living lies
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur Dong (screenplay, based on Allen
Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World
War II, and director) Coming Out Under Fire / 1994
Coming Out Under Fire, Arthur Dong’s fascinating and often horrifying documentary about
being a gay or lesbian while serving in the military in World War II (based on
Allen Bérubé’s book Coming Out Under Fire: The
History of Gay Men and Women in World War II) begins in a time long
after that war, with President Bill Clinton still arguing in 1993 for a
continuation “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to be the policy under which soldiers
under fire had long been asked to live. The film continues with the rather
shocking, if not surprising, agreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all males
and over 50, responding to Indiana Republican senator Daniel Coats’ question,
each repeating that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.”
As
one of the major voices in this film, Radio Technician in the Women’s Army
Corps, Phyllis Abry, a lesbian who served as a WAC during World War II,
suggests in a follow up to that clip, it was a catch-22: “The only way you
could get in [to the military] was to lie. The only way you could stay in was
to lie. Man or woman. It was not tolerated. So, they made you live a double
life.”
Marvin Liebman, a WWII member of the Special Services, U.S. Army Air
Corps continues “The Army. the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the United States
Government wants its citizens to be liars. And to be unaccepting of themselves
rather than say gay or homosexual [they wanted you to] be invisible, shut up.”
A
scroll down of words restates the major presumptions with which these men and women
were faced from World War II and lays out the concerns of Dong’s documentary.
Beginning in World War II the military developed a discriminatory
system that forced homosexuals to hide who they were and punished
them for telling the truth.
Over the years, the military has given different reasons for treating
homosexuals as if they were a separate group.
At first they were labelled criminals, then mentally ill, then security
risks, and in 1993 they were considered threats to unit cohesion.
Underlying these shifting rationales was an unchallenged contempt
for homosexuals and a belief that they contaminated society with their
very presence.
So the film turns its attention to the early days of World War II. After
the events in Europe and Pearl Harbor nearly everyone, we are reminded, wanted
to enlist in order to demonstrate their patriotism. The issues that Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy and then the warrior culture of Japan had put forward
were so obviously opposed to any idea of democracy that it was difficult for
anyone with a conscience to not want to serve. And the military suddenly needed
a vast number of men and women to join up, young people which included gay men
and lesbians and numerous others often still too young to have truly perceived
their own sexuality.
New guidelines had already been established that homosexuals were among
the mentally ill, psychologists suggesting that all recruits be asked whether
or not they were homosexual. This clearly put all the loyal young volunteers in
a double bind: pass as heterosexual or be sent back home officially labeled as
a “sex pervert.”
Even more frightening were the stated Articles of War punitive charges
which included “fraudulent Enlistment” and the notorious Article 93 which
listed sodomy—defined by the military as “sexual connection by rectum or by
mouth by a man with a human being”—both of which were punishable by
dishonorable discharge and confinement to hard labor at a US Penitentiary for
five years. Young gay men in the prime of their life, unlike their
straight counterparts who were basically expected to and even encouraged to
seek out sex with local prostitutes in brothels, engaged in sexual activities
recognized as being what today we perceive as a natural act might lead them to
criminal punishment and problems of finding employment for the rest of their
lives.
For
gay black men such as the one interviewed in Dong’s film who served in the
“Colored Units,” being black and gay was a “double whammy,” both seen as
detrimental in the military, the one obvious but the other kept hidden. You had
to learn how to evade attention, he laments.

Lesbianism was not explicitly illegal but
was strongly frowned upon, even though some more openly “butch-like” women were
promoted for seeming to be more compatible with military leadership. Many of
the young girls who joined the various branches of service were raised rather
conservatively without even imagining lesbian activity. But as Sarah Davis,
Aviation Machinist Mate of the WAVES suggests, suddenly being surrounded by so
many women for the first time brought out hitherto unimagined desires,
particularly since contact with males was often difficult and took place for
relatively brief intervals. She found a lover who after the war appeared to
been unfazed by their intense war-time relationship, leaving her behind,
confused and suspicious of relationships for the rest of her life.
When Abry left the military she married a man with whom she lived
happily for several years before rediscovering her sexual preference.
Yet despite all of the immediate conflicts the military structure had
set up, many young men and women, surrounded by their own sex in numbers of
individuals larger than their own home communities suddenly discovered numerous
gay men in their midst. As Dr. Herbert Greenspan, Psychiatrist in the U. S.
Navy recalls, everyone new that many in our unit were gay, that I was and so
was the Captain to whom I reported.
Others describe finding numerous gay friends who kept apart from the
straight boys, often using a kind of coded language based on rhyming words and
phrases from writers such as Dorothy Parker. Some of them even began
underground newspapers, using the company mimeo machines and paper to create
gay-lingo news journals such as The Myrtle Beach Bitch and The
Bitches Camouflage.
Gay military men wrote numerous letters to others using the so-called
Parker-parlance, calling everyone “Darling” and writing witty bon mots
about the bad food and group morale.
Still others served important roles as drag performers in chorus lines,
singers, and dancers in camp shows, as one of the famous military drag queens
who performed under the name of “Madame Latrine” recounts, allowing the
soldiers in a time before the Bob Hope and other regular entertainers of the
troops a chance to laugh and find pleasure. He argues that they too lugged
their guns about, but dressed in drag. He remembers looking out at all those
young men and wondering “which ones would be dead tomorrow. Some of them had to
die. That was what war was all about.”
Even popular cultural works such as the musical South Pacific represent
that aspect of military life through the character of Luther Billis whose gay
sexuality I discuss in connection with the 1958 movie version. Moreover, we
mustn’t forget the importance of the all-male military drag performance of
World War I in Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937).
A couple of interviewees such as the U.S. Navy camp storekeeper David
Barrett describe the openness of being gay during the first part of World War
II, when everybody knew you were gay and employed that fact for their amusement
and a kind of comic protection. One recalled approaching corporals in new units
who looked them up and down, saying in slightly campy voice, “Well, who do we
have here?” Others asked to be reassigned to units in which they knew were gay
officers or other gay friends.

All claim to have been good soldiers and recognized their fellow queers
as good soldiers as well. Moreover, even many so-called “straight” men were
often willing to explore gay and lesbian sex. Being young and exploring new
worlds was only natural, and traveling to places which they might have never
previously even imagined as existing, they were willing to try out new
experiences. I have always held a long-time suspicion that someone might have
attempted to explore gay sex with my very handsome, straight-arrow father,
which might explain his homophobia with regard to his son’s homosexuality later
in his life.
Some young men, not unlike my father, began showing up to camp
psychiatrists such as Stuart Loomis, Psychological Assistant in the U. S. Army,
confused by their new sexual feelings or concerned about having to encountered
homosexuals in their units. Loomis likens it to a sense of “panic” engulfing
them. As a gay officer himself he could help the patients he saw, but other
so-called professionals had little experience with counseling such young men.
And the military officials were themselves increasingly unsure of how to
deal with what they saw to be an increasingly openness to both male and female
same-sex relationships. There was currently only one way to get rid of a gay
soldier, charge him with sodomy; then he could be court-marshalled and
sentenced to prison. Commanding officers claimed that the system was too
cumbersome, while psychiatrists argued that it was inhumane and archaic to
imprison individuals who they saw to be “mentally ill.” And since women could
not be convicted of sodomy there was no way of dealing with lesbianism among
the ranks.
By the middle of the war authorities proffered a solution: diagnose them
as psychopaths. Or charge them with sodomy and quickly dispose of them as
“undesirables.” The more “efficient system,” as the film’s narrator (Salome
Jens) describes it, brought new purges upon many of the companies. Indeed the
creators of the gay newspapers whose stencils they found among the trash were
denounced as gay. Barrett, the writers of Parker-parlance whose letters had
crossed the desks of the censors, and even the black soldier trying to avoid
the spotlight were rounded up. Many gay men were put in special holding cells
not unlike mental wards of hospitals or gathered in what others called gay
stockades.
As in the later McCarthy hearings, they were asked to admit to their
crimes and name names of their gay compatriots. When they were finally released
as “undesirables” they were forced to return home to face families who were
embarrassed and hostile, sometimes rejecting their young sons and daughters.
Jobs were difficult to obtain.
Arby eventually discovered that her lover had been asked to report
“suspicious behavior” to her superiors—although apparently she never found any
to report. But many of these survivors talk about their treatment causing them
to themselves be suspicious of others and prone to hiding their own sexualities
for the rest of their lives. These maimed men and women were among the many who
suffered from their war-time encounters, but in this case had no entry to a Veteran
Hospital to diagnose their psychological wounds.
In the time since the end of the war and the release of film these
problems had not improved for LGB men and women, not to even speak of even
greater difficulties facing transsexuals. The number of homosexuals discharged
since World War II eventually reached over 100,000.
Looking back, given the context that Dong’s and Bérubé’s works provide
us, we can now easily recognize that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a brutal
policy that demanded the patriot lie not only to their friends and military
superiors but to themselves. Such logic represents the hostility of a culture
still not able to embrace queer life.
During the 1990s hearings Jack Warner, Republican Senator from West
Virginia asked, “Is it too much to ask that you just serve honorably and
quietly and efficiently and not profess?”
Margarethe Cammermeyer, former Colonel and Chief Nurse of the Washington
National Guard, attempts to answer: “As long as there isn’t the regulation that
gives someone the opportunity to threaten me with ‘I think you’re a lesbian and
I’m going to ruin your career.’ As long as the regulation is there it says that
no matter if we are totally closeted for the duration that means that someone
has the power to use that threat.”
“You feel that intensely and patriotic that you want to serve then give
up a little something.”
“We
have, sir.”
“Give up the right to actively profess your sexuality among your fellow
soldiers, then we’ll let you serve quietly and patriotically in every other
way.”
But obviously giving up one of the most important elements of what
defines a human being is to give up being itself, to deny what it is that one
is bringing to the service in the first place, a thinking and loving woman or
man. To remain silent is the same as not existing, as denying your identity.
I
am sure, given my own feelings about the issues at 17 that, had I been born a
generation earlier, I too might have volunteered to serve in World War II, at
an age when I was still not sure about my sexuality. I probably would have
realized I was gay a year later, at the age when I really did, and might have
been court-martialed or even imprisoned, my future destroyed.
I
have mixed feelings, nonetheless, about the new and needed changes in military
regulations, particularly when it involves induction by draft.
At
age 23—soon after I met my husband Howard, with whom, as of today, I have now
lived for 51 years—when I was called for the draft for the Vietnam War, a war I
adamantly opposed, I was terrified that they might not recognize me as being
“undesirable.” After a full physical checkup and a battery of forms to fill
out, they asked for anyone who thought they might be gay or have other
psychological problems to move on to the induction center psychiatrist.
I’d long heard that psychiatrists had become quite skeptical about
anyone claiming homosexuality given the unpopularity of that war. Some rumored
they demanded rectal tests or
the “Gag Reflex and Fellatio Test” and
“Drawing-a-Man Test” which had been required for some volunteering in World War
II—all of which I might have failed. I like masculine-looking men, I have
always had an immediate gag reflex (just ask my dentist), and, although I had
certainly had anal sex I believe that my rectum had not terribly stretched
since I was neither exclusively, as gays sometimes describe it, “a top” or a
“bottom.” I was shaking as I approached the psychiatrist’s desk.
“Why did you choose to see me?” he asked.
“I’m gay,” I assertively claimed, “and I’m in a relationship.”
I
think he looked at me for a moment and quickly stamped my form 4-F, “deemed
unfit for military service.” And although I breathed a great sigh of relief
even then I knew it was also a lie.
Los Angeles, February 4, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (February 2021).