Soldiers & Sexuality: Part 2

Part 1 looked at the shifting attitudes towards homosexuality within European military institutions – from the ancient world all the way through to the early modern era. This chapter picks up where the last left off – starting with Australian attitudes towards homsexuality during the early colonial period as well as the hysteria regarding homsexuality that accompanied the major conflicts of the 20th century.

When the first British colonists arrived in Australia the Indigenous population was divided to a dizzying number of individual nations and language groups and it’s likely that a range of sexual norms existed across the continent. Over the course of the 19th century the British exported their prejudices towards homosexuality to Australia and this religiously-inspired homophobia, combined with an almost pathological racism, undermined most attempts to study or record the culture of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants. This neglect makes it very difficult for modern historians to reconstruct Indigenous attitudes towards gender and sexuality prior to white settlement. While work is currently being done to better understand the tactics and strategies employed by Indigenous warriors who resisted colonisation it remains difficult to determine how sexuality was perceived and understood within pre-colonial Indigenous societies.

Having said all that, the one Indigenous community for which we have some evidence of trans-gender identity also happens to be one that had the most success in evicting British colonists during the 19th century. The Tiwi people of Northern Australia occupy several large islands north of Darwin in the Timor sea. In this region some islanders appear to have retained pre-colonial notions of gender and sexual identity. Over the last few years the terms ‘Brotherboys’ and ‘Sistergirls’ have gained currency in the wider community to describe Indigenous Australians who don’t fit neatly into anglo-european gender categories. In an article for Junkee writer Hayden Moon suggests that Tiwi notions of sexuality and identity were shared by at least some mainland indigenous communities – quoting one Sistergirl from the Bundjalung in Northern New South Wales who was adamant that, when it came to gender, “the binary arrived with the boats”.

In the history of Australia’s Frontier Wars the Tiwi island clans are conspicuous for their military success against British colonial authorities. Even before British authorities attempted to establish permanent bases on the islands interactions between English explorers and Tiwi islanders suggest that the local inhabitants were already familiar with the threat posed by firearms by the time the British arrived – evidence of possible earlier encounters with Portuguese slave-raiders. Suspicion of foreign arrivals appears to have somewhat prepared the Tiwi for what was to come. In 1824 British authorities began construction of two coastal forts in the area – Fort Dundas on Melville island and Fort Wellington on the Cobourg Peninsula. The forts were intended to protect trading posts and defend against threats from the sea but, in the end, they mainly served as refuges from Indigenous attacks.

The officers tasked with establishing the forts had been warned that the local Indigenous population were ‘understood to be of a ferocious disposition.’ This assessment would be born out over the following weeks and months. Following an escalating series of clashes between the British soldiers and the local inhabitants of Raffles Bay, a party of Iwaidja warriors began a siege of Fort Wellington in 1827 – with the fort’s garrison at one stage responding by firing one of their 18-pounder cannons. 

Meanwhile, on Melville island, a force of 30 marines and 22 soldiers of the British 3rd Regiment of Foot attempted to provide protection for convict working parties but constant raids by Tiwi war parties meant that the British found themselves confined to Fort Dundas for most of the year. After the garrison’s doctor and another man were killed in an ambush in 1827 the British Colonial Secretary petitioned that the fort be abandoned saying that ‘I do not think there is any prospect of advantage sufficiently strong to warrant a continuance of the Expense and risk of life’.

When it came to the larger settlements on Australia’s east coast, the British authorities were less worried about local resistance and more worried about ‘immoral acts’ being committed by their convict workforce. In the early years of white settlement gender-segregated penal colonies and a shortage of unmarried women led to what psychologists refer to as ‘situational homosexuality’. These relationships caused official consternation and suppressing them preoccupied both local colonial authorities and their distant British overlords. Until very recently most long-established Australian families were reluctant to admit to their convict ancestry. This latent sense of shame can be partially attributed to those initial criminal convictions but it also reflects the unspoken understanding that the first convicts sent to Australia had only each other for sexual companionship. In his book, The Fatal Shore, writer Robert Hughes attributes the stigma surrounding convict ancestry to concerns over sexuality, noting that ‘Homosexuality was one of the mute, stark, subliminal elements in the ‘convict stain’ whose removal, from 1840 onward, so preoccupied Australian nationalists.’ 

If Australia’s penal colonies were considered hot-beds of sexual depravity then Tasmania was where official concerns reached the level of hysteria. In 1845 the Superintendent of the Maria Island penal station reported to London that some convicts had removed the boards separating their beds and were sleeping together ‘in a most suspicious manner’. For this infraction the men in question were tried and sentenced to nine months of hard labour in chains. Shortly afterwards the prison dormitories at Port Arthur were redesigned to keep inmates under constant surveillance and a separate prison was built which allowed convicts to be held in solitary confinement.

As immigration from Britain increased many newcomers were confronted, for the first time, with the reality of living in an open-air prison. Despite the free labour provided by the governor in the form of convict working parties a growing anti-transportation movement began to gain momentum in the mid 19th century. The Tasmanian middle-class, together with a vocal clergy, leveraged public revulsion towards homosexuality in order to bring an end to the policy of transportation. In doing so, they stoked a culture of homophobia that persisted for generations. 

Pillars of Society:
Military Sex Scandals of the Early 20th Century

In Europe, public hysteria over homosexuality reached its height in the first decade of the 20th century amid a series of  sex scandals involving various government officials and members of the aristocracy. In particular accusations of homosexuality played a part in the long-running Dreyfus Affair that paralysed French politics at the turn of the century. Likewise the blackmail of a prominent officer in the  Austro-Hungarian military – Alfred Redl – led to one of the 20th century’s most high-profile cases of treason. 

But it was Imperial Germany that experienced the biggest upheavals as a result of homophobia. In 1906 a number of Imperial Germany’s senior military and diplomatic officials were publicly outed in a scandal that dragged on in the German courts and in the wider European press for several years. The so-called Eulenburg Affair was centred on an alleged relationship between Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, and the Kaiser’s adjutant, General Kuno von Moltke, but dozens of other government officials were also caught up in the scandal. 

Because Eulenburg and other members of his clique were critics of the ongoing naval arms race between Germany and Britain they were made scapegoats for several foreign policy blunders. Relentless press coverage of the scandal meant that homosexuality became associated in the public mind with pacifism and aristocracy and other traits that were considered effeminate at the time. For their part, the French press seized on the German scandal to ridicule Kaiser Wilhelm II – depicting him as a weak-willed and effeminate figure surrounded by effete men. 

Historians interested in the causes of the first world war have made the case that this scandal destabilised Germany’s government at a pivotal time and may have even helped escalate tensions between Germany and other European powers over the following years – as many of the men who had previously provided a moderating influence on German foreign policy were forced to resign between 1906 and 1909. Those that replaced them turned out to be more belligerent and militaristic – partly, it appears, to compensate for the perceived humiliation associated with The Eulenburg Affair. According to historian Norman Domeier: 

“Professional warmongers such as the Pan-Germans saw their radical imperialism confirmed. They eagerly seized upon homosexuality as a new political-moral construct that not only explained the international relations of the past decades, but also aggravated the national and international conflicts of the present. The Leipziger Neueste Nachrìchten [a German daily newspaper] determined that the Eulenburg camarilla was the “actual carrier of this meager and unmanly policy of reconciliation.”

In Australia the fierce social stigma surrounding homosexuality and the historic criminalisation of same-sex relationships has left a substantial gap in the nation’s social history. WWI took place at the height of this repression and, as a result, there is very little record of same-sex relationships between Australian soldiers and no official acknowledgement of trysts within the AIF. Letters sent back from the battlefields were reviewed and censored by military officials in the interests of wartime secrecy – making romantic correspondence between soldiers a risky proposition. Presumably when these relationships became apparent they were dealt with quietly and informally by the military so as to avoid scandal. 

Other nations involved in the war appear to have been slightly more willing to broach the subject. The famous British warrior-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were celebrated in Britain for their ability to convey something of the cruelty and futility of trench warfare. Their relationship with one another and their romantic liaisons with other men didn’t seem to damage their credibility as soldiers or tarnish their literary legacy. In some ways their military service appears to have insulated them from the bigotry that characterised British society at the time. Sassoon had received the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ on the western front but his experience of combat had only cemented his opposition to the war. While recovering from a bout of illness Sassoon drafted a public letter of protest to the British authorities that read, in part:

‘I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.’

The army ignored his protest and Sassoon was forced to rejoin his unit. Shortly after returning to the front he was wounded in a friendly fire incident when a British sentry mistook him for a German and shot him in the head. Sassoon spent the remainder of the war recovering in Britain while his friend and fellow poet Wilfred Owen returned to the front line only to be killed one week shy of the November armistice in 1918.

Arguably the public face of the British war effort – the dour, moustached visage of Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener – belonged to man conflicted by his own sexual orientation. It should be noted that the question of Lord Kitchener’s sexuality is somewhat controversial – mainly amongst historians willing to overlook a mountain of circumstantial evidence. While it’s possible to dismiss Kitchener’s interest in fine porcelain, flower arrangement and sculptures of nude males as vaguely in keeping with public norms for men of his time and class, it’s much harder to ignore his lifelong indifference towards women. Throughout his life Kitchener was never romantically connected with anyone of the opposite sex and instead preferred to spend his time with his inner circle of unmarried staff officers affectionately known as ‘Kitchener’s Band of Boys’. In his later years he focused his attention on his much younger aide-de-camp Captain Oswald Fitzgerald – another ‘lifelong bachelor’. The two men lived together for almost nine years and died together aboard the HMS Hampshire when the ship struck a mine off the coast of Scotland in 1916. Field Marshal Kitchener – the hero of Omdurman – became the highest-ranking casualty of the entire war.

In their misguided attempts to protect Kitchener’s reputation later commentators often pointed to his apparently callous reaction to the death of fellow officer Hector MacDonald as evidence that Kitchener shared a common revulsion toward homosexuality. In 1903 MacDonald – another famous veteran of Omdurman – was alleged to have been caught in some sort of compromising position with local youths while serving as Commander-in-Chief of British troops in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Unlike other high-profile officers who’d been alleged to have had homosexual affairs MacDonald was threatened with a court martial rather than a demotion or quiet transfer to another posting.

But the court martial never occured because MacDonald shot himself shortly after being informed that charges were pending. Over the years Kitchener’s apparent disgust at MacDonald’s conduct has been used to counter claims that Kitchener himself was homosexual. But this line of reasoning betrays a basic misunderstanding of the cognitive dissonance experienced by those forced to hide their true feelings and impulses. Concepts like ‘internalised homophobia’ – whereby feelings of self-loathing manifest as contempt for anyone displaying homosexual tendencies – were not widely recognised in the early 20th century but this tendency has been well documented by modern psychologists. 

In his book Mars Without Venus: A Study of Some Homosexual Generals (1981) the former medical officer Frank M. Richardson attributed the sometimes fierce ambitions of great military figures to the Freudian notion of ‘sublimation’ – the re-direction of socially unacceptable impulses towards socially acceptable activities. Richardson certainly seems to have thrown his net wide. In addition to Kitchner and the two ‘Greats’ – Alexander and Frederick – Richardson adds Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Gordon to the list of gay or bisexual military commanders.

Not long after Kitchener’s death, and the AIF’s evacuation from Gallipoli, the British renewed their efforts to undermine the Ottoman state by sponsoring an uprising in the Arabian peninsula. The resulting ‘Arab Revolt’ was led by Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, and raged across the Middle-East for more than two years – occupying tens of thousands of Ottoman troops and briefly establishing an independent Arab state in Syria. One of several Allied officers sent to provide assistance to the revolt was a British Captain named Thomas Edward Lawrence who quickly earned the trust of his Arab hosts and helped coordinate a guerrilla campaign against Ottoman troops in the Hejaz. 

Before the war Lawrence had worked as an archeologist on the Turkish-Syrian border where he’d befriended a young Arab by the name of Dahoum. Ostensibly Dahoum was hired as Lawrence’s archeological assistant but their relationship appears to have been much more intimate and, for that reason, somewhat scandalous. Another famed archeologist of the era. – Leonard Woolley – noted that Lawrence invited Dahoum to live with him and, on one occasion, had the boy pose as a model for a ‘queer crouching figure’ which he carved in the soft local limestone. The two were separated by the war, and when Lawrence’s Arab forces reached the region in 1918 he was distraught to learn that Dahoum had died in a typhus epidemic two years earlier. This young man is the most likely candidate for Lawrence’s dedication at the start of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Thanks to his own writings and a great deal of self promotion ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ became a celebrity in Britain but his status as a war hero was shored-up by a conspiracy of silence around his homosexual tendencies and the dogged insistence by contemporary commentators that Lawrence was asexual and celibate throughout his life. Lawrence made the same assertion but he also made no effort to conceal his interest and appreciation for the erotic side of same-sex couplings. In the Seven Pillars Lawrence describes the willingness of his Arab allies to sexually satisfy each other rather than risk contracting venereal disease from prostitutes in the garrison towns of the Hejaz.

“In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies—a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort [to secure Arab independence]. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.”

In post-war Germany the issue of homosexuality became one of many social anxieties that accompanied the return of soldiers from the trenches of the western front. Shell-shocked soldiers were often lumped in with social outcasts like jews, criminals, homosexuals and the insane. There was a widespread belief, often perpetuated by medical authorities, that the brutality of war had left veterans disinterested in sex and more predisposed towards violence and homosexuality. Others disagreed. The renowned Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was criticised for pointing out that many of the ‘neurological conditions’ associated with veterans were shared by civilians across class and gender divides. He also argued, based on evidence collected by staff at his Sexual Research Institute, that homosexuality was an innate tendency rather than a perversion of ‘normal’ sexual instincts. On that basis Hirschfeld campaigned for homosexuality to be decriminalised. Brave veterans also campaigned on their own behalf. One of the letters sent to Hirschfeld’s institute detailed the lengths that one former soldier went to to dispel myths and prejudices towards homosexuality among his peers:

“I worked very faithfully for the common cause, gave many of our fellows our literature and got them to the point where they were interested in the fact of homosexuality and then answered the questions which their interest would prompt them to ask. I came across some remarkable views and many times I was dismayed at the horrible lies which had been disseminated about us. . . . I am certain that if everyone would do his share in the interests of the whole class of homosexuals and help dispel the legendary lies concerning us, great progress would be made. . . Would that all my colleagues could be freed from their oppressive burden through open and valiant combat”

During the interwar years in Australia many men joined the various branches of Australia’s military as a form of escape. As researcher Yorick Smaal explained in his study Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific:

“The forces allowed men to break away from the stifling routine of everyday life, providing a temporary stop-gap to impending expectations of marriage and children, as well as reprieve from personal and social difficulties that accompanied queer life depending on the context and circumstance.”

Nevertheless the consequences for being ‘outed’ were often severe. Those found guilty of engaging in same-sex relationships faced trial by court-martial with a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment. Even when the full weight of penalties was not applied the outcome could be harrowing for men who had built their self-image around their military rank and status. Army officers accused of ‘disgraceful conduct’ were usually dismissed from the service and this sentence was often accompanied by a ritual of public humiliation. One enlisted Australian soldier in the 1940s recalled what happened to an officer cashiered for sodomy. After being marched in front of the troops under armed escort the man was made to stand at attention while his conviction was read out. 

“A drum was then rolled and the C.O. [Commanding Officer] commenced stripping the epaulets [sic] of rank and various badges from the culprit’s uniform. This humiliation was never completed; the victim fainted and was carried from the parade ground.”

Despite the risk of discovery and sanction some gay volunteers thought that the discipline and values of the military ‘might adjust their existing impulses and desires’.  Smaal quotes an Australian soldier with the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (AIF) who stated that, ‘The army was going to make a man of me: I was going to become a decent, square Australian soldier who would visit the brothels with the best of them and leave all that degeneracy behind me forever’. For those soldiers who joined to escape their own desires the reality of wartime service often only complicated matters. 

Over-Paid, Over-Sexed and Over Here
The Arrival of the U.S. Army in 1942

In Australia the appearance of a visible homosexual subculture coincided with the arrival of U.S. troops in Australian cities throughout the 1940s. Mobilisation for the Second World War triggered two parallel moral panics in Australian society. The first was public dismay at the ‘mannish’ tendencies of women who had been employed to fill roles left vacant by the overwhelming demands of conscription. The second concerned the prevalence of homosexual relationships amongst soldiers and between foreign and local troops. 

Starting in early 1942 hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers began arriving in cities and towns along Australia’s east coast in preparation for an allied counter-offensive in the Pacific. The influx of young men (roughly sixty per cent of Navy and Marine personnel were under the age of twenty-three) caused a certain degree of public anxiety in Australia. A popular refrain at the time complained that ‘yank’ soldiers were ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’ but this sentiment appears to have been driven by moral panic over their effect on Australia’s women without much consideration of the chastity of Australian men.

But for both Australian and U.S. soldiers the long months of preparation offered plenty of opportunity to pursue relationships with other men or simply satisfy sexual urges. These trysts were necessarily short-lived and discrete. Discovery carried heavy legal and social consequences and the demands of the military meant that couples could easily be separated from one another for months or years at a time. The dual pressure of maintaining secrecy and warding off the looming prospect of deployment gave rise to what would now be considered a pervasive ‘hook-up’ culture among troops.

The influx of foreign servicemen brought with it a whole slew of new mannerisms, slang terms and rules of etiquette to Australia’s much more sexually repressed shores. The term ‘queen’ was widely understood but its rhyming-slang equivalent ‘tonk’ (from tonka-bean) presumably had to be explained to U.S. arrivals. Terms like ‘butch’ and ‘sissy’ came to define active and passive roles in sex while makeup and cross-dressing became common features of life in all-male garrisons and prison camps. Even sex acts themselves needed to be defined (for example: the term ‘blow-job’ began to appear in Australia in letters and arrest records in the 1940s). This new sexual subculture represented a significant departure from the way in which homosexuality had traditionally been expressed. As Smaal notes:

“Given that groups of effeminate men had not emerged in the fragile settler society of the nineteenth century where men greatly outnumbered women, other models of same-sex desire – friendships among mates in the bush (and its attendant drinking culture) and active-passive relationships between adult men and male youths mainly among significant numbers of Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants – had laid a distinctive template for Australian masculinities.”

On the home front, Australian civil society was scandalised by this side of wartime mobilisation but coverage of the ‘problem’ also advertised the possibilities to those who were curious. In response to outrage from community and religious leaders arrests were made and patrols increased to discourage anyone from lingering in known hookup hotspots (it’s interesting to note that in both Melbourne and Brisbane the state Shrine of Remembrance was a popular haunt) but, for the most part, Australian military authorities appear to have turned a blind eye to what soldiers did while on leave.

The Australian army may have continued their policy of willful ignorance were it not for overzealous U.S. military authorities who attempted to weed out overtly homosexual soldiers. U.S. authorities in the South Pacific considered their efforts to be so successful that they warned their Australian counterparts of a potential public-relations scandal. The Australian army’s chief provost Major Norman Cooper wrote, in turn, to the Commander of New Guinea Force – telling him that a ‘situation may shortly arise in which the perverted desires of American soldiers are being satisfied mainly or wholly by “girls” from the Australian forces’. Smaal points out that, in their attempts to diagnose the behaviour of overseas troops, ‘the army became one of the first Australian institutions to grapple in a practical way with the differences between homosexual behaviour and homosexual identity.’

The pressure to take action presented Australia’s military authorities with a substantial dilemma. Treating homosexuality as a purely disciplinary issue threatened to tie-down the military’s legal system with investigations which raised thorny questions of evidence and witness testimony. On the other hand, some military officials feared that treating homosexuality as a purely medical/psychiatric issue might offer an easy way out for men who wanted to cut short their overseas service. In one memo Australia’s Adjutant-General argued that offering medical discharges purely on the basis of personal admissions of homosexuality provided  ‘too great an opportunity … to escape service in remote and uncongenial localities’.

In the end the army settled on a policy whereby suspects were tried by court-martial for any incident where consent was unclear while all other allegations were dealt with by a medical board of inquiry. According to the new policy, psychiatric evaluations would incorporate a range of different criteria including whether the subject was exclusively attracted to men, whether they took an active or passive role in the sex act and whether they exhibited any signs of gender ‘inversion’ (ie. crossdressing). Much to the relief of Cooper and other officials, the anticipated stampede of self-confessed homosexuals never occurred and the issue was quietly shelved. Quoting from Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific.

“That the debate was over so quickly – at least in the army – suggests that officials were not averse to a swift solution on an otherwise uncomfortable subject. After all, the army was the crucible of Australian masculinity. When it appeared that the New Guinea affair was an anomaly among Australian soldiers, commanders breathed a collective sigh of relief and returned their heads to the proverbial sand.”

Following the second world war Australian military officials seemed to have taken a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach to homosexuality within the ranks. Cultural historians characterised the 1950s as a period of comparative silence on the issue of homosexuality – at least in terms of public commentary. But the upheavals of the 1940s had left a permanent impression on Australian society and the subcultures that had taken root during wartime continued to grow in the post-war era. Smaal notes that there was even a gay bar in Sydney called ‘Diggers’. Within the army itself there appears to have been a widespread tolerance of homosexuality as long as the men or women were discreet. 

In compiling their history of LGBTI service in the Australian armed forces, Pride in Defence, Noah Riseman and Shirleene Robinson managed to collect a range of personal accounts (mostly anonymous) from former soldiers about the difficulties of navigating official and unofficial restrictions on their sex lives. During the Malayan Emergency one Australian soldier, Tom Goldsby, got involved with a local Malay man who, on one occasion, almost outed Goldsby by dedicating a song to him on the radio. While some gay soldiers suspected that their sexual orientation was known, in most cases, official sanctions were only imposed when their conduct became too conspicuous or some other rivalry in the ranks spurred allegations or complaints.

Another soldier in Vietnam, Brian McFarlane, insisted that close-knit military units made it virtually impossible to maintain secrecy when it came to one another’s’ sex lives. In an interview McFarlane explained that:

“There were always gays, both male and female, in society and in the military. Those closely associated with them mostly always knew of their inclination. But the sensible gay did not go about pushing the matter in the faces of all and sundry, particularly those who may not understand, or care to understand.”

In 1973 the American Psychiatry Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and, although public attitudes towards homosexuality seemed to be gradually thawing, the culture within the Australian military became one of penalisation. In the late 1970s the newly re-named Australian Defence Force initiated a series of witch hunts and investigations aimed at hounding homosexual servicemen and women out of the military. Pride in Defence records numerous examples of soldiers being singled out and interrogated about their sexual orientation. In many cases personnel were placed under surveillance, both on and off duty, and had their belongings searched at random. In some cases ADF psychiatrists prescribed potassium bromide in an attempt to blunt sexual desire. This official clampdown appears to have been accompanied by an upsurge in homophobic bullying and harassment within the ranks.

In the Women’s Royal Australian Air Corps it was widely understood that the more senior a woman was in rank the more likely they were to be gay – as married women were generally obliged to leave the service. In a typical example of what gay personnel experienced one member of the WRAAC – Susie Struth – was dismissed from the service in 1977 following an exhausting series of interrogations and official harassment. At one stage she was shown a nominal roll of WRAAC personnel and asked to identify the lesbians. Struth refused but pointed out that ‘it would be quicker for me to tick off those that aren’t.”

The ADF’s official ban on gay and lesbian personnel was overturned in 1992 after a female reservist appealed her dismissal to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and asked to be reinstated. This court case finally prompted the federal government to lift the ban on recruiting gay soldiers.

The Male Gays
Homosexuality, Soldiers and Cinema

The history of homosexuality in the military is, in many ways, a history of censorship. Just as the careful avoidance of phenomena like friendly fire from popular history impairs our understanding of war, the neglect of sexual and romantic relationships between soldiers also provides a glaring example of what can be covered up if the whole weight of our collective culture is bent towards denial. The conspiracy of silence around homosexuality and soldiers illustrates just how much can be suppressed – even when it comes to a conflict like WWII which has been endlessly researched and dissected.

It is a somewhat terrifying indictment of 20th century Australian masculinity that veterans of Australia’s wars are occasionally willing to share stories of personal cowardice, the inadvertent killing of comrades or their participation in war crimes but almost no former soldiers will admit to sexually pursuing a fellow soldier.

Highlighting the experiences of gay soldiers and warriors throughout history helps us better understand war. Their stories shed light on the appeal of military service – not just to men and women who are attracted to the same sex – but to human beings more generally. Beneath many of our most celebrated stories of mateship and heroism lies the basic insight that we are social creatures driven to sometimes incredible feats of self sacrifice out of love for one another rather than any overwhelming sense of nationalism or political ideology. Homosexual relationships – whether they be motivated by romance or convenience – are clearly part of the way that soldiers (as well as prisoners and convicts) cope with life in extremis.

Moreover the relationships between soldiers and the culture that develops within military units helps explain why some soldiers return to war – even if their earlier experiences were traumatic or frustrating in many ways. Clearly some men and women become addicted to combat and life within a military unit and the comradery that goes with it. Popular histories and official exhibitions like those at the Australian War Memorial like to portray military service as a matter of duty and a sacrifice – one that patriotic Australian men have reluctantly undertaken in order to protect the status of nation and empire. But very rarely do you see those sentiments conveyed in interviews with veterans themselves. Neither do you hear from the soldiers that, once they got a taste for war, never really wanted the experience to end.

One veteran interviewed for the Australians At War Film Archive stated that he regretted not seeing action in WWII and got his first taste of battle in Korea. When medical officers in the Army suggested that he might be too old to deploy to Vietnam he considered signing up as a mercenary. Some part of this can be attributed to a thrill-seeking instinct but for some percentage of veterans, military service provided – and continues to provide – an opportunity to return to an overwhelmingly male social group with close bonds of friendship and very different social expectations to civilian life.

Finally, a public re-examination of our military history as it relates to homosexuality is necessary in order to address decades of institutionalised and informal harassment that our servicemen and women have been subjected to over the years. Soldiers suspected of being homosexual have been subject to an enormous amount of hostility- in addition to those men and women cashiered or dishonourably discharged from the service many others have been denied pensions or prohibited from being listed as next-of-kin to their partners or participating in ANZAC Day memorials. In a letter to the Australian Defence Minister and members of the parliament in 2018 historian Noah Riseman highlighted the impact of the ADF’s policies on generations of former soldiers:

“The stress of hiding their authentic selves and the traumatising experience of the investigations, interviews and discharges have left ongoing mental health problems for some ex-service personnel. We also know that there were LGBT members under investigation who suicided. For those who rebuilt their lives after discharging, still there is the feeling that the ADF abandoned them and there has never been a proper reconciliation.”

Unlike some of the more intractable issues surrounding war and state violence the issue of homophobia in the armed forces is one that can be partly addressed through representation in the popular media. Prejudice can be eroded over time simply by revealing the hidden history of homosexuality as it relates to warfare and military service.

Cinematic depictions of military life in anglo-american films have tiptoed around the issue of homosexuality while occasionally veering into homoerotic territory. Within Hollywood the first onscreen kiss between two men took place way back in 1927 in William Wellman’s WWI action film Wings. Wellman’s silent epic tells the story of Jack Powell and David Armstrong – two trainee pilots who are each apparently vying for the affections of the same woman. However when the U.S. joins the war in Europe both men are deployed to France whereupon they go from being rivals to friends. In the closing act, David is shot down over enemy lines but manages to commandeer a German bi-plane to make his escape. Jack unwittingly shoots down the German aircraft – mortally wounding his friend in the process. Reunited on the ground a distraught Jack kisses his friend goodbye. A title screen appears as the two men embrace ‘You know there is nothing in the world that means as much to me as your friendship’ Jack tells him.

A few years later conservative political figures in America forced Hollywood filmmakers to adhere to the Motion Picture Production Code which, among other things – circumscribed even the suggestion of homosexual relationships. During the era of the MPPC Hollywood filmmakers who wanted to portray anything remotely controversial had to feign ignorance any time they alluded to anything that could be construed as ‘indecent’.

Sometimes the subtext was subtle enough to fly over the heads of the actors themselves – as appears to be the case with the sword-and-sandal epic Ben Hur (1959) in which Charlton Heston plays a disgraced Jewish merchant seeking revenge against his childhood companion who has risen through the ranks of the Roman army. Commenting on his contribution to one of several script rewrites Gore Vidal explained that “the only way one could justify several hours of hatred between two lads — and all those horses — was to establish, without saying so in words, an affair between them as boys”. 

A year later Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus fell afoul of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code – forcing Kubrick to cut a scene where the Roman general, Crassus (Laurence Olivier) attempts to seduce his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis). 

Nagisa Ōshima,’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) explored the psycho-sexual tension between the commander of a Japanese prison camp and a British POW played by David Bowie. In the same year American director Robert Altman’s indie movie Streamers examined the racial and sexual prejudices harboured by a group of soldiers awaiting deployment overseas. Thanks to a shoestring budget and a very limited theatrical release the film did not make much of a cultural impact but it stands as one of the first American films to portray homosexuality between soldiers in an unambiguous manner. 

One of the most high profile films to depict the unspoken appeal of military service is Tony Scott’s 1986 action blockbuster Top Gun –  a film which one reviewer at the time referred to as a “shiny homoerotic commercial”. Ever since its release commentators and critics have dwelled on the apparent sexual tension between the pilots and debated whether this subtext was intended. A recent interview with Jerry Bruckheimer suggests that, visually at least, there was nothing inadvertent about the homoeroticism. The casting and aesthetics of the film were very consciously inspired by photographer Bruce Weber’s sexually-charged portraits of young Navy recruits compiled in his monograph ‘On Leave in Waikiki’. Referring to an early meeting he had with Tom Cruise producer Jerry Bruckheimer explained:

“He came into the office and Tony showed him this [photography] book that Bruce Weber had done on Americana and these great-looking guys. We leafed through the book and Tony said, ‘This is what I want you to look like’ — all these guys in white T-shirts, all handsome. Tony was excited and Tom got excited. That’s when I set him up with the Blue Angels.”

More recently South African director Oliver Hermanu has collected numerous awards for his film Moffie (2019). Hermanu’s film is an adaptation of Afrikaans writer André Carl van der Merwe’s account of his National Service experience during the 1980s – running the gauntlet of institutional homophobia and racism. The title itself is a homophobic slur in Afrikaans and the film goes some way towards showing how hate and self-loathing are reinforced and perpetuated within a culture.

In an interview with The Guardian Hermanu explained how in the 1980s in South Africa the term ‘communist’ was interchangeable with ‘terrorist’, which was interchangeable with ‘Black man’. Likewise ‘moffie’ was interchangeable with ‘pedophile’, which was interchangeable with ‘atheist’.

“I see it as a portrait of the factory, how men were being made in the service of an ideology that relates to their treatment of women, their treatment of other races, how they potentially become the men we identify as problematic today.”

Sexual relationships between soldiers are conspicuously absent from most official histories of Australia’s wars and are rarely mentioned in memoirs and biographies of prominent veterans. Likewise examples of trysts between soldiers of the same sex are vanishingly thin in mainstream pop-culture even as they form the basis of an entire genre of erotic literature. This absence is not entirely due to self-censorship. Author James Jones who wrote a lightly-fictionalised account of his experiences during the battle of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line included this example of ‘situational’ homosexuality and the typical rationalisations that went with it.

“Fife had divined what was coming. Nevertheless he pretended surprise and confusion. But he already knew that he was going to accept. And Bead, finding that he was not rebuffed, now became more confident in his voice and in his salesmanship. Apparently it made no difference to him and did not worry him that he was suggesting something homosexual. And perhaps, being eighteen and just out of school, he didn’t see it that way. But that could not be entirely true, Fife speculated later, because as he started to crawl over to Fife’s side of the little tent he stopped and said:

“I just dont want you to think I’m no queer, or nothing like that.”

“Well, dont you get the idea I am, either,” Fife had answered.”

This brief exchange was considered chaste enough for U.S. censors but the editors of Jones’ previous novel From Here to Eternity – set in Hawaii in the lead up to the war – had removed descriptions of soldiers moonlighting as rent-boys to wealthy men in Honolulu. The original manuscript version was finally published in 2011 at the behest of Jones’ daughter Kylie who explained, in article for The Daily Beast, that:

“My father believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time. He also believed that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier’s capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago.”

References:
John Morris (2001) – The Tiwi and the British
Stephen Craig Kerry (2012) – Sistergirls/Brotherboys: The Status of Indigenous Transgender Australians
Robert Hughes (1987) – The Fatal Shore
T. E. Lawrence (1926) – The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Yorick Smaal (2015) – Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45
Kaylie Jones (2009) – Was a WWII Classic Too Gay?
Norman Domeier (2015) – The Homosexual Scare and the Masculinization of German Politics before World War I
Frank M Richardson (1981) – Mars without Venus : a study of some homosexual generals
Magnus Hirschfeld (1934) – The Sexual History of the World War
Noah Riseman and Shirleene Robinson (2020) – Pride in Defence The Australian Military and LGBTI Service Since 1945
James Jones (1962) – The Thin Red Line
Roslyn Sulcas (2021) – From a South African Slur to a Scathing Drama About Toxic Masculinity
Stephen Galloway (2016) – As ‘Top Gun’ Turns 30, Jerry Bruckheimer Reveals Secrets of the Film’s