provided gay men and lesbians with a dramatic new vision of their diversity and ubiquity. To a few, it even suggested how powerful they might one day become.
The combination of friendship and discrimination experienced by homosexuals in uniform created one of the great ironies of gay history: this mixture made the United States Army a secret, powerful, and unwittingengine of gay liberation in America. The roots formed by this experience would nourish the movement that finally made its first public appearance in Manhattan twenty-four years after the war was over. World War I did not have a comparable effect because it was not the same kind of mass experience in America; by the end of our relatively brief involvement in Europe, only 1,200,000 American troops were stationed in France. During World War II, about twenty million Americans were in uniform.
World War II gnawed away at all kinds of ancient taboos. Most importantly, although it was fought with a religious fervor, this conflict probably did more to loosen the religious constraints on a puritan society than any previous event. And for many who came of age in this era, the awesome force of the atomic bomb encouraged the notion that twentieth-century man was now just as powerful as God. The war would also give the generation that fought it an extraordinary sense of accomplishmentâa feeling that bordered on nobilityâsince the Nazi defeat was universally viewed as a magnificent achievement.
Because the war brought women into factories and offices for the first time in large numbers to replace the men who departed for the front, it was at least as important to the eventual liberation of women as it would be to the liberation of gays. The overwhelming success of women who became workers and soldiers, and gay men who became warriors, proved the falseness of centuries-old stereotypes.
To win their rightful place inside the armed forces, gay men theoretically had to evade a whole new set of barriers. Before 1940, the army and navy had only prosecuted acts of sodomy, rather than attempting a systematic exclusion of homosexuals from their ranks. It was only after the beginning of the draft in 1940 that the psychiatric profession began a campaign to convince the Selective Service System to perform psychiatric as well as physical examinations of all draftees.
In
Coming Out Under Fire
, a superb study of homosexuals who served in the American military during the Second World War, Allan Bérubé reports that the psychiatric establishment used an economic argument to convince the War Department of the need for psychiatric screenings. The government had spent more than $1 billion caring for the psychiatric casualties of World War I; in 1940, these victims still occupied more than half the beds in veteransâ hospitals.
On the eve of the Second World War, three members of the American Psychiatric Associationâs Military Mobilization Committee became the key advisers to army generals on this question. Winfred Overholser, HarrySteckel, and Harry Stack Sullivan, coeditor of the journal
Psychiatry
, argued that the country could save millions by excluding potential psychiatric cases before they became patients in veterans wards. Sullivan was extremely well known and widely admired within the Washington psychiatric community. He also happened to be a gay man who lived with his lover in Bethesda, Maryland.
Thus began an unholy alliance between the War Department and psychiatry, a specialty still disdained by much of the medical profession. The war provided psychiatrists with a unique opportunity for legitimization: the official imprimatur of the federal government This affiliation would help them shed their reputation as members of a fey discipline. Now they would be able to act as robust patriots, eager to prevent the encroachment of perverts on the nationâs armed forces.
Ironically, Sullivanâs original plan for psychiatric screening did not include any
The combination of friendship and discrimination experienced by homosexuals in uniform created one of the great ironies of gay history: this mixture made the United States Army a secret, powerful, and unwittingengine of gay liberation in America. The roots formed by this experience would nourish the movement that finally made its first public appearance in Manhattan twenty-four years after the war was over. World War I did not have a comparable effect because it was not the same kind of mass experience in America; by the end of our relatively brief involvement in Europe, only 1,200,000 American troops were stationed in France. During World War II, about twenty million Americans were in uniform.
World War II gnawed away at all kinds of ancient taboos. Most importantly, although it was fought with a religious fervor, this conflict probably did more to loosen the religious constraints on a puritan society than any previous event. And for many who came of age in this era, the awesome force of the atomic bomb encouraged the notion that twentieth-century man was now just as powerful as God. The war would also give the generation that fought it an extraordinary sense of accomplishmentâa feeling that bordered on nobilityâsince the Nazi defeat was universally viewed as a magnificent achievement.
Because the war brought women into factories and offices for the first time in large numbers to replace the men who departed for the front, it was at least as important to the eventual liberation of women as it would be to the liberation of gays. The overwhelming success of women who became workers and soldiers, and gay men who became warriors, proved the falseness of centuries-old stereotypes.
To win their rightful place inside the armed forces, gay men theoretically had to evade a whole new set of barriers. Before 1940, the army and navy had only prosecuted acts of sodomy, rather than attempting a systematic exclusion of homosexuals from their ranks. It was only after the beginning of the draft in 1940 that the psychiatric profession began a campaign to convince the Selective Service System to perform psychiatric as well as physical examinations of all draftees.
In
Coming Out Under Fire
, a superb study of homosexuals who served in the American military during the Second World War, Allan Bérubé reports that the psychiatric establishment used an economic argument to convince the War Department of the need for psychiatric screenings. The government had spent more than $1 billion caring for the psychiatric casualties of World War I; in 1940, these victims still occupied more than half the beds in veteransâ hospitals.
On the eve of the Second World War, three members of the American Psychiatric Associationâs Military Mobilization Committee became the key advisers to army generals on this question. Winfred Overholser, HarrySteckel, and Harry Stack Sullivan, coeditor of the journal
Psychiatry
, argued that the country could save millions by excluding potential psychiatric cases before they became patients in veterans wards. Sullivan was extremely well known and widely admired within the Washington psychiatric community. He also happened to be a gay man who lived with his lover in Bethesda, Maryland.
Thus began an unholy alliance between the War Department and psychiatry, a specialty still disdained by much of the medical profession. The war provided psychiatrists with a unique opportunity for legitimization: the official imprimatur of the federal government This affiliation would help them shed their reputation as members of a fey discipline. Now they would be able to act as robust patriots, eager to prevent the encroachment of perverts on the nationâs armed forces.
Ironically, Sullivanâs original plan for psychiatric screening did not include any
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