A Queer History of the United States (24 page)

The guide also noted that some homosexuals in the military were not conflicted about their sexuality. It advised that if such men “readily apply their interest and energy to the tasks of army life” and “if they are content with quietly seeking the satisfaction of their sexual needs with others of their own kind, their perversion may continue to go unnoticed and they may even become excellent soldiers.”
22

At the same time that it was distributing
Psychology for the Fighting Man,
the military was beginning to purge homosexuals. In 1941 secretary of war Henry Stimson ordered all “sodomists” be court-martialed and, if found guilty, sentenced to five years of hard labor. The courts-martial quickly became too costly. In 1942 Stimson allowed Section 8 discharges—called “blue discharges,” after the color of the paper on which they were printed—for homosexuals. A Section 8 discharge was not a dishonorable discharge, issued after a court-martial, but neither was it an honorable discharge. The Veterans Administration quickly determined that a Section 8 discharge precluded a former service member from entitlements. These included access to health care at a VA hospital and accessing the numerous benefits of the GI Bill, such as college tuition, occupational training, mortgage insurance, and loans to start businesses. Worse, a Section 8 discharge often meant that the former service member was unable to get a job in civilian life.

The army alone issued between forty-nine thousand and sixty-eight thousand Section 8 discharges. As the war drew to a close, Section 8 discharges were given more frequently. Homosexuals were not the only ones affected. African Americans were discharged, often for protesting civilian and military Jim Crow laws, in such disproportionate numbers—22.2 percent for a group that made up only 6.5 percent of the army—that the national black press started a campaign against the practice.

For homosexuals, receiving a Section 8—which essentially indicated mental illness—could be devastating. Women and men were often committed to hospital psychiatric units for examinations, grilled about their sexual thoughts and practices, and forced to give names of their sexual partners. Many men were physically and sexually abused, and public humiliation was commonplace. In some places, homosexual servicemen were rounded up and placed in “queer stockades” until they could be processed. More than five thousand homosexuals were released with Section 8 discharges from the army, and more than four thousand from the navy. Margot Canaday notes that the military stepped up purges of lesbians after the war, when women were supposed to go back into the home.
23

The implicit inclusion of homosexuals in the military, juxtaposed with official discrimination, complicated the homosexuals’ relationship to the ideal of American citizenship. This model was to be enacted in numerous ways over the next decades. While visibility brought benefits to homosexuals, it also brought opposition, particularly the stigma of a pathological identity. As Canaday notes,
“What was an inchoate and vague sort of opposition between citizenship and perversion in the early twentieth century became a hard and clear line by midcentury.”
24
The effect of these witch hunts was personally traumatic. Pat Bond states that at her base in Tokyo, over five hundred women were sent home and discharged. She vividly recalls a specific tragic incident: “They called up one of our kids—Helen. They got her up on the stand and told her that if she didn’t give names of her friends they would tell her parents she was gay. She went up to her room on the sixth floor and jumped out and killed herself. She was twenty.”
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Such events illustrate an ongoing struggle between legal principles, which categorized homosexual behavior as a crime, and the more “enlightened” principles of medicine, which viewed homosexuality as an illness. As medicine’s power to define homosexuality grew, so did the implications of what it meant to be homosexual. Psychiatry, which had once defined homosexuality simply as a sexual act, now defined it as a psychological state, present with or without physical acts. Many psychiatrists believed that homosexuality should not be punished, but as a profession, they believed it could be cured.

Bringing the War Home

When the war ended, society expected women and men to revert to traditional gender roles. As men came back from the war, women were expected to give up their jobs. However, while some women did leave the workforce to raise a family, many women wanted, or needed, to continue working. Lesbians, who were never going to have the economic support of a husband, worked to support themselves. Polls taken between 1943 and 1945 showed that 61 percent to 85 percent of women wanted to keep their jobs, including 47 percent to 68 percent of married women. This massive realignment of the workforce, economics, and gender roles played a decisive role in shaping how Americans viewed both the housewife and the working, economically independent woman.

American postwar life was marked by trauma. Virtually everyone in America had lost a family member, work colleague, friend, or neighbor. Physical trauma was most visible on the wounded or maimed male body. Emotional trauma was equally apparent. Men were now more able to be emotional, express their feelings, and even cry. The stereotypical “strong, silent type,” quintessentially heterosexual, that had characterized the American Man had been replaced with a new, sensitive man who had many of the qualities of the homosexual male.

After the war, homosexual novelists began exploring the intense emotional lives of men who had fought in the war. These novels were an attempt to uncover how the severe trauma of the war affected not only fighting men but American masculinity. They detailed the complicated connections between the war, American men, and homosexual identity in society.

Some novels took place during the war and explored men’s relationships with one another. John Horne Burns’s 1947
The Gallery
presented a sympathetic portrait of military patrons of a gay bar in Naples. Another example is
The Invisible Glass
, a 1950 novel by Loren Wahl (the pen name of Lorenzo Madalena, who took the title from a quote by W. E. B. Du Bois). The novel details the tragic relationship of Steve La Cava, a white lieutenant, and Chick, an African American driver, who are stationed in Italy in 1945. In a scene in which the two men are sharing a bed, Wahl made the homosexuality clear:

With a slight moan Chick rolled onto his left side, toward the Lieutenant. His finger sought those of the officer’s as they entwined their legs. Their faces met. The breaths, smelling sweet from wine, came in heavy drawn sighs. La Cava grasped the soldier by his waist and drew him tightly to his body. His mouth pressed down until he felt Chick’s lips part. For a moment they lay quietly, holding one another with strained arms.
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The Invisible Glass
contains surprising nuances. Chick, a former UCLA student, is straight but has sex with men; Steve is just coming to terms with his sexuality, even though he has fallen in love with men. Much of the plot revolves around military racism, reflecting the complexity of men’s lives in the war.

Novels such as Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar
(1948), Fritz Peters’s
The World Next Door
(1949), and James Barr’s
Quatrefoil
(1950) examined men who had come out during the war and the effect on their lives after the war. An ongoing theme in these novels is how the rising presence and acceptance of homoerotic desires in men’s lives was transforming American masculinity.

Homosexual writers were not the only ones concerned with same-sex relationships in the postwar novel. Norman Mailer’s 1948
The Naked and the Dead,
on the
New York Times
best-seller list for sixty-two weeks, dealt with masculinity. One of its main characters, General Cummings, a repressed homosexual, embodied all of the contradictions of American masculinity. James Jones’s 1951
From Here to Eternity,
which won a National Book Award, contained numerous references to sex between men. One of its main characters, a heterosexual soldier, spent a great deal of time socializing and having sex with wealthy gay male civilians for money. The enormous popularity of these works demonstrates that large numbers of people were ready to consider questions about how Americans thought about sex.

Other heterosexual novelists explicitly critiqued what they saw as destructive American masculinity. Richard Brooks’s 1945
The Brick Foxhole
detailed the brutal murder of an openly gay man by a sociopathic soldier. Brooks, later a noted film director, made it clear that his antagonist’s hatred of homosexuals (as well as Jews and African Americans) was directly linked to his ideas about white American masculinity. The “brick foxhole” in which these soldiers are trapped signifies, among other things, masculinity.

Social conservatives objected to the content in these books, claiming they misrepresented the wholesomeness of the American fighting man. Mailer’s editor made him change the frequently used “fuck” to “fug,” and Jones’s editor made him remove scenes describing, or even discussing, the characters’ homosexual activities. According to James Rorty, the National Organization for Decent Literature, a group founded in 1937 with support from the American Council of Catholic Bishops, was one of a myriad of censorship and reform groups at work after the war. These groups were reinvigorated in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in direct opposition to the changes brought about by World War II. The goal of the National Organization for Decent Literature was “to organize and set in motion the moral forces of the entire country” by prohibiting, through use of boycotts, the sale of “the lascivious type of literature which threatens the moral, social and national life of our country.”
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Their list of indecent books, including Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms,
Lillian Smith’s antilynching novel
Strange Fruit,
Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,
Zola’s
Nana,
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
was sent to parishes, women’s clubs, drugstores, and supermarkets.
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Because so many Americans were now enjoying the freedoms that had emerged during the war—including the freedom to read about sexuality—the censorship groups made limited headway. Civil liberties organizations, librarians, and free speech advocates resisted these groups, although with uneven results. Compared to heterosexual themes, homosexual material was seen by free speech advocates as less defendable in the legal system or the court of public opinion. Therefore homosexual material was the most likely to be banned. This two-tiered system was instrumental in reasserting a decisive separation between heterosexuality and homosexuality in the public imagination.

The tension between the possibility of new freedom and the heightened sense of danger that it brought was instrumental in forming the postwar homosexual. As Allan Bérubé states, “The veterans of World War II were the first generation of gay men and women to experience such rapid, dramatic, and widespread changes in their lives as homosexuals.”
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The new postwar openness created a more openly sexual society that placed hostility to homosexuality in sharp relief.

After the war, marriage rates among young people rose precipitously. The age of marriage dropped—many marriages happened right after high school—and the birth rate in the United States increased tremendously. January 1946 saw 222,721 births; in October, there were 339,499. The 1940s saw 32 million births, up from 24 million during the 1930s. This trend continued into the next decade. Many heterosexual couples and their new families moved to the suburbs that were being built across the country. Their migration out of the city again radically changed the nature, texture, and population of urban areas.

Meanwhile, lesbians and gay men—terms that were beginning to be used with more frequency, first within the homosexual community and then in popular speech—were understanding their relationship to American society primarily through cities. Lesbian and gay male veterans frequently decided not to return to their towns of birth; instead they moved to large cities, where they knew they could live more openly. Homosexuals had undergone a sexual revolution during the war. This revolution contributed almost immediately to a new sense of community, first in the armed forces and then in civilian life. Large cities across the country—especially those on the East and West coasts, where women and men from overseas disembarked on their return—saw enormous growth in the number of lesbians and gay men. While these urban homosexual communities were not entirely new, their numbers were now much larger. Their formation was also aided by technological advances—inexpensive paperback books, wider access to the telephone, 78 RPM and then long-playing records, and eventually television—that precipitated the faster circulation of ideas and images.

Even fundamental ideas about space and community changed. In contrast to communities organized around the biological family, the new homosexual communities needed smaller living spaces for single people or couples, but a much larger space for community activities. These social spaces included restaurants, theaters, bars, coffeehouses, and parks. Most large cities had neighborhoods that accommodated these needs. Many of them, such as San Francisco’s North Beach, the west side of Boston’s Beacon Hill, or New York’s Greenwich Village, were neighborhoods that had previously been occupied by newly arrived immigrants, who required vibrant public social space in which they could sustain their own culture.