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

5. Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II

Marching to a Different Drummer Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II This is the first essay that Bérubé published based on the research that culminated in his award-winning book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990). In it, he draws on oral histories, correspondence, and other documentary evidence to reconstruct the experience of gay men and lesbians during World War II. Written in the tradition of the New Social History of the 1960s and 1970s, it relates the experience of ordinary Americans rather than the rich, famous, and powerful. Bérubé makes the argument that World War II was “a turning point” in gay and lesbian history and that it “lay the groundwork for gay life as we know it” by helping to build the urban communities of the postwar decades. In that sense, the war years were to Bérubé “as crucial . . . as the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.” Written while he was still in the early stages of research for the book, it was published in the Advocate, the national gay newspaper with the largest circulation at the time. It spread the word about his project and helped him find other men and women to interview. The U.S. military has a long tradition of purging homosexuals from its ranks. In January 1982, the Pentagon released a directive that may be its strongest antigay policy to date. “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service,” the directive explained, because it undermines military discipline , creates security risks, and gives the military a bad reputation. Even a member of the armed forces who “has stated that he or she is a homosexual” or “desires” to “engage in homosexual conduct” is considered a threat to the military under these rules.1 The massive mobilization of all Americans for World War II allowed the U.S. military to adopt its first explicit antihomosexual policy, which included provisions for temporarily utilizing homosexual men and women Originally published in the Advocate, October 15, 1981, 20–25. Revised for Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 383–94 (New York: New American Library, 1989). 5 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • 86 : a national historian in situations that served the war effort. As one Women’s Army Corps (wac) officer testified early in 1944, during a secret investigation into lesbian activity in the wac, “The Surgeon General’s Office in the latest circular letter, particularly for soldiers overseas, [stressed] that homosexual relationships should be tolerated” as long as they were private, consensual, and did not disrupt the unit.2 The military, in spite of its contempt for homosexuals, was not above using lesbian and gay gis when it needed them to win a war. The implementation of this secret policy was just one of the radical social changes that made World War II a turning point in the lives of lesbian and gay Americans. The massive war mobilization forced many American women and men to discover their homosexuality for the first time, to end their isolation in small towns and find other people like themselves, and to strengthen their identity as a minority in American society. Their experiences in the military and on the assembly line, their discovery of gay nightlife in the cities, and their struggle to survive the postwar antigay crackdowns all helped to lay the groundwork for gay life as we know it today. World War II was as crucial to these women and men as the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion would be to a later generation, but its impact was lost in the tragedy of a world war, with no gay movement or gay press to record its history. Jumping with Jodie, World War II all-male musical produced by black soldiers stationed in Germany. Army Signal Corps photograph sc-208040 (National Archives). Courtesy of the World War II Project Papers at the glbths, San Francisco. lesbian and gay gis in world war ii : 87 Most Americans, when they talk about World War II, begin by telling what they were doing on December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked . Stuart Loomis, a gay man who was twenty-one and still living in a Nebraska town, remembers “sitting upstairs in the balcony of Walgreen’s drugstore late in the afternoon, listening to a rebroadcast of President Roosevelt ’s announcement to Congress and talking...