The Gay Metropolis (7 page)

Unfortunately, as Bérubé explains, Sullivan and his colleagues “had carved out the territory on which others would build an antihomosexual barrier and the rationale for using it.” Sullivan's belief in the relative insignificance of “sexual aberrations” in establishing mental illness was undermined as his plan was digested by the Washington bureaucracy. By the middle of 1941, the army and the Selective Service both included “homosexual proclivities” in their lists of disqualifying “deviations.”

At a series of government-sponsored seminars at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan in 1941, psychiatrists expanded on their theory of homosexuality as a mental illness. Homosexuality was discussed as “an aspect of three personality disorders: psychopaths who were sexual perverts, paranoid personalities who suffered from homosexual panic, and schizoid personalities” who displayed gay symptoms. In 1942, army mobilization regulations were expanded to include a paragraph entitled “Sexual Perversions.” It was written by Lawrence Kubie, a Manhattan psychiatrist who was famous for his treatment of show business patients tormented by doubts
about their sexual orientation—from Clifton Webb to Tennessee Williams and Moss Hart.

EVERY ARGUMENT
made against the admission of lesbians and gays to the military in the nineties has its own echo in the forties, including the idea that effeminate men would become “subject to ridicule and joshing, which will harm the general morale and will incapacitate the individual for Army duty.”

“Malingerers” were those who pretended to be gay to avoid duty at the front;
“reverse
malingerers”—a term invented by military psychiatrists—described gay recruits who pretended to be heterosexual so they could perform their patriotic duty. By 1943 doctors had devised the Cornell Selectee Index, which used “occupational choice” questions to screen out dancers, window dressers, and interior decorators because they would have difficulty with their “acceptance of the male pattern.”

The media periodically spread this new official prejudice. The
Washington Star
noted that navy psychiatrists would “be on the lookout for any number of mental illnesses or deficiencies that would make the recruit a misfit,” including homosexuality, and
Time
reported that “How do you get along with girls?” was one of the questions “machine-gunned” at the inductee during his physical.

These press reports produced all kinds of unlikely fears. When Murray Gitlin enlisted in the navy, he was “very afraid that they would undress me during the physical examination, and they'd know, looking at me, that I was gay. That's how innocent I was. Well they didn't—and they couldn't have cared less.”

Two factors discouraged nearly all gay men from using their status as members of a sexual minority to avoid the military: the fear of a permanent stigma, because the reason for exclusion was recorded on draft records available to future employers, and an overwhelming desire to participate in the defining experience of a generation. Charles Rowland was drafted at the age of twenty-five. He knew “an awful lot of gay people, but nobody, with one exception, ever considered not serving. We were not about to be deprived of the privilege of serving our country in a time of great national emergency by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay.”

Stanley Posthorn was twenty-three in 1941; he enlisted eight months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “I wanted to go in,” said Posthorn, who grew up in Cincinnati and settled in Manhattan when the war was over. “You had real villains, and if you were Jewish, they were sizable villains.
And you had heroes. Roosevelt was a great man. And Churchill was a great man. Also, it was
the
experience of my generation. And I wanted to get away from home. It was a big deal to get away: a big adventure.

“I remember a man who did get out while I was still in basic training,” Posthorn continued. “A man from Cincinnati, who got out based on family need. He said, ‘Sure I want to avenge Pearl Harbor.' But he wanted out. He was not gay; he was a straight man who was a coward, who wanted to make money, and who didn't want to be in the army. I thought he was awful.”

Posthorn had been in love with a man named Alan for four years before he went into the army: “There was no one ever more beautiful in my whole life.
Ever!
I always felt very lucky to have attracted that man. He was Nijinsky and I was Diaghilev. I was very lucky to have that leaper.” After Posthorn enlisted, he and Alan got together one more time when Posthorn came home to Cincinnati for a twelve-day leave.

“We spent three days in a hotel room—a rather seedy hotel—and I couldn't leave because if I were seen, I would be in terrible trouble with my folks, who didn't know I was home yet. So I stayed in there with my clothes off for three days, and he'd go down and sneak a sandwich. It was just
heaven!
It was like being enslaved to this thing we were doing constantly. It was a total cure.

“The war was on now: it was 1942.1 think there was a radio in the room, but I don't think we listened. We had so much to talk about. We were very idealistic. You know, it was Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart time—
Casablanca
. We're going off, and we might never see each other again.”

Two years later Alan was posted to Iceland and he sent Posthorn a Dear John letter. “I was in France,” said Posthorn. “Alan loved this person, and what was he going to do? The man didn't even know about it. I was so hurt. You know,
saving
myself! My eggs were all in his basket. I didn't write him for a long time, but I kept getting letters. And then I got sick and I wrote him. And I just wished him luck. I said, ‘I can't talk to you. I just can't!' All I wanted to do was to go back to big Al. And now I had nothing to go back to.”

Posthorn became a captain by the end of the war, but unlike some other veterans he never felt pride in his success as a gay man in the army. “Pride? No. There was fear, uncertainty; also the feeling of not being quite fit for what you were doing. You're softer; you didn't have the macho. I felt in danger. I felt in jeopardy. I always felt vulnerable, that somebody might catch up with me. I thought I was passing: softly passing. I couldn't drill as
well as anyone else, I wasn't as good on the athletic field or in the morning exercises. I could do other things. I excelled where I could excel. Here's a smart Jew—but he can't down the beers in the canteen, you know. I was considered snobbish—which I didn't really want to be. I didn't play craps; I didn't get into big poker games; and I didn't go out and fall down drunk. I felt I really didn't belong there in the army because I didn't have the muscles and I didn't have the mind-set for it. And I think maybe that's why I worked so hard—to stay with it, to hang in.”

Those who got in generally fell into one of two categories: either they had long ago learned to mask their sexual identity in civilian life, or they were too young to have realized that they were gay. And despite the elaborate new regulations developed to discriminate against gays in the army, the only obstacle many of them encountered at the induction center was the “Do you like girls?” question.

George Buse remembered, “One of the worst of the stereotypes was the lie that all homosexuals are effeminate—and you're not really a man, you're more like a girl. So a lot of us at that time who were gay had to prove our manhood. So I joined the toughest, most masculine military organization in the country—and that was the Marine Corps. ‘The Marine Corps builds men.'”

Of the eighteen million men examined for military service, fewer than five thousand were excluded because of their sexual orientation. No records were kept on the exclusion of lesbians. Once inside, many gay soldiers were astonished to discover how common their orientation was. Charles Rowland's first assignment was in the induction station at Fort Snelling, which was “instantly called the seduction station,” he said. “I found that all of the people I had known in the gay bars in Minneapolis-St. Paul were all officers who were running this ‘seduction station.' Recruits would be lined up by the thousands every morning outside our windows. All of us would
rush
to the windows and express great sorrow that all these beautiful boys were going to be killed or maimed or something in the war.”

Posthorn had met only one other gay man (besides Alan) during his first four years in the army. But then he visited Seventh Army Headquarters in Deauville, France, in 1945. “I never saw so many gays in my life as that weekend in Deauville,” he recalled. “When I went to the theater, they were yoo-hooing and waving. It was incredible! A
flaming
crew of gays running that outfit.” But he did not identify with them at all; their flamboyance made him uneasy. “I resented them. I did not want to be considered
their equal. I'd been in the field. They'd been living a very soft life, probably with boas in their closet.

“On my way back I stopped to see Liechtenstein. I went to the movies and I met a
beautiful
soldier, who really didn't know I was after him. But we went for a walk in this gorgeous park. And I scored. Yeah. I got even with Alan again.” Posthorn's first gay experience with a stranger in uniform had taken place earlier when he was posted in California. “I was a second lieutenant and I took a four-day pass by myself to get laid. I went to Carmel, California. So lovely. And there was a whole crew of guys there from the cavalry. Which never went overseas because there was no need for a cavalry. But they looked great: jodhpurs and the boots and the whole thing. And there was one who eyed me and I eyed him, and he said he had a room.

“When we got there, he said he had to have ten dollars. I said, ‘Oh?' He said, ‘Well, I have a date tonight with a girl, so give me ten bucks. Okay?' And I said, ‘All right'—because he was very attractive. And then he said, ‘I'm not taking my boots off.' And I felt really cheap. He just lowered his trousers. And it was not mutual at all. I just did it and I hated it. And I had to wash afterward, and he said, ‘Hey, if you want to go again, I'll get undressed for fourteen.' And I said, ‘Not for
two
dollars.' And I left. I felt very demeaned. And I never paid again. Ever.”

ALLAN BÉRUBÉ DISCOVERED
that the extreme stress of battlefield conditions occasionally permitted gay men to express their affection for one another without any inhibition. Jim Warren's boyfriend was shot while trying to eliminate a machine-gun nest on Saipan.

“They brought him back and he was at the point of death. He was bleeding. He had been hit about three or four times. I stood there and he looked up at me and I looked down at him, and he said, ‘Well, Jim, we didn't make it, did we?' And tears were just rolling down my cheeks. I don't know when I've ever felt such a lump and such a waste. And he kind of gave me a boyish crooked grin, and just said, ‘Well, maybe next time.' I said, ‘I'm going to miss you. And I'll see your mother.' There were maybe seven or eight people standing there, and I was there touching his hand and we were talking. Somebody said later, ‘You were pretty good friends,' because I had been openly crying, and most people don't do this. I said, ‘Yes, we were quite good friends.' And nobody ever said anything. I guess as long as I supposedly upheld my end of the bargain everything was all right.”

Ben Small's boyfriend was hit moments after Small said good night to him in his tent.

“This plane came overhead and all we heard was explosions and we fell to the ground. When I got up to see if he was all right, the thrust of the bomb had gone through his tent and he was not there. I went into a three-day period of hysterics. I was treated with such kindness by the guys that I worked with, who were all totally aware of why I had gone hysterical. It wasn't because we were bombed. It was because my boyfriend had been killed. And one guy in the tent came up to me, and said, ‘Why didn't you tell me you were gay? You could have talked to me.' I said, ‘Well, I was afraid to.' This big, straight, macho guy. There was a sort of compassion then.”

On another occasion, Small witnessed an injured lieutenant being evacuated from the Philippines. The men “all went to the plane to see him off that night. It was an amazingly touching moment when he and his lover said good-bye because they embraced and kissed in front of all these straight guys and everyone dealt with it so well.” It was “a little distilled moment out of time” when the men's prejudices were suspended and gay soldiers “could be a part of what this meant.”

FOR THOSE WHO
failed their physicals for the regular army but remained eager to participate in the war, the American Field Service provided an attractive alternative. Stephen Reynolds, who flunked his vision test, first learned about the Field Service through an article in
Life
magazine, which described its role as a volunteer ambulance corps for the Allies.

“I got in my car and I went down to the Ritz Hotel in Boston. Fortified by three martinis, I went into the lobby and dialed the State Department. Eventually I got a woman on the phone and I told her I wanted to inquire about the American Field Service. She said, ‘Where are you calling from?' and I said, ‘I'm calling from Boston.' She said, ‘Where are you?' And I said, ‘I am in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel.' And she said, ‘Well, I come from Boston. Go out of the lobby, turn right, and about four houses down you'll find the AFS office.' It was three minutes from the Ritz. So I walked over, lurched up some stairs, and found an old man with a pad in front of him who asked my name. It turned out that he was a great friend of my father, so my application was accepted.”

Many volunteers purchased their own ambulances: front-wheel-drive
Chevrolets, which were indispensable equipment in the Egyptian desert. “The British army didn't have front-wheel drive. And they were crossing the desert. And they got stuck.”