(Yes, it's another post about my POW obsession. I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone but me and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
halotolerant, but I do think that the POW experience and the Second World War in general are important and very very neglected topics in queer history.)
One of the frustrating things about the few existing histories of POW life during the Second World War is their almost-universal tendency to ignore or outright deny that POWs ever had sexual or romantic relationships with each other. There was no privacy in the camps, these books say. The prisoners were too hungry to think about sex. Homosexuality was too widely disapproved of for such things to be happening.
Sometimes these histories support their claims with, typically, excerpts from published or otherwise "official" POW memoirs. Considering that sex between men was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967, and in most of the U.S. for much longer, and also considering the heavy social stigma, these memoirists would have every reason to deny POW homosexuality (a fact not taken into account in any secondary history I've seen). Furthermore, a lot of the history books are contradictory, on the one hand quoting POW sources (such as chaplains) fretting about the prevalence of homosexuality, then claiming its extreme rarity on the other.
And every single history that I've seen has ignored primary-source evidence that male-male sex (sometimes pseudo-heterosexual with one man adopting a "female" social and sexual role, but oftentimes not)1 was widespread. And this evidence isn't hidden: Paul Fussell, in the context of a general book about soldiers' attitudes, beliefs, social lives, etc. during the Second World War, quotes from a published book about the Bataan Death March and Japanese-run POW camps, which mentions that male-male relationships were so common that one of the camp doctors set up a "marital relations clinic" to help prevent domestic problems.
And then there's Gordon Westwood's Society and the Homosexual, published in 1952, which includes a whole (short) chapter focusing mostly on POW homosexuality. It's based on interviews with ex-POWs, and Westwood argues strongly and I think convincingly that most men who were POWs for any substantial length of time had sex with other POWs at some point, often eventually having many sexual partners and/or forming loving relationships.
Since Westwood's book is little known and hard to get hold of (thanks heavens for Interlibrary Loan!), I've typed up most of the chapter to share. It's under the cut.
( click here to read; includes a rather wonderful love story )
halotolerant, but I do think that the POW experience and the Second World War in general are important and very very neglected topics in queer history.)One of the frustrating things about the few existing histories of POW life during the Second World War is their almost-universal tendency to ignore or outright deny that POWs ever had sexual or romantic relationships with each other. There was no privacy in the camps, these books say. The prisoners were too hungry to think about sex. Homosexuality was too widely disapproved of for such things to be happening.
Sometimes these histories support their claims with, typically, excerpts from published or otherwise "official" POW memoirs. Considering that sex between men was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967, and in most of the U.S. for much longer, and also considering the heavy social stigma, these memoirists would have every reason to deny POW homosexuality (a fact not taken into account in any secondary history I've seen). Furthermore, a lot of the history books are contradictory, on the one hand quoting POW sources (such as chaplains) fretting about the prevalence of homosexuality, then claiming its extreme rarity on the other.
And every single history that I've seen has ignored primary-source evidence that male-male sex (sometimes pseudo-heterosexual with one man adopting a "female" social and sexual role, but oftentimes not)1 was widespread. And this evidence isn't hidden: Paul Fussell, in the context of a general book about soldiers' attitudes, beliefs, social lives, etc. during the Second World War, quotes from a published book about the Bataan Death March and Japanese-run POW camps, which mentions that male-male relationships were so common that one of the camp doctors set up a "marital relations clinic" to help prevent domestic problems.
And then there's Gordon Westwood's Society and the Homosexual, published in 1952, which includes a whole (short) chapter focusing mostly on POW homosexuality. It's based on interviews with ex-POWs, and Westwood argues strongly and I think convincingly that most men who were POWs for any substantial length of time had sex with other POWs at some point, often eventually having many sexual partners and/or forming loving relationships.
Since Westwood's book is little known and hard to get hold of (thanks heavens for Interlibrary Loan!), I've typed up most of the chapter to share. It's under the cut.
( click here to read; includes a rather wonderful love story )
