Biden’s Pardon is a Reminder the Greatest Generation Had Queer Veterans, Too

In the popular telling, the Greatest Generation is white, male, and straight. Tom Hanks’s Playtone studios, which produced some of the most popular adaptations of World War II history over the past 30 years, has played a key role in simplifying and flattening our understanding of the era.

In reality, the picture was far more complicated—and the role of the United States government was more painful. President Joe Biden’s pardon this week of soldiers who were court-martialed and convicted for same-sex relations is the start of acknowledging that painful history. It’s easy to imagine the war as a crusade that united American innocence and manhood. But both historical memory and pop history should be able to accommodate the fact that even as the federal government was hunting and purging queer Americans from uniform, from the intelligence services, and from the diplomatic corps, those same Americans answered the nation’s call despite real risks and real threats from their own democratic government.

Almost a decade before the 1998 release of The Greatest Generation, Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire told a richer and more accurate story to widespread acclaim. As the U.S. government called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the increasing presence of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people in the military conflicted with expanding anti-gay policies and procedures. Even as they created justifications for why gay people could not function within the armed forces, military officials knew that they could not afford to exclude most gay recruits.

At the same time, the gay men who enlisted or were drafted—and the lesbians who volunteered—realized that the military was both prepared to discharge them on the basis of their homosexuality and would make it known to the public.

And yet, like most Americans, they were eager to do their part in the war effort. Awareness of these policies placed them in a bind. Interviews, diaries, love letters, and declassified documents describe a two-front war: one on behalf of the United States and one within the armed forces, similar in some ways to the experiences of the African Americans and Japanese Americans who served.

From its inception, the United States military took punitive measures against gay servicemembers. One account from the Revolutionary War describes how an officer of the Continental Army who was outed by a fellow officer, then court-martialed for sodomy, convicted, and dishonorably discharged. Although “homosexuality” or “sodomy” weren’t explicitly mentioned in military law for more than a century afterward, the military maintained a de facto practice of discharging servicemembers for such conduct throughout the 19th century. However, during World War II, it became difficult to hold court-martials, so some commanders started issuing administrative discharges instead.

As the war continued, policies shifted, resulting in a 1944 directive that called for homosexuals to be committed to military hospitals, examined by psychiatrists, and discharged under Section 8 of the U.S. Army Regulations as “unfit for service.” Estimates across the uniformed services in 1946 indicate that somewhere between 54,000-72,000 blue tickets were issued during World War II, making it difficult, if not impossible, to reintegrate into civilian life.

Despite this, queer people wanted to do their part. , Chuck Rowland, one of the founders of the pioneering gay rights group, the Mattachine Society, attempted to enlist in the Marine Corps with his boyfriend in Cleveland in 1942 under the mistaken belief that the service had a “buddy system” that would keep them together. His eyesight was poor, preventing him from enlisting, and he was later drafted into the Army, serving until 1946.

Rowland was one of thousands. In 1943, Charles Reddy, a gay teenager, dropped out of high school in New Jersey to join the Marine Corps. Betty Somers joined the United States Marine Corps in 1944, just a few months after the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve was established. At the time, she was 20 years old, in college, and had a girlfriend. “The Marine Corps is known for being a rather aggressive unit, so I went into the Marine Corps for that reason,” she later explained in an interview with Bérubé, the historian. “I expected to make any kind of sacrifices, and I expected to go overseas.”

During the height of the AIDS crisis—and just one year after the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” policy was announced—Bérubé’s account of the war was adapted into a Peabody Award-winning documentary. Now, at a moment when approval rates among Americans for same-sex marriage at an all-time high, but the future of open LGBTQIA+ military service is under threat, integrating these stories into popular culture is more vital than ever.

A group of gay veterans march past the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 1993.Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images

That would also counter a worrying current trend; in every Playtone adaptation of history and memoir released, more and more screen time is given over to an ever-increasing strident insistence on masculinity and heterosexuality. The Pacific detours into a tedious, gauzy wartime romance that fails to pass the Bechdel Test. While Masters of the Air has more women characters than any other series produced by the studio, it centers on an extensive and adulterous affair. If Playtone has determined that viewers will be comfortable with an admission of adultery in the Greatest Generation, then it’s past time to include the stories of queer Americans who served in uniform during World War II. If recent polling of Gen Z is reflected in their antecedents in the Greatest Generation, that would mean that there were 4.8 LGBTQIA+ veterans of that war.

Integrating these stories is crucial for more than just verisimilitude and the accuracy of documentary evidence; much more importantly, it makes for better film and television. It demonstrates a richer and more complex love of country and hatred of fascism when people choose to lie and do moral injury to themselves in order to serve. These Americans faced the very real risk of being outed at any point in the induction process or on active duty, which would destroy their lives and social standing through harassment and undesirable discharges.

For those who were not forcibly outed, getting in and living under the threat of being found out meant maintaining deception. For example, Bérubé interviewed, Robert Fleischer of the Upper West Side, who lied to an Army psychiatrist about his sexual orientation so he could enlist to avenge the death of a cousin killed at Pearl Harbor, left home for the first time, lost his virginity, fell in love, and became a drag star as “Carmelita Ack-Ack,” all the while living in fear of being forcibly outed and given a less than honorable discharge. He later used his G.I. Bill benefits to go to fashion school, dying in 1985.

If Hollywood were to look beyond Bérubé for future material, one such source for adaptation from this era would be The Gallery by John Horne Burns, a graduate of Andover and Harvard University who taught at a prestigious prep school before serving in military intelligence for the U.S. Army in North Africa and Italy. His semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1947, depicts nine Americans serving in and around Naples in 1944, constantly moving in and out of the bombed-out arcade of the Galleria Umberto. In this setting, everyone in town comes together seeking food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion.

It was one of the first novels to directly explore gay life in the military. Among its nine portraits is Momma, the proprietress of a gay bar in the Galleria, a generous depiction of how gay men from every branch of service and every nation in the alliance come together to drink, flirt, and find sexual and romantic connections. This warm and accurate depiction of gay culture was scandalous and brave. It was scandalous because it was an overt and positive depiction of homosexuality—and because Momma endorsed her patrons’ sexuality.

“In 1947, homophobia was rampant both in Italy (where the fascist regime had targeted gay men just a few years before) and the United States (where nearly all constituencies had laws against sodomy), and the Hayes Code—Hollywood’s policy of self-censorship, which pushed most depictions of queer people out of movies for decades—was barely a decade old. State and federal obscenity laws were still widely in effect; the year before, Gore Vidal’s gay bildungsroman The City and the Pillar was denied reviews, and Vidal was driven out of polite society, forcing him to publish under a pseudonym for much of the next decade. So the clear, honest, and humane depictions of gay soldiers, sailors, marines, and “airplane drivers” from across the world as complex individuals—rather than not sexless sissies or defective, dangerous deviants—would have amounted to confession by the author of his own queerness.

Despite the obvious controversy, Burns’s portrait slid by unremarked, first by the lawyers for the publisher and the editor and then by the literary press. In some circles, it was seen as a contender for the 1948 Pulitzer Prize, and Burns became a celebrity even as he lost to James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.

Burns published three subsequent novels, none of which was met with the same sort of popular acclaim, and proceeded to drink himself to death in Italy in the early 1950s. A man who was once viewed by Vidal and other queer men of his generation as a rival for accolades and a major literary talent faded into obscurity after his death. His family refused to believe that he was gay, and even after the Stonewall uprising in 1969, they declined to give scholars, writers, and thinkers access to his letters and archives.

Military veterans march along the Pride parade route, moving from Meridian Hill Park to Dupont Circle, in Washington, D.C., on June 23, 1991.

Or take The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks. The original novel, which evaded wartime and other censors, examines a group of soldiers stationed in a military barracks in the eastern United States during World War II. It is a fascinating, well-developed look at homophobia, racism, and antisemitism among the Greatest Generation. The plot hinges on an anti-gay hate crime—but in its far more famous noir film adaptation, renamed as Crossfire, that plot point had to be changed to an antisemitic killing.

In the novel, Keeley—a hardened military reporter who takes on the role of the private investigator—observes that “many of the men who had fought on Eniwetok and Kwajalein and Guadalcanal had peculiar ideas about liberty and freedom which sounded like white supremacy and Protestant justice. The Americans’ skill and ability to fire artillery had helped him win … not the desire to free a handful of natives in the Solomons and on New Georgia.”

On its publication in 1945, the book led to the court martial of its author, Brooks; the war ended, and the trial collapsed under wide public pressure. Brooks went on to a storied career as a screenwriter, film director, novelist, and producer. He was nominated for eight Academy Awards during his career, and he was best known for his books Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, and In Cold Blood.

Crossfire and The Brick Foxhole lived on in Vito Russo’s Celluloid Closet—a 1981 book about how Hollywood depicted homosexuality under the Hayes Code—as well as a 1995 documentary adaptation of the same name. In an era of brand pre-awareness and risk mitigation through intellectual property, remaking a Hollywood classic as an authentic period piece with queer characters is a natural fit.”

All of these rich texts tell us something very different about the Greatest Generation than Playtone would have you think. Burns, a deeply closeted gay Catholic, took a tremendous risk to depict the patrons of Momma’s bar. Brooks’ character Keeley, and the author himself, know that homosexuality is normal, natural, and occurs frequently; the men who organize the murder are depicted as the villains not just for killing, but for engaging in what we’d now call a hate crime. Both authors make clear that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or with gay men as a class, but that there’s something wrong with the people, groups, and societies that promote homophobia up to and beyond hate crimes. It’s something worth thinking about the next time the Greatest Generation is invoked to justify contemporary homophobia or transphobia.

A more accurate depiction of the past would include the people who have been here all along in the nation’s service: in combat, in the intelligence services, and in the State Department, who have otherwise been scrubbed out of history, humiliated, and had their lives destroyed.