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1 THE GREATEST GENERATION The men and women who served in the military during World War II have become known as ‘‘the greatest generation.’’ Although there are exceptions, the majority of these veterans have been exceedingly humble about the sacrifices that they made in service to the United States. When asked why they served, almost every one of them answers: ‘‘I was just doing my duty.’’ This is true of gay as well as heterosexual veterans. Patriotism runs strong among them all.∞ Just talk to Charles Rowland, a gay draftee from Phoenix, Arizona. Rowland knew ‘‘an awful lot of gay people but nobody, with one exception, ever considered not serving. We were not about to be deprived the privilege of serving our country in a time of great national emergency by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay.’’≤ Antisodomy laws and military regulations had limited gay service since World War I, leading to courts-martial for men found having sex with other men. Still, gay men were in uniform from the very start of World War II. There were gay sailors at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, and gay sergeants training the massive influx of recruits and draftees immediately afterward. In the early 1940s, draft boards examined 18 million American men for possible service in World War II. Military psychiatrists sought to screen out gay men as ‘‘sexual psychopaths,’’ but fewer than 5,000 of the 18 million draftees were initially rejected because of homosexual tendencies . A conservative estimate of the number of gay men who served during World War II is 650,000 out of 16 million American servicemen.≥ Paul Jordan had already been in the army for years when the vast majority of volunteers and draftees joined him to fight in World War II. He had enlisted 6 the greatest generation in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, but Paul’s enlistment had more to do with the Great Depression than with international politics. With few jobs in his rural Maine community, the military was one of the very few alternatives to unemployment and poverty. After helping to train the new wave of recruits brought into the army at the start of World War II, Paul volunteered to fight in Europe. His memories of the war echo the stories of hundreds of thousands of other young infantrymen who fought in the European theater. Paul was just one of the boys . . . one of the boys with a secret. Another young man who shared a similar secret was Bill Taylor. Short in stature, Taylor was tapped as a tail gunner for a b-24 bomber based in England. Like Paul Jordan’s, Bill’s story varies only slightly from the ones that his straight crewmates would tell about service during the war. Like them and like his two brothers who served, Bill was just doing his duty: trying to win the war for the Allies and most of all, trying to survive. On the home front, World War II accelerated the social changes that the Great Depression had begun, inspiring millions of people to migrate in search of jobs in the war industries or to relocate because of enlistment and deployment . As the historian Allan Bérubé argues in his book Coming Out under Fire, ‘‘The massive mobilization for World War II relaxed the social constraints of peacetime that kept many gay men and women unaware of themselves and each other.’’ Away from the small town authorities and conservative mores, young gay men found new identities and new communities. Bud Robbins and Burt Gerrits saw these changes first hand. Stationed in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, respectively, these young men found kindred spirits in the nightclubs and bars that became the nuclei of urban gay communities after the war.∂ The war also inspired revolutionary changes for American women, both gay and straight. The formation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, renamed the Women’s Army Corps (wacs) in 1943, was just one small part of this seismic shift in gender roles. Along with the waves in the navy, the wacs replaced servicemen in clerical and other noncombat occupational specialties . By the end of the war, more than 150,000 women served on posts across the United States and overseas. Worried that servicewomen would be seen as ‘‘amazons’’ or ‘‘camp followers ,’’ wac o≈cers emphasized the virtues of femininity and chastity...

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