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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!
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-02 09:06 pm (UTC)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*