José Torrealba | Open Secrets / 2004 [documentary]

gay men living in a world of all men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Jackson, José Torrealba, and Shelley Tepperman (writers), José Torrealba (director) Open Secrets / 2004 [documentary]

 

Narrating his own film based on the book by Paul Jackson Courting Homosexuals in the Military, Venezuelan-born Canadian filmmaker José Torrealba documents the active roles played on homosexuals in the Canadian Armed Forces during and after World War II.

      Interviewing five former World War II veterans, Bert Sutcliffe (Regimental Sergeant-Major), Ralph Wormraleigh (Sergeant), Henri Di Piero (Lieutenant), Bob Grimson (Flying Officer), and Bill Dunstan (Private, Performer), this documentary basically confirms and extends what has been discussed and observed in numerous other such documentaries about both male and female service people in the US military in films about which I have already written.

      Like those other works, this suggests that in the beginning of the War as thousands of willing and pressured young men volunteered and were suddenly thrown together in military bases, the military had no policies regarding homosexuality. After all, several of the interviewees point out, homosexuality was never publicly discussed and all young military men were by decree labeled as good heterosexual boys wanting to serve their country despite the great possibility of death.

     Moreover, most of these men, several from small towns, did not even think of themselves as being “gay,” a term in those days not in common use, let alone homosexual. Many had dated girls back home even if they had felt other sexual urges, and presumed they would some day marry. Now thrown together with hundreds of other males, many of whom, particularly from the larger cities who were actively homosexual and other males who had promised their wives not to engage in sex with other women, felt perfectly at ease in engaging in male-on-male sex. Several others, perhaps bisexual, simply enjoyed sex. And the country boys such as Bert Sutcliffe simply found themselves happier among the male company without any longer having to deal with female relationships.

     Some begin what they described as deep male friendships, male bonding that included holding hands at night with the person in the next bunk or even occasional mutual masturbation without necessarily imagining it represented any great abnormality. As long as they were discrete, other soldiers in the platoons and battalions overlooked such behavior.

      Others were actively engaging in sex, Bob Grimson describing how he met a gay man who basically mentored him into gay life, taking him to gay bars and even a “bawdy house” for males only, in which while waiting for your room, you could pay to look into peep holes to watch the others engaged in sex. Naples had a notorious bar, the Mama bar, in which men performed sometimes in the open.

       For the early days of World War II, indeed, when soldiers weren’t engaged in their daily dirty, deadly, and degrading daily duties, no one seemed to resent the differences of those who sought ought sex with one another. Soldiers grew to realize they all had to work together in order to survive, and those few who were outed and discharged were usually charged by people outside their units.

      Yet military officers soon realized they had a major problem on their hands which they couldn’t identify to the world in general, particularly if they wanted to keep the myth that their young men were all good, patriotic straight boys working for God and their country. Increasingly the military police begin to spy on noted gay spots, and the military itself, writing up a new code of military decorum used the dreaded court-martial proceedings, designed to humiliate the suspected or actual acts of homosexual behavior by describing them in detail while still defining them only as “improper and indecent conduct.” Grimson himself was asked to serve as one of the judges and made to feel that he had no choice but to agree with the higher offices with whom he as serving if he wanted to protect his own life. Besides, as written into the military code, it was improper conduct, he insists.

     The military itself had been assured by the medical community that homosexuality was a disease and that it was dangerous for gay men to be in daily contact with heterosexuals who might be swayed psychologically to explore the perverted sexual world of homosexuality.

     Asked about the hypocrisy of his position when he himself was engaged in such improper conduct, he hedged by simply responding that when he was having gay sex he did not think about the military code, obviously able through discretion and mental compartmentalization to escape the moral implications of his actions.

     Others, like the beautiful young Bill Dunston, who had been a talented singer, was asked to join the entertainment corps. Since his face was so femininely beautiful, he was asked to dress in drag and perform in shows that delighted the soldiers. Indeed, he and another soldier in drag became quite famous for their drag routines and falsetto singing. His friend became a noted drag queen after the war, but ironically, Dunston is the only one of the five men interviewed who was actually straight and has been married to a woman for decades since the war.

    The second half of the film is devoted to the real service of men such as Sutcliffe, who remained in the military after the war and in 1962 was about to be promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and stationed in the pentagon when he made the mistake of visiting a bathroom in Ottawa and approaching a man hovering in the back seeming to look for sex. He was arrested, visited by brigadier generals and kicked out of the military the next day, told to go back to his apartment.

     As with so many of the men shamed, they had no way in those days of finding other employment. And, as Sutcliffe describes it, how was he to tell his brother and sister why he had left the military. “I was desiccated. The military had been my life.” He takes out a luger, contemplating suicide before he realizes that do so would merely condescend to the ridiculousness of military logic. He had already proven his worthiness despite his sexual differences with their code.

     Perhaps Di Piero tells one of the saddest stories in the film. Having taken over Germany, the unit to which he was attached was assigned to go to Dachau and gather up the dying, skeletal bodies of Jewish men and women left behind. But the Germans had booby-trapped to bodies to explode when touched. To move the bodies was to die. The skeletal remaining survivors argued that they would remove the bodies since they already felt sentenced to death. Di Piero breaks down in tears with the horrific memories of what happened and which now some people doubt. He grows angry. I was there and I saw it happen, he argues.

     Once the bomb had been dropped, most soldiers were told to go home and wait for further orders. Di Piero returns to a different Montreal, deciding to visit the Mount Royal Hotel, rumored for its cruising bar. There he met a young Air Force man. They sat down on a settee and began to talk and suddenly were arrested by military police.

     Di Piero was charged with “suspected” homosexuality and sent to a psychiatrist which only made things worse since he argued the young Lieutenant be discharged. I was discharged “on suspicion” of being a homosexual, not even for actually being one, he angrily observes. I was thrown out of the army after four years of good service.

      Later Di Piero came to teach at McGill university where he had heard a former young lover had become a student. When he asked about the boy he knew and had fallen in love with at age 26, he was told that, tired of being labeled a gay man, the young lover had taken his motorcycle into a garage and asphyxiated himself to death on its fumes. Finally broken, Di Piero left Canada to move to England where he remains today.

     The horrible tales of sexual discrimination this film tells finally came to an apparent end in 1992 when Michele Douglas sued the Canadian military for sexual discrimination based on sexual orientation and won, the military establishment being forced to change its policies. But Torrealba wonders how much things have actually changed in people’s minds. At a recent military celebration in Ottawa, Canada’s Governor General paused to consider who Canada’s unknown soldier might actually have been. “She mentioned race, profession, and all kinds of personal traits. But what she did not say was, ‘And he may have been gay.’”

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).