Gays and lesbians

The period from 1929 to 1945 brought significant developments for gays and lesbians in the United States. Despite societal disapproval and sanctions, the emergence of a more active homosexual subculture in such major cities as New York and Los Angeles in the late 1920s and 1930s helped gays and lesbians find new opportunities to pursue their sexuality and to achieve a greater collective consciousness. Then mobilization and migration during World War II uprooted millions of Americans, contributed to greater sexual permissiveness in American society, and produced nonfamilial and often sex-segregated environments in urban areas and the military where gays and lesbians could meet others like themselves and find support and solidarity. Although the military undertook efforts to winnow out homosexuals, gay men and lesbians served in all branches of the armed forces during the war.

During the interwar years, gays and lesbians increasingly developed friendship networks and meeting places, particularly in big cities, and often gained greater acceptance among younger city dwellers. But a society and legal system rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition remained hostile to homosexuality, which was widely condemned as immoral, and to homosexual acts, which were typically made criminal under the law. Doctors supported a medical model that understood homosexuality as congenital disease, and some performed sterilization to prevent carriers from passing the disease on to future generations. Meeting places for gays and lesbians, often controlled by organized crime and situated in out-of-the-way locations, remained open at the pleasure of police. Patrons of gay bars risked entrapment and arrest, and gays and lesbians typically pleaded guilty to avoid further embarrassment in court proceedings that aimed to inculcate shame. Despite the development of gay communities in urban areas, then, the interwar years also meant continuing dangers and proscriptions and public socializing remained unusual.

Complexity also characterized gay and lesbian history during World War II. As young gays and lesbians joined the armed forces and relocated to urban settings to help with mobilization efforts, they found in the unusually sex-segregated arrangements of wartime America opportunities to encounter other homosexuals and forge personal ties and supportive networks. Some found that wartime mobilization reinforced the greater freedom they had already experienced before the war. On the other hand, the war years also brought new sanctions against homosexuality by the military and produced in many communities efforts to enforce old standards of behavior against what seemed improper sexual permissiveness among both homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Prior to World War II, the armed forces had not screened for homosexuality. But by 1943, military psychiatrists convinced the U. S. Navy and the U. S. Army to establish policies banning gays and lesbians from military service. For the first time—and unlike the policies of other nations at war—the military medical examination forced homosexuals, previously accustomed to a measure of privacy, to face public inquiry. Few gay or lesbian inductees revealed their homosexual identity in these examinations, and only superficial and stereotypical signs of homosexuality were noticed by psychiatrists, who because of time constraints typically conducted hasty, perfunctory screenings. Only a tiny number of homosexuals were denied entry into the military or were subsequently discharged, but in the postwar era proscriptions against homosexuals in the military became routine, and some gay veterans who had been discharged were denied benefits under the GI Bill of Rights. Many gay men nonetheless served with distinction on the battlefronts. Lesbians generally experienced fewer difficulties in the military than did gay men.

For gays and lesbians, the events of the 1930s and the war years thus brought continuing and sometimes increased scrutiny and sanctions, but they also brought new opportunities and experiences that helped lay foundations for the more cohesive and assertive gay subculture of the postwar era.

Further reading: Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

—Joseph C. Gutberlet