[LINK] Gays in the Canadian Military of the Second World War

[rfmcdonald]

I'd like to thank dsgood for forwarding to me a link of this insightful review of Paul Jackson's One of the Boys, a history of gay and bisexual men in wartime. Blaine Marchand, writing for Capital Xtra, describes Jackson's findings.

"When I spoke to gay veterans who fought in the war," Jackson told me recently, "I found the experiences they recounted did not jibe with the histories that have been written. So the formidable task in undertaking my study was to uncover references to homosexuality in military records. I decided I had to look in different places than other historians, some of whom tried to dissuade me from this task."

Jackson found that in military court martial records, "homosexual" was a term commonly used by legal, medical and administrative authorities. There were two interpretations of the term. It was applied to men who were effeminate, and who were seen as suffering gender inversion, and to men who were masculine and who were thought to be morally lax. Homosexuality was perceived as being destructive to the individual, to the military and to society.

When he started contacting gay veterans whose names were cited in these records, few of them would permit him to use their real names. Some had found their experiences traumatic. Others felt obliged to retain total discretion as they had married and raised children after the war. Only a handful were open about their gay experiences while in the military. These were men who had been upfront about their sexuality during the war and who either escaped detection or who had found a way to be accepted.

Interestingly, gay and bisexual men who were "straight-acting" seem to have suffered from more severe penalties at court-martial than those who were not, apparently on the grounds that the former had made a choice to behave immorally and were therefore a more subtle threat to the integrity of the service. Not, mind, that prosecutions for homosexual behaviour seem to have been popular in the first place, but the military police was dedicated to ensuring the purity of the Forces.