Coming Out Under Fire
In Coming Out Under Fire: the history of Gay men and women in World War Two (1990), Allan Bérubé uses letters, war novels, military documents, and oral histories to explore the fabric of the lived military experience of queer men and women. Bérubé’s interest in the subject started with letters salvaged from a dumpster. The memories of a group of gay GIs had literally been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Bérubé writes of the role of the military in forming a lesbian and gay subculture during WWII. For the first time, the U.S. military attempted to exclude homosexuals via a psychiatric evaluation in which individuals were asked- "are you a homosexual?" This confrontation, repeated hundereds of thousands of times, is an example of "coming out" having a clear political meaning and unifying potential. Yet, even as the military's managment of homosexuality grew in importance, its need for labor led to an era of permissivenss. This was true even for women's organizations whose feminine appeal and adherence to gender norms was repeatedly stressed in recruitng ads. Furthermore, the homosocial nature of new women's auxilary organizations such as the WACs and the WAVEs allowed lesbian and lesbian-like women a place to meet and date, and many women witnessed the butch-femme dynamic for the first time.
In the homosocial world of the military, gay men and women experienced a shared identity, many for the first time. They formed gay cliques, put on drag shows, engaged in ambiguous flirting with straight friends, and fell in love.
Later pulp novels played on these themes- exaggerating the prevelance of homosexuality but also importantly acknowledging and even celebrating it. Gay pulp titles such as From Passion to Disaster hinted that soldiers might be caught in a clinch by the enemy, but Killer Queens' cover denied that fear. Women's Barracks mixed the images of a feminine, heterosexually available WAC with the lesbian potential of close living quartes.