"he had longed to kiss me for weeks and weeks"

[kindkit]

(Yes, it's another post about my POW obsession. I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone but me and 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.



The chapter comes from Westwood's section on the "causes of homosexuality," and is entitled "All-Male Environment." Despite the broad title, it's almost entirely focused on POWs. I'm quoting from pages 51-55 of the American edition, published by E. P. Dutton in 1953. Apologies to people on LJ, who will see the entire blockquote in italics; you can always click the link at the bottom to read it correctly formatted on DW!

The experiences of prisoners of war in Germany and Japan are interesting because these camps contained men from every walk of life and of every conceivable temperament.

Case VIII. This history of one young prisoner of war will serve to illustrate how abnormal the situation can get. This man was a good-looking airman of 21 who was a practising homosexual before he was captured. With the same incredible ingenuity which other prisoners of war used for more praiseworthy ends, he made up a complex female attire for himself and even manufactured some exotic scent which he spread all over his body. He grew his hair long and walked and talked like a woman. His one object was to arouse erotic excitement in his fellow prisoners and he was extremely successful. Although food was very scarce he lived well and was never short of anything. The record of his daily sexual extravagances do him no credit, but the variety and number of his partners indicate that many prisoners of war were having overt homosexual experiences.

The histories of these prisoners can be classified into three stages. One group were having no homosexual contacts as far as was known. This group formed quite a small minority where the men had been imprisoned for two years or more. A second group consisted of those who were having secret 'affairs', but owing to the lack of privacy in camps of this sort, the secret was usually discovered before very long. Many of this group were outwardly hostile to all forms of homosexuality until they were discovered. Then there were those who openly admitted having overt homosexual experiences and made advances to other prisoners. Long term prisoners tended to pass through all three stages.

From the point of view of society, a temporary deviation when the individual is denied the normal conditions of that society cannot be considered to be very important. But now we must consider whether the homosexual experiences of these men in camps, ships, hostels and other all-male communities will have any permanent effect. If they revert to normal behaviour as soon as the situation becomes normal, there is little to worry about. But if the homosexual influence is found to have a lasting effect, it can become an important cause in the spread of homosexuality.

In this connection it is worth reporting the results of an experiment that Jenkins carried out with rats. He discovered that if the rats were kept apart and the male rats had no opportunity to contact the female rats, then after some time homosexual activities would begin. As the length of time that they were kept apart was increased, so the amount of homosexual behaviour increased. When this behaviour was well established he put back the females among the males but they showed little heterosexual interest and were not attracted to the females. The number of those which remained homosexual and the number of those that regained their heterosexuality was strictly dependent upon the length of time they had been kept away from the females. The longer the segregation the greater the number of rats which showed diminished heterosexuality on mixing with the females.

Any generalization of these results can only be applied to human animals with extreme caution. Nevertheless there are a number of cases where the individual has been unable to revert to heterosexual interests.

Case IX. D_____ was a prisoner of war for over four years. He was an intelligent man, a research chemist in civilian life and an officer in the R.A.F. He had a brief homosexual experience at school but was not troubled by it later. He married before he joined the Service and enjoyed heterosexual relations. Fairly soon after his capture he experienced homosexual stirrings but resisted any overt expression for over a year. Eventually he formed an association with another prisoner and before his release he had a number of partners. He returned to his wife but continued with his overt homosexuality. Two years ago his wife divorced him and now, at the age of 38, he is living with another man and engaging in regular homosexuality.

There were other cases of individuals who had shown only weak tendencies in youth and as a result of their war experiences are now completely homosexual. There are also a few cases of individuals who can remember no homosexual impulses during adolescence, but who, nevertheless, have failed to revert to heterosexuality. These are probably examples of a latent tendency which may not have been aroused in more favourable circumstances. This situation is illustrated in the next history.

Case X. G_____ was an R.A.F. officer aged 24 years by the time he was released, but he had a babyish face and could easily have been taken for 19 or 20. He was 21 at the time he was captured and without any homosexual experience.

"I cannot remember when I found out that some men were physically attracted to me but I know that long before the Jerries caught me, I had a lot of advances made to me and I had learnt how to take care of myself. At first I used to feel angry with these people who would try to get off with me, but after a time I grew more tolerant and just used to feel sorry for them. I was at six different Stalags in my first eight weeks of captivity and everywhere I went I received plenty of offers--from the German guards as well. But I just couldn't see it and even after I had been in the camp for over a year, I still didn't want anything to do with it. I masturbated a bit, but I always thought of girls at home when I did . . .

"Most of the time I knocked around with Jack. He was about two years older than me, easy to get along with and we seemed to have a lot in common. We had be friends for quite a few weeks when one day I found myself watching Jack as he dozed on his bunk. I seemed to notice for the first time what strong muscular legs he had and what a fine smooth athletic body. I shocked myself with these thoughts because I swear it was the first time I had thought of Jack in that way. I kept trying to get those thoughts out of my mind. Just to prove to myself that I wasn't going queer, I spent half that night trying to get up a bit of excitement about a girl at home I used to be very fond of. It didn't work. From then on I could hardly bear to let Jack out of my sight and yet as soon as I saw him I cursed myself for thinking about him in that way. I even picked a quarrel with him so that he wouldn't tempt me by being near to me. But it was no good. I came to realize that I was in love with him, and that was that. I used to cry in bed at night, partly because I was angry with myself for letting this thing get the better of me after resisting so many temptations, and partly because it seemed such a hopeless kind of love anyway.

"I did my best to hide these thoughts from Jack. I was still ashamed of them and I thought it would break up our friendship. Then one day we were nailing something on to the wall when his cheek touched mine. A lot of other boys used to creep up on me and do something like that, but not Jack. I didn't back away as I usually did, but stood still. I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. I was trembling from head to foot. Slowly his turned his face round until our lips met.

"He told me he had longed to kiss me for weeks and weeks but he hadn't dared to try. I suppose I had got quite a reputation as an untouchable by that time. We kissed a lot of times after that and sometimes we did a bit more--nothing awful, you know what I mean. It wasn't just a way of relieving ourselves as it seemed to be with most of the others. I can't really explain it. All I can say is that I have never seen a girl and boy who love each other more than we do.

"What's going to happen now? I don't know. I don't think I can ever love a woman again. Perhaps I ought to try, but frankly I want to go back to Jack. And yet I want a family, children and all that sort of thing. And Jack is clever; I don't want to make a mess of his life. I don't know what I am going to do."

This history, like most of the others, was obtained at a Prisoner of War Rehabilitation Centre. The last that was heard of G____ was that he had gone back to his friend and they were sharing a flat together.

Of course there were many who were successful in reverting to heterosexuality. It seems to depend partly upon the strength of the tendencies acquired in early childhood. It is well known that there is usually a certain amount of homosexual activity aboard a ship during long voyages into foreign waters, but the heterosexual activities of sailors when they return to port are even better known.

And on that rather odd note the chapter ends. I swear, I wanted to cheer when I got to Westwood's helpful addendum that G_____ went back to his Jack. I hope they lived happily ever after. Incidentally, Westwood, despite his pathologizing vocabulary, was himself a gay man and became a very important gay activist; I've posted here about his later, post-Wolfenden Report book A Minority.

I don't know if the problem is with military history, or "popular" history written for the general audience, or both, but I'm very interested in how strongly books about POWs are invested in a heteronormative discourse that erases, indeed seems to deliberately erase, queerness. Actually now that I think about it, it may be military history in general, because the academic essays in Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War do the same thing. One favorite (not) moment for me was when Oliver Wilkinson, in "Captivity in Print: The Form and Function of POW Camp Magazines," asserts that the (First World War era) camps' female impersonators, and camp magazines' paeans to them (including description of their beauty and charm, and the impersonators' female personas appearing as women in POW-written fiction) "should . . . be interpreted as providing a conventional image of women in the camps and, by doing so, they reaffirmed traditional gender relations and heterosexual masculinity behind the wire" (236-37). Um, no, I don't think so. Something's going on there that's incredibly complicated, and I don't think it would be accurate to label it as "homosexuality," but it's certainly not conventional heterosexuality either, not when gender has become an explicit social fiction, ostensibly detached from sexed bodies but with socially-feminized bodies becoming an allowable locus of desire. There's queering happening, queering of gender and of desire, and I'd love to see a nuanced study of female impersonation in POW camps.

If I were still an academic, and thus had access to sources, I would be all over the topic of queer POWs. Even though it's about 400 years after that period I was trained in, and in any case I trained in literature rather than history. But someone's got to do it!

*contemplates, with much trepidation, the prospect of writing the dreaded Original Fiction about it instead*

Oh, and on a frivolous concluding note, reading Westwood tempts me to say that we've finally found the one thing war is good for: it makes queer people!


¹It's also, of course, quite likely that some of the people who feminized their appearance and behavior while POWs were in fact transgender women.

Comments

[surexit]

This is a really interesting post! And I am happy for Jack and G.

[kindkit]

Thinking about Jack and G. (George? Gerald? Geoffrey?) makes me absurdly happy.

[starlady]

I read these posts with great interest! You clearly know so much more than I do about it, though, so I am mostly just siting here reading along and nodding.

One question: We just watched Coming Out Under Fire in the class I am grading for. Did the UK armed forces have the same screening/dishonorable discharge policies towards gay service members as the US did?

[kindkit]

The UK situation, based on what I can gather from various accounts including "'The Good Fellow': Negotiation, Remembrance, and Recollection--Homosexuality in the British Armed Forced , 1939-45" (by Emma Vickers, published in Brutality and Desire, ed. Dagmar Herzog, Palgrave 2009), was even more complicated than in the U.S. Sex between men was against military regulations (sex between women wasn't, just as it wasn't illegal, although some women were dismissed from the service for lesbianism), but as in the US during WWII there was a lot of tolerance, based largely on the desperate need to use all available labor but also on factors like whether someone was seen as a good soldier and whether they were well liked in and protected by their unit. Unlike in the US, there doesn't seem to have been the same huge witch hunt at the end of the war. Perhaps--and this is purely me speculating--one factor there is that British military personnel had no GI Bill, and thus no expensive package of benefits that military administrators might want to take away from them via dishonorable discharge. There were 790 Army court martials of "other ranks" (i.e. non-officers; Vickers doesn't provide figures for army officers or the other services because there aren't any official figures) for homosexuality during the Second World War, an extremely small number considering there were 6.5 million people in the combined UK armed forces during that period. In contrast the army court-martialled almost 14,000 men for losing Army property by neglect. So it doesn't seem to have been any kind of priority. In Britain the really bad period for anti-gay persecution got started later, after the defection of Guy Burgess (who was gay) and Donald Maclean to the Soviets in 1951. US intelligence started putting pressure on British intelligence and the British government to purge gay people, plus there was a lot of ugly media coverage and an ensuing moral panic.

Military regulations actually sparked the prosecution of Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu, and Michael Pitt-Rivers for homosexual offenses in 1954. Wildeblood's lover Edward McNally was in the RAF, and letters Wildeblood had sent to him were discovered, at which point RAF military police bullied him and another man into testifying against Wildeblood, Montagu, and Pitt-Rivers in exchange for immunity.

Even after decriminalization in Britain in 1967, gay sex was still against British military regulations until 2000.

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[starlady]

Only three years before it was fully decriminalized in the States.

*nods* Thank you. My impression from the documentary was that the military purge and persecution that started mid-war really didn't let up thereafter until the 1960s. What we've been learning about the 1950s further confirms that.

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[kindkit]

The 1950s seem to have been a horrible time. It always amazes me that people are nostalgic for that period.

Cruising in from my network...

[rembrandtswife]

Am I the only person who thought that G_ and Jack's story sounded like about fifty John/Sherlock stories they'd read? (Or, for that matter, John/Rodney, Jim/Blair, etc. etc. etc.)

Slash fanfic: More realistic than you think.

(Criminal acts until 1967. Jesus wept, I was a year old before it ended.)

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[jesse_the_k]

|o That's me raising my hand. Word for word!

I would so love to read that original fiction!

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[kindkit]

*grins* Thank you! When I started seriously thinking about it, I immediately got bogged down in the question of whether the main characters should be officers or "other ranks." But I need to just be bolder and get on with it.

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[naraht]

Or one of each, like The Charioteer. ;)

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[kindkit]

On my most recent Charioteer re-reading, I was surprised that there wasn't more about the potential problems created by the disparity in their ranks. Of course it helps that they're in different services, but a naval lieutenant and an army corporal socializing together in public seems like it would have attracted some notice. There were a few mentions, like Reg's rather baffled remarks about "your officer friend" and the boy's disbelief that Laurie could know someone who'd commanded a ship, but not very much.

POW camps were generally segregated, either with officers and other ranks in different camps or, if in the same camp (as in the Luftwaffe's camps for air force prisoners), in segregated compounds. So it would be difficult for an officer and a non-officer to meet, let alone have a relationship, unless the partner who wasn't an officer was someone's batman or an orderly or something. And I tend to shy away from the possibility anyway, partly because it opens so many cans of worms about power and class and potential exploitation, partly because I feel like the pairing of a middle or upper-class man with a working-class man is so bog-standard in queer stories written during or about the era as to be almost a cliché. Then too, those relationships seem to have been often a kind of lightly disguised prostitution, with the less powerful and often younger man giving sex in exchange for favors. And I want to write about love, because I am secretly an incorrigible romantic.

/long answer to a short comment!

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[naraht]

I completely lost track of this very interesting reply; apologies for the unconscionably late comment.

It is indeed interesting that the rank differential doesn't cause more notice--apart from the amusing assumption at the party that Laurie is actually a rent boy! I suppose Laurie is so self-conscious about his queerness and (to a lesser extent) his disability that his rank doesn't register with him as much. Also his accent would be apparent to anyone who spoke with them, so I suppose the question would be more "why is that chap a corporal?" rather than "why are those two friends?"

I've idly been mulling over the idea of writing a Charioteer AU where Ralph and Laurie are both in a POW camp, so the impact of differences in rank and service has become clearer to me recently. I'd thought of having Laurie be an orderly/batman at Colditz, which would have at least been possible, but apparently the relationship between officers and orderlies at Colditz was particularly fraught, to the extent of breaking down completely. So if I did write it, it would be almost All About Class. Not that this would necessarily be a bad thing?

I do take your point about the cross-class relationship being such a cliche, and rather problematic as well. (I'm looking at you, Forster.) So I think you're making the right decision, and belated thanks for taking my rather flip comment as an opportunity to explain!

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[jesse_the_k]

You wish for arbitrary constraints? I can reliably issue the results of binary or hexagonal or dodecahedral dice.

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[kindkit]

I think on this issue I need to make an actual deliberate choice. Leaving it up to chance is tempting, though!

Re: Cruising in from my network...

[kindkit]

I certainly noticed how slashy it was. This is one of the reasons I get irked when people claim that m/m slash "doesn't represent gay men's experience." There are lots of gay and bisexual men, with lots of different kinds of experiences that vary not only from individual to individual but across cultures and time periods (and within cultures and time periods due to factors like race and class), and just about any slash trope you want to pick, apart from MPREG, is going to be close to someone's experience.

There's a very good book called Between the Acts, which is oral histories of a number of gay men's lives from the First World War through decriminalization, and one of the things I like about it is how varied the lives recounted within it are.

[naraht]

Just want to say how fascinating I'm finding all of this, and that you have another keen reader of your researches.

I've found a few pages on POW homosexuality in The Barbed Wire University by Midge Gillies and another few in One of the Boys by Paul Jackson. I haven't read the former yet but the latter seems to be pulling against the line that male/male relationships in camps were uncommon or insignificant. If you haven't read either of these yet, would you like me to scan the relevant pages?

[kindkit]

halotolerant has read the Gillies book and wasn't impressed by its treatment of homosexuality; she said Gillies is very much in the chorus of deniers. One of the Boys, on the other hand, is clearly a book I need to read ASAP. Its focus is on Canada rather than Britain, but it still sounds very very useful for military life in general and for POWs. Thanks!

[naraht]

I am still slightly resenting this book for being about Canada, but yes, it does look very useful. :)

[kindkit]

Yes, I don't understand why there's no equivalent book about Britain, nor why no one has followed up Berubé's Coming Out Under Fire, which sorely needs a more scholarly and updated legacy, for the US.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I don't think my father mentioned anything of the sort in his memoir, though he did talk much more frankly about sexuality than I had expected him to. While he was in the city jail in Rangoon, he mentions that Burmese criminals were sometimes put in the same cells as POWs for a short period, including "prostitutes" -- I suppose they must have been male prostitutes, but he doesn't say one way or the other. The airmen (who were considered war criminals by the Japanese) were treated much worse than other prisoners and I suspect were indeed too badly off to engage in any sort of sexual relations much of the time.

"Back to life in the cells. This paragraph is about sex, and it will be short. We discovered that very nearly the first effect of a grossly inadequate diet, well before significant loss of weight or strength, is the total disappearance of one’s libido. The divine gift of lust, in the memorable phrase of Dr. Alex Comfort, goes out the window. After I had been in the Rangoon City Jail for about a week I had a wet dream, to my total amazement. The more formal phrase, nocturnal emission, is in this case also more appropriate, since no dream at all accompanied my involuntary orgasm. Young males, I am told, regularly have this experience if they are not having any sort of sexual activity, including the solitary kind. (I used to think that Mother Nature invented this phenomenon primarily to benefit Roman Catholic priests. Now that I read the papers more regularly I am not so sure.) In any case, this was the last vestige of my sexuality for about twenty months – no erections, no erotic yearnings, not even a tingle of desire. Thank God it was not permanent!"

"What did we do all day every day in our cells? With eight men in a 9x12 cell, it is possible to walk, and we did but only one of us at a time. What we mostly did of course was talk, obviously about a tremendous variety of subjects. The topics included the schools we had been to, our families, our intended future careers, the progress of the war, our hobbies and athletic activities, and cooking (a very major subject). Right up there with cooking as a favorite subject was sex, despite the fact that we had all been effectively neutered by our diet, as I indicated in the previous paragraph. We, mostly in our early twenties, had therefore been intensely interested in sex and continued to be academically interested in the erotic histories of each other. We talked about what we had done, what we wished we had done, and what we hoped to do."

From what I've read, other POWs were under rather different conditions and I don't think my father's evidence reduces the likelihood of anything you have said (even assuming 100% accuracy -- he says himself that after a time he was too ill to notice much, and his biases are of course those of the period). Well, except to say that loss of libido really may follow on extreme starvation, though of course I can't say whether it was as universal an effect as he claimed. I suspect details from stories like my father's were seized on so that people could gloss over events elsewhere.

[kindkit]

I'm sure a lot depended on conditions. Some Japanese camps (especially Changi) were much better than others in terms of food supplies and so on. There's also the fact that even in the most appalling conditions, some people simply thrive better than others--if they have the resources and the ruthlessness to trade, for example. So the level of starvation and consequent loss of libido is going to vary.

Even in concentration camps, where you'd expect sex would be the last thing on anybody's mind, there was both institutionalized (although strictly forbidden) homosexuality in which powerful male prisoners would offer protection and food to young, attractive men in exchange for sex, and also some heterosexuality in the form of camp brothels, which prisoners could get access to as a privilege for being "good workers." Jewish concentration camp inmates had no access to either, but the small minority of those (generally German or "Aryan") prisoners on the top of the prisoner hierarchy (kapos, those who worked as camp police or administrators, and so on) did.

POW memoirs do often seem to make the claim that the sex drive vanished; sometimes they explicitly cite that as a reason why there was little or no homosexuality. In some cases I'm sure it was competely true. In others, men may have felt uncomfortable talking about their sexual desires and sexual frustrations (including masturbation, the longing for heterosexual sex, and so on). Memoirists may not have wanted to talk about homosexuality in the camps because they saw it as ugly or disgraceful, best covered over. They may not have wanted their own sexuality impugned, whether or not they themselves engaged in sex with other men, and therefore omitted or denied that it ever happened. Basically, memoirists had every reason to deny or omit to discuss homosexuality in the camps, and no incentive to write about it. In those circumstances, I'm inclined to give more credence to accounts that do acknowledge and discuss it, because there's much less reason to invent stigmatized behavior than to deny it. I think it's significant, too, that the claims of widespread POW homosexuality seem to come from ex-POWs interviews with doctors and psychologists, where there's confidentiality and the discussion is outside the purview of the military hierarchy. The denying accounts, on the other hand, tend to be written either for publication, for the survivors' family and friends, or for official military records like the oral histories in the Imperial War Museum.

I hope I'm not being offensive here; I know this is personal to you in a way that it isn't for me. Everything your father wrote may have been the exact truth as he knew it. What I'm trying to do is explain my own thinking in general about the issue and about how to sort through contradictory evidence.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

You're not being at all offensive, and I quite understand. My impression is that on any sexual matters my father believed in either keeping your mouth shut or telling the truth. I don't believe he would have uttered a word about his libido (much less going into detail about not having erections) if he hadn't meant it. But he was certainly heterocentric (though less homophobic than average for men of his generation -- he was of the "it's their misfortune, not their fault" type) and he may well also have closed his eyes to stuff. Plus of course he was practicing dissociation anyway to deal with what he was going through.

It doesn't bother me at all to contemplate the possibility that he could have had a homosexual relationship at some point, in or out of wartime. I just haven't seen anything that makes it seem at all likely. But one can't prove a negative, as Dad would be the first to tell me.

[joatamon]

Thank you so much for typing up this chapter - it's so interesting. And also kind of heartwarming *g* I really hope that D and G lead long and happy lives with their partners. (Although I feel sorry for D's wife.)

[kindkit]

I do feel sorry for D.'s wife--the situation must have been pretty horrible for her--but in the circumstances I think divorce was probably the best thing for them both. I'm not a fan of the idea that people are obliged to make themselves miserable and deny their own needs for the sake of others, so I think he had every right to want out of a marriage that could only make him unhappy. And the divorce freed her up to hopefully find someone who could really love her and want to be with her, which sounds like a better deal than being stuck in an emotionally and sexually vacant marriage.

[joatamon]

Oh absolutely, I'm not pro-misery either although it is apparent that he was cheating on her, which is not cool (given that divorce was a possibility).

I don't know whether it would have been better or worse for her that he left her for a man (or men). I imagine that it must have been a tremendous shock - even more so than it would be today. And while divorce was much more common immediately following the war than it had been prior, there was still stigma. I wonder what grounds she used for the divorce? /musing

I hope she remarried happily, anyway (or remained unmarried, according to her choice) *g*

[mllesatine]

I just wanted to mention the book "A world apart" by Gustav Herling-Grudzinski. It deals with the author's experience of the Soviet prison camp system. There was a very short passage in the book where he mentions a ethnic group (the name escapes my at the moment, they might have been Turkmen) and the behaviour among these prisoners. Herling noticed that the men would sit together and slowly stroke each other's backs. He then goes on saying that he never saw homosexual behaviour but that it might have been possible since there were no female prisoners of this ethnic group in the camp.

[kindkit]

Thanks for the rec! I think that in any situation where people live (willingly or not) in same-sex groups for years, there's going to be same-sex attraction and possibly sexual activity among people who might not feel or act on such attractions in other circumstances. It's so well attested in so many circumstances that I'm instantly suspicious of claims that "there was no homosexuality in X Situation" even leaving aside the fact that in any group of people much larger than ten, it's statistically inevitable that some of them will be gay or bisexual.