Gay wwii soldiers

In 1942, the relatively new profession of military psychiatrists warned of the “psychopathic personality disorders” that would make homosexuals unfit to fight. They were often marked “HS” or some other code for homosexual, effectively disqualifying the veteran from receiving any GI rights or benefits and barring many discharged soldiers from getting civilian jobs.

While not a lot is known or confirmed about transgender people serving in the U.S.

military during World War II, there are some stories of trans World War II veterans. Many years and over one thousand pounds later, each letter he found gave another missing piece to the story. In official spaces, female masculinity, unlike male effeminacy, was not considered to be a disqualifying defect, reflecting the need for women who could perform traditionally male work.

After his conviction, he was forced to choose between prison time and chemical castration. Still, this did not grant him immunity to institutional homophobia. A straight veteran lauded his queer fellows for their “amazing capacity to see the ridiculous part of life.” One man always got a laugh from his compatriots by handing down the order to ‘open fire, dear.’ Private Dudley Cave, who was openly homosexual during the war, recalled that the worst homophobic comment he’d received during that time was simply a joke about how he ‘held a broom like a woman.’

Many LGBT veterans recalled the war as a period of opportunity, the likes of which they had never encountered before.

He pretended to have epilepsy during the medical exam, hoping that they would allow him to stay.

These soldiers were photographed operating heavy artillery while still wearing their drag costumes. Once he realized that “G” stood for Gordon Bowsher, he was shocked. Turing died in 1954 at the age of 41, and his cause of death was officially determined to be suicide.

The LGBT rank and file also suffered great prejudice upon their return to the home front.

To help examiners distinguish gay men from other enlistees, psychiatrists wrote into military regulations lists of stereotyped signs that characterized gay men as visibly different from the rest of the population. For these veterans, already facing formidable racist barriers to jobs and housing, the stain of a blue discharge further crippled their future prospects for chances for stability.

READ MORE: The Supreme Court Rulings That Have Shaped Gay Rights in America

In their effort to screen out queer conscripts, military officials ran into a problem: They didn’t have a conclusive way of identifying them, beyond a set of subjectively interpreted “signs” such as “feminine bodily characteristics” and “effeminacy in dress and manner,” according to Allan Bérubé, author of Coming Out Under Fire: Gay Men and Women During World War II.

But the blue discharges ruined many lives. The tenuous look-the-other-way policy towards gay men and women also came crumbling down during the late 1940s and 1950s, both in the military and in general society. Perhaps one of the most famous trans veterans was Christine Jorgensen, who was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1945. Letters between gay men are incredibly rare because they were almost always destroyed.

Blue discharges could be dispensed to anyone with “undesirable traits of character,” a term ultimately applied in large numbers to queer people.

While the discharges affected people of all races, it took a particularly heavy toll on Black soldiers, University of Michigan historian Jennifer Dominique Jones told HISTORY.com.

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