“Do you like girls?”
Sixteen million young American men and women enlisted or were drafted for duty during the Second World War. Almost as many millions more—mostly young women—left home for military or industrial jobs in new cities, often living in boarding houses and dorms, as part of the war effort. Never before had there been this many young people mobilized into sex-segregated living situations, often under life-and-death conditions in which bonds between people can be intense and long lasting. The impact on sexuality overall, and on homosexuality in particular, was astonishing.
Among the famous gays who served were actors Tyrone Power and Rock Hudson and writers Gore Vidal and John Cheever. But a wealth of evidence exists to prove that the war created conditions for sexual experimentation and the development of a gay identity among hundreds of thousands, if not more. If researcher Alfred Kinsey’s wartime studies are accurate and can be applied to the U.S. military population, then at least 650,000 and as many as 1.6 million male soldiers were gay.30 D’Emilio writes,
In releasing large numbers of Americans from their homes and neighborhoods, World War II created a substantially new “erotic situation” conducive both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay subculture. For some gay men and women, the war years simply strengthened a way of living they had previously chosen…. At the same time, those who experienced strong same-sex attraction but felt inhibited from acting upon it suddenly possessed relatively more freedom to enter into homosexual relationships. The unusual conditions of a mobilized society allowed homosexual desire to be expressed more easily in action. For many gay Americans, World War II created something of a nationwide coming out experience.31
The First World War, by comparison, only mobilized 4.7 million Americans over a nineteen-month period.32 However, its cataclysmic impact on European life translated into a similar phenomenon there. Books referring to sexual trysts in the trenches, homoerotic relationships between comrades in arms, poetic exchanges, and long nights in fear-and lust-induced embraces are chronicled in collections such as Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches.33 Of the homosexually-tinged poetry between soldiers, one writer explains, “No one turning from the poetry of the Second World War to that of the First can fail to notice there the unique physical tenderness, the readiness to admire openly the bodily beauty of young men, the unapologetic recognition that men may be in love with each other.”34 In the twenties, a largely underground subculture for gay men and lesbian women expanded in London, Paris, and Berlin in particular. The successful prosecution in Britain of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928 was evidence of the continued state repression of any open expression of same-sex love, even in popular literature.
One major, if indirect, impact that the First World War had on gays in the U.S. military was the $1 billion cost incurred for the care of psychiatric casualties—half of all veterans’ hospital beds were still filled with psychiatric inpatients at the start of the Second World War.35 This enormous cost was used as an incentive by the emerging psychiatric profession to promote the necessity of psychiatric screening for the millions of military inductees in the lead-up to the new war.
One of the chief advocates for psychiatric screening, Harry Stack Sullivan, was a psychologist who lived discreetly with his male lover in Bethesda, Maryland. Sullivan did not believe that gays should be banned from military service or discriminated against in any way and had no intention of including any reference to homosexuality in the screening. But in May 1941, the Army Surgeon General’s office for the first time included “homosexual proclivities in their lists of disqualifying deviations.”36 There were—of course—no scientific means of determining who was gay; therefore, crude guidelines called for excluding any man who displayed “feminine bodily characteristics,” “effeminacy in dress and manner,” or “a patulous (expanded) rectum.” As historian Allan Bérubé notes, “All three of these markers linked homosexuality with effeminacy or sexually ‘passive’ anal intercourse and ignored gay men who were masculine or ‘active’ in anal intercourse.”37
What this amounted to in practice was hardly scientific. Millions of young men were forced to stand naked in front of physicians, or their assistants, and were asked—often to their great embarrassment—“Do you like girls?”38 Given the years of propaganda for a coming war against the Nazis, the stigma of being deemed unfit for service, and the fact that nearly a whole generation was being mobilized to fight, ample incentive existed for those who knew they were gay to lie and go to war with their peers.
Coming out in close quarters
The armed forces segregated men in crowded barracks or in close ship quarters. The fear of death in a war that killed more than four hundred thousand Americans was ever present and created harsh and extraordinary circumstances in which the norms of civilian life were often suspended. Men on leave in port cities danced together, an offense that would have brought arrest during peacetime; soldiers performed in popular drag shows with explicit homosexual themes to rapturous applause in Europe and the Pacific; GIs shared beds in crowded YMCAs and slept wrapped in each others’ arms in public parks while waiting to be shipped overseas; and intense emotional bonds were formed between soldiers who were often physically demonstrative in ways that American male culture in peacetime condemns.39 This created an atmosphere in which homosexuality was often ignored or accepted by peers. Gay veterans, such as Long Island native Bob Ruffing, recall how easy it was to cruise other men in the military. Said Ruffing, “When I first got into the navy—in the recreation hall, for instance—there’d be eye contact, and pretty soon you’d get to know one or two people and kept branching out. All of a sudden you had a vast network of friends, usually through this eye contact thing, some through outright cruising. They could get away with it in that atmosphere.”40
Nearly 250,000 women served in the armed forces, most of them in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and few, if any, were rejected for lesbianism. Working as mechanics, drill instructors, and motor vehicle operators, women in the armed services were recruited with posters showing muscular, short-haired women wearing tight-fitting, tailored uniforms. Training manuals praised the female comradeship and close bonds between recruits, two-thirds of whom were single women under the age of twenty-five. There is evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of women who joined the WAC were lesbians looking to meet other women and to get the opportunity to do “men’s work.”41 Even a popular Fleischmann’s Yeast advertisement during the war showed a uniformed WAC riding a motorcycle beneath the heading: “This is no time to be FRAIL.”42 More than a few WAC veterans recall women showing up for their inductions wearing men’s clothing with their hair slicked back in the classic butch style of out lesbians of the day.
The realities of the war and the dire need for servicemen and women trumped all other concerns of the War Department. Despite the official hostility to homosexuality in the military, very few gays were actually rejected. Out of eighteen million men examined for service, only four thousand to five thousand were officially nixed for being homosexual.43
The most famous example of how central many gays and lesbians were to the war effort and the impact that had on forcing an unofficial wartime suspension of the witch hunt is recounted by historian Randy Shilts. General Dwight Eisenhower, acting on a rumor, ordered a member of his staff, WAC sergeant Johnnie Phelps, to draw up a list of all lesbians serving in the WAC battalion for him to dismiss from service. After informing him of the medal-winning service of the battalion and the vast number of lesbians in it, Phelps said, “I’ll make your list, but you’ve got to know that when you get the list back, my name’s going to be first.” The secretary of the battalion then interrupted to say, “Sir, if the General pleases, Sergeant Phelps will have to be second on the list. I’m going to type it. My name will be first.”44 General Eisenhower promptly tore up the order.
With millions of men gone from the workforce, jobs in aircraft and shipbuilding, as well as in clerical and consumer industries, opened up to women for the first time. Many women had to relocate in order to take these jobs and found housing in