You've Died Twice If No One Knows You Lived
MARCH 27, 2008 TAGS:
By Jeff Weinstein
In times of war, when our daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, mates and friends are killed, their stolen lives beg to be remembered. To its shame, the Pentagon has tried to forbid the publication of photos of soldiers’ coffins: “We don't want the remains of our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified," a deputy undersecretary of defense has said. But what could be less dignified than hiding those flag-draped forms, such eloquent evidence of loss?
Veterans of old and politically toothless conflicts may fare better. Lazare Ponticelli, the last acknowledged French veteran of World War I, that “war to end all wars,” died on March 12 at age 110. “His family was uncomfortable with the elaborate national funeral ceremony planned,” an AP obit read, but Ponticelli agreed to be honored if all French soldiers were honored as well. Coincidentally, the last surviving U.S. doughboy, Frank Woodruff Buckles, 107, was celebrated at the Pentagon in early March, too.
Too bad you won’t see or hear any military salutes for author Allan Bérubé, who died December 11 at an early 61. He deserves the highest acclaim because he discovered thousands of unhonored, dishonored “unknown soldiers”: gay men and lesbians who served during World War II. Tributes aren’t placed in the hands or on the graves of those the Armed Forces kicked out, unless you have someone like Bérubé to set the record straight.
Modest, reticent, Allan Bérubé was a MacArthur Award-winning independent scholar, a self-taught “community historian” who wrote Coming Out Under Fire, a landmark book published in 1990. His profound sense of what is fair resulted in a sharp, corrective slap to the face of the nation’s record-keepers and lawmakers, who for years ignored or denied the contributions of these erased patriots. Traditional academic historians sometimes let tradition call the shots. Bérubé never did.
Coming Out Under Fire coolly and indisputably demonstrates that a great many young gay men and lesbians served our nation bravely in World War II, yet more than a few were hunted, jailed and forced out of uniform in cruel and humiliating ways. Government records of that aggressive persecution were hidden — are still hidden — or destroyed, and the achievements of those loyal citizens have been expunged.
Gay veterans, Bérubé wrote, were made invisible. Released to the cities and towns of a world that would not accept them, some even became “invisible” to themselves. As his interviews make clear, World War II killed these soldiers slowly, off the battlefields as well as on. They vanished before they died.
Their ghosts reappeared by accident. A friend of one of Bérubé’s San Francisco neighbors had grabbed from a dumpster hundreds of photos and letters written by gay G.I.s; the trove sat in a closet for five years. When in 1979, the neighbor mentioned that Allan was a gay-history buff (not many around then), he was given the pile.
Imagine a youthful, bearded man in jeans sitting on his Haight-Ashbury living room floor, surrounded by yellowing envelopes with faded names and addresses, opening and reading the treasures of the past one by one. About a dozen GIs, Bérubé discovered, met at an Army base in Missouri, “where they had formed their own clique that met daily at the service club.” When they scattered stateside and overseas, they wrote to one another about “what it was like to be gay wherever they were stationed — their romances, the gay bars they visited, and the dilemmas they faced as homosexuals in the military.”
During the next decade, Bérubé put out the word and, out of 100 who offered, he interviewed in person 71 gay men and lesbians from Rhode Island to Hawaii about their experiences during the war. (His study estimates that 650,000 to 1.6 million male soldiers out of 16 million in WW II were gay.) A few of those he spoke with chose to keep their real names out of Bérubé’s book because they were “still the targets of prejudice, discrimination and criminal prosecution.” And now, some of them are very likely gone.
For isolated gay youngsters, a soldier’s life provided some pluses, an opportunity to meet — often for the first time — others like oneself, to bond, and perhaps to fall in love. “I have no one to answer to,” wrote one gay G.I. to his “buddy,” “as long as I behave myself during the week and stay out of the way of MPs on weekends. If I go home … how can I stay out all night or promote a serious affair?”
But as war continued, military psychiatrists began to ferret out soldiers on the newly created basis of gay “identity” and not simply behavior. Confident diagnostic terms such as habitual homosexual, sexual pervert, true sodomist, confirmed pervert, and moral pervert were used to sort G.I.s into filing-cabinet categories. In the war’s last two years, purges were begun, and thousands were held in punitive “queer stockades” where for months they were “interrogated about their sex lives, locked up, physically abused, and subjected to systematic humiliations in front of other soldiers.”
Those gay prisoners of war were forced to sleep with the lights on. Guards routinely raped men they controlled. After months of imprisonment and isolation — as a perilous international conflict dragged on — the once productive soldiers received dishonorable “blue” discharges and were forced home in fear, fury, and disgrace.
Toward the end of the war, stories of using blue discharges to punish black soldiers (which happened when they objected to demeaning treatment and segregation) began to surface, and a few newspapers blew the whistle. Well-meant lectures to parents whose children were labeled as sexual perverts advised them not to “condemn the psychopath, but … not make apologies to him either.” Yet the damage was done.
Those who now are bored silly with Will & Grace reruns and think gay marriage is just another excuse for cake won’t understand how terrifying and dangerous it was to be gay before Stonewall — that 1969 rebellion in which furious gay New Yorkers took to the streets to scream their independence — or even a decade or two after. A guy could be jailed for kissing, or even dancing with, another man; the same for a gal with a gal. Virtually no one risked coming out, so a crucial, loving part of oneself was trapped in a world of secrets and codes. It was a victory to be out even to yourself.
Of course, our planet has been home to countless hidden narratives and horrors (remember the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”?), which would remain buried were it not for brave and dogged historians like Allan Bérubé. That is why, as war continues now, detective work like his becomes even more essential. What other stories, what other lives, have we lost or cast aside? History must be challenged if we’re to know who we are.
Jeff Weinstein writes about culture and gay issues for www.artsjournal.com/outthere.
In times of war, when our daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, mates and friends are killed, their stolen lives beg to be remembered. To its shame, the Pentagon has tried to forbid the publication of photos of soldiers’ coffins: “We don't want the remains of our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified," a deputy undersecretary of defense has said. But what could be less dignified than hiding those flag-draped forms, such eloquent evidence of loss?
Veterans of old and politically toothless conflicts may fare better. Lazare Ponticelli, the last acknowledged French veteran of World War I, that “war to end all wars,” died on March 12 at age 110. “His family was uncomfortable with the elaborate national funeral ceremony planned,” an AP obit read, but Ponticelli agreed to be honored if all French soldiers were honored as well. Coincidentally, the last surviving U.S. doughboy, Frank Woodruff Buckles, 107, was celebrated at the Pentagon in early March, too.
Too bad you won’t see or hear any military salutes for author Allan Bérubé, who died December 11 at an early 61. He deserves the highest acclaim because he discovered thousands of unhonored, dishonored “unknown soldiers”: gay men and lesbians who served during World War II. Tributes aren’t placed in the hands or on the graves of those the Armed Forces kicked out, unless you have someone like Bérubé to set the record straight.
Modest, reticent, Allan Bérubé was a MacArthur Award-winning independent scholar, a self-taught “community historian” who wrote Coming Out Under Fire, a landmark book published in 1990. His profound sense of what is fair resulted in a sharp, corrective slap to the face of the nation’s record-keepers and lawmakers, who for years ignored or denied the contributions of these erased patriots. Traditional academic historians sometimes let tradition call the shots. Bérubé never did.
Coming Out Under Fire coolly and indisputably demonstrates that a great many young gay men and lesbians served our nation bravely in World War II, yet more than a few were hunted, jailed and forced out of uniform in cruel and humiliating ways. Government records of that aggressive persecution were hidden — are still hidden — or destroyed, and the achievements of those loyal citizens have been expunged.
Gay veterans, Bérubé wrote, were made invisible. Released to the cities and towns of a world that would not accept them, some even became “invisible” to themselves. As his interviews make clear, World War II killed these soldiers slowly, off the battlefields as well as on. They vanished before they died.
Their ghosts reappeared by accident. A friend of one of Bérubé’s San Francisco neighbors had grabbed from a dumpster hundreds of photos and letters written by gay G.I.s; the trove sat in a closet for five years. When in 1979, the neighbor mentioned that Allan was a gay-history buff (not many around then), he was given the pile.
Imagine a youthful, bearded man in jeans sitting on his Haight-Ashbury living room floor, surrounded by yellowing envelopes with faded names and addresses, opening and reading the treasures of the past one by one. About a dozen GIs, Bérubé discovered, met at an Army base in Missouri, “where they had formed their own clique that met daily at the service club.” When they scattered stateside and overseas, they wrote to one another about “what it was like to be gay wherever they were stationed — their romances, the gay bars they visited, and the dilemmas they faced as homosexuals in the military.”
During the next decade, Bérubé put out the word and, out of 100 who offered, he interviewed in person 71 gay men and lesbians from Rhode Island to Hawaii about their experiences during the war. (His study estimates that 650,000 to 1.6 million male soldiers out of 16 million in WW II were gay.) A few of those he spoke with chose to keep their real names out of Bérubé’s book because they were “still the targets of prejudice, discrimination and criminal prosecution.” And now, some of them are very likely gone.For isolated gay youngsters, a soldier’s life provided some pluses, an opportunity to meet — often for the first time — others like oneself, to bond, and perhaps to fall in love. “I have no one to answer to,” wrote one gay G.I. to his “buddy,” “as long as I behave myself during the week and stay out of the way of MPs on weekends. If I go home … how can I stay out all night or promote a serious affair?”
But as war continued, military psychiatrists began to ferret out soldiers on the newly created basis of gay “identity” and not simply behavior. Confident diagnostic terms such as habitual homosexual, sexual pervert, true sodomist, confirmed pervert, and moral pervert were used to sort G.I.s into filing-cabinet categories. In the war’s last two years, purges were begun, and thousands were held in punitive “queer stockades” where for months they were “interrogated about their sex lives, locked up, physically abused, and subjected to systematic humiliations in front of other soldiers.”
Those gay prisoners of war were forced to sleep with the lights on. Guards routinely raped men they controlled. After months of imprisonment and isolation — as a perilous international conflict dragged on — the once productive soldiers received dishonorable “blue” discharges and were forced home in fear, fury, and disgrace.
Toward the end of the war, stories of using blue discharges to punish black soldiers (which happened when they objected to demeaning treatment and segregation) began to surface, and a few newspapers blew the whistle. Well-meant lectures to parents whose children were labeled as sexual perverts advised them not to “condemn the psychopath, but … not make apologies to him either.” Yet the damage was done.
Those who now are bored silly with Will & Grace reruns and think gay marriage is just another excuse for cake won’t understand how terrifying and dangerous it was to be gay before Stonewall — that 1969 rebellion in which furious gay New Yorkers took to the streets to scream their independence — or even a decade or two after. A guy could be jailed for kissing, or even dancing with, another man; the same for a gal with a gal. Virtually no one risked coming out, so a crucial, loving part of oneself was trapped in a world of secrets and codes. It was a victory to be out even to yourself.
Of course, our planet has been home to countless hidden narratives and horrors (remember the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”?), which would remain buried were it not for brave and dogged historians like Allan Bérubé. That is why, as war continues now, detective work like his becomes even more essential. What other stories, what other lives, have we lost or cast aside? History must be challenged if we’re to know who we are.
Jeff Weinstein writes about culture and gay issues for www.artsjournal.com/outthere.
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