The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser Page B

reference to homosexuality. Understandably, Sullivan believed homosexuals should be “accepted and left alone,” a position that made him a dissident in his own profession. And Overholser tried to convince the military that homosexuals should be handled by psychiatrists rather than prison guards. “The emotional reaction of the public against homosexual activity is out of all proportion to the threat which it represents to personal rights, or even to public order,” he told the navy. But Overholser also believed the public could not think rationally about the subject because it was “so overlaid with emotional coloring that the processes of reason are often obscured.”
    Unfortunately, as Bérubé explains, Sullivan and his colleagues “had carved out the territory on which others would build an antihomosexual barrier and the rationale for using it.” Sullivan’s belief in the relative insignificance of “sexual aberrations” in establishing mental illness was undermined as his plan was digested by the Washington bureaucracy. By the middle of 1941, the army and the Selective Service both included “homosexual proclivities” in their lists of disqualifying “deviations.”
    At a series of government-sponsored seminars at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan in 1941, psychiatrists expanded on their theory of homosexuality as a mental illness. Homosexuality was discussed as “an aspect of three personality disorders: psychopaths who were sexual perverts, paranoid personalities who suffered from homosexual panic, and schizoid personalities” who displayed gay symptoms. In 1942, army mobilization regulations were expanded to include a paragraph entitled “Sexual Perversions.” It was written by Lawrence Kubie, a Manhattan psychiatrist who was famous for his treatment of show business patients tormented by doubtsabout their sexual orientation—from Clifton Webb to Tennessee Williams and Moss Hart.
    EVERY ARGUMENT made against the admission of lesbians and gays to the military in the nineties has its own echo in the forties, including the idea that effeminate men would become “subject to ridicule and joshing, which will harm the general morale and will incapacitate the individual for Army duty.”
    â€œMalingerers” were those who pretended to be gay to avoid duty at the front;
“reverse
malingerers”—a term invented by military psychiatrists—described gay recruits who pretended to be heterosexual so they could perform their patriotic duty. By 1943 doctors had devised the Cornell Selectee Index, which used “occupational choice” questions to screen out dancers, window dressers, and interior decorators because they would have difficulty with their “acceptance of the male pattern.”
    The media periodically spread this new official prejudice. The
Washington Star
noted that navy psychiatrists would “be on the lookout for any number of mental illnesses or deficiencies that would make the recruit a misfit,” including homosexuality, and
Time
reported that “How do you get along with girls?” was one of the questions “machine-gunned” at the inductee during his physical.
    These press reports produced all kinds of unlikely fears. When Murray Gitlin enlisted in the navy, he was “very afraid that they would undress me during the physical examination, and they’d know, looking at me, that I was gay. That’s how innocent I was. Well they didn’t—and they couldn’t have cared less.”
    Two factors discouraged nearly all gay men from using their status as members of a sexual minority to avoid the military: the fear of a permanent stigma, because the reason for exclusion was recorded on draft records available to future employers, and an overwhelming desire to participate in the defining experience of a generation. Charles Rowland was drafted at the age of twenty-five.