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  • Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45 by Emma Vickers
  • Chris Brickell
Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45. By Emma Vickers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Pp. 202. $110.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Jimmy Jacques turned up to a recruitment center in southeast London in 1940. He underwent the routine medical examination, discovered he had an A1 body, and entered the Royal Artillery. Nobody suspected anything about his sexuality. As he said, "I just acted as you would normally . . . with people until you found out who was and who wasn't" (40). In Queen and Country Emma Vickers explores the meaning of same-sex desire for men like Jimmy and for women who desired other women in the British forces during the Second World War. Finding out who was and who wasn't, as Jimmy put it, led some military personnel into trouble, others into a new social world, and a few into both.

Vickers's book is a welcome addition to the literature on homoeroticism and homosociability in wartime. It offers a useful supplement to earlier work: Allan Bérubé in the American context, Paul Jackson on Canadian men's wars, and, more recently, Yorick Smaal on the experiences of men in Australia. Vickers offers a comprehensive and readable corrective to the paucity of work on Britain. Unlike many other scholars, she addresses queer women's experiences, as well as men's. Queen and Country explores the ways same-sex desire took shape in military regimes and offers a discussion of context-specific forms of identity. Some of those who took part in same-sex activity saw themselves as "queer," but others did not, and many thought of sex as a form of "relief" rather than a cornerstone of their subjectivity. Vickers also tells of camaraderie expressed in physical but nongenital ways. This is a continuum of possibility where sociability and sexuality abut but do not necessarily touch.

Restrictions and opportunities tack back and forth throughout the book. Some personnel suppressed aspects of themselves, some lived compartmentalized lives, and many, like Jimmy, found ways to integrate their sexuality into a military life. Vickers points out, as Bérubé did in Coming [End Page 344] Out under Fire, that war can be a formative experience: the distance from home and the respite from the surveillance of familial ties allowed some queer military personnel to create new lives. She tells of queer "havens" like the Union Jack Club in London and the sexual freedom of Cairo with its "multitude of queer bars and other venues" (84). In short, there was not one queer war but many. Some interviewees insist that the war was no time for homoerotic self-expression, while others tell of the importance of "discretion," and still others reveal wartime's pleasurable possibilities.

What happened when discretion broke down and a fellow soldier or a friend in the women's auxiliary forces found out? Queen and Country handily structures its treatment of this question around one key trope: the "good fellow." Sometimes men's or women's comrades became fiercely protective of them. As a well-respected member of a unit, the "good fellow" was highly valued, and this overrode anything that "might otherwise threaten that recruit's position, including their sexual activity" (86). The trope of the "good fellow" suggests that a semiopen queerness was possible, at least in some units, and it could be readily incorporated into social relationships. Vickers's analysis speaks to the complexity of interpersonal relationships. She reveals the intricate ties that bound military personnel on an everyday basis and also in terms of military discipline. Valued members of a battalion were rarely subject to legal proceedings even when their sexual involvement could not be mistaken. In one instance, a young soldier and a sergeant major were seen in "a compromising position," only half-shielded by a bush, but their commanding officer looked away, walked on, and did nothing more about it (124). Vickers sets out to examine the "fissures, tensions and contradictions of human behaviour" (16), and her concept of the "good fellow" helps her...

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