originally published in Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 759–75. 8 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • 126 : a national historian as a means of discrediting the Truman administration’s national security policy. A Senate investigation into the employment of “homosexuals and other sex perverts” painted a menacing picture of the infiltration of the federal government by “sexual deviates” whose presence allegedly threatened the moral welfare of the nation.1 The popular press kept the homosexual issue alive with reports of dismissals from government service and exposés of alleged homosexual “rings.” Scandal writers in stories with such titles as “Lesbians Prey on Weak Women” charged that there were cells of lesbians in the schools and in the military bent on seducing the innocent.2 Rhetoric portraying sexual deviance as a threat to national security had its analogue in more repressive policies. During the early 1950s the government explicitly excluded homosexuals and lesbians from all federal jobs; many private employers, particularly those under government contract, followed suit.3 The military’s response to the “homosexual menace” was especially severe. By the end of the 1940s, the military was discharging about a thousand men and women per year on charges of homosexuality. But as the campaign against sexual deviance intensified in the 1950s, the number discharged rose to over 2,000 per year.4 Women in the military were particularly vulnerable to these antihomosexual policies. A secret investigative board noted in 1957 that the rate of detection for homosexual activity in the navy had been “much higher for the U.S. Army recruitment poster, World War II. Courtesy of the World War II Project Papers at the glbths, San Francisco. the military and lesbians during the mccarthy years : 127 female than the male” even though “homosexual activity in the female is difficult to detect.”5 As unmarried female volunteers in an intensely masculine institution, women in the military constituted a socially deviant group that too easily fit the popular stereotype of lesbians. Their deviation from the norms of female behavior was especially highlighted by the reassertion of traditional gender roles in the postwar years. By contrast, during World War II, the demands of massive mobilization had allowed large numbers of American women to step temporarily outside their usual roles not only to enlist in the military but also to work in heavy industry, to live away from husbands and other kin, and...