Still Coming Out Under Fire

Trump administration officials and supporters speak wistfully of a return to the tougher military of days past when discussing policy changes like the re-upped ban on transgender service members. The ban, first introduced during Trump’s first term and now in force after the Supreme Court ended a temporary injunction, has affected service members with more than a decade of service, as well as recent transgender graduates of military academies who are no longer allowed to commission. The executive order that initiated the change states that transgender individuals wishing to serve their country lack “the humility and selflessness required of a service member.” Despite this renewed pushback against queer service members, it remains true that queer people have always stepped up to serve their country, fighting for leaders at home who keep treating queerness as an inherent national security threat. While the exact form of oppression has shapeshifted across more than a century of military policy, there remains a through line, as historian Allan Bérubé showed in his 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II.

Bérubé’s core takeaway was that in the face of extraordinary repression, gay and lesbian service members, along with their few allies, found ways to navigate what Bérubé refers to as the fighting of “two wars,” one for American democracy and another for “their own survival as homosexuals within the military organization.” Revisiting this history now, after three more decades of policy shifts, casts this fight in an increasingly urgent light. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2011, four years after Bérubé’s death, may have seemed to some like a triumphant bookend to Coming Out Under Fire’s historical narrative. The ongoing targeting of queer service members, however, demonstrates that Bérubé’s cautionary tale of institutionalized discrimination ought to continue being told not just as a record of endurance, but also a reminder of how fragile the rights of queer people are within the armed forces. 

The 1919 Newport Scandal is a notable early example of how the military addressed even the suspicion of homosexual behavior among service members. It is a useful prequel to the history Bérubé focused on in his work, and tells the story of a future president who was comfortable demonizing queer service members. 

This early injustice set a grim precedent, not because it was the first instance of homophobic military policy, which has been seen in the United States going back to the Revolutionary War, but because it marked a turning point in the lengths leaders were willing to go to carry out queer persecution under the guise of national security concerns.

The Newport Scandal began with an investigation into alleged homosexual behavior between sailors at the U.S. Naval Station in Newport, Rhode Island. The investigation was carried out largely at the hands of 14 men, most of whom were teenagers, recruited to carry out a sting operation. The recruits were provided with a handbook on how they were to go about investigating moral corruption among the sailors, specifically men looking to engage in same-sex acts with other men. When concerns arose regarding the criminalized same-sex sexual acts that the recruits would be engaging in throughout the operation, then-assistant secretary of the Navy and future president Franklin D. Roosevelt consulted with an attorney who determined that criminal acts used to expose other criminals could be legally exempt. 

The sailors caught in the sting operation were kept on the USS Boxer, a broken-down ship off the coast of Newport, where they were interrogated, starved, and physically beaten. The commanding officer of the training station, Captain Edward Campbell, told Rhode Island Sens. Max Levy and Peter Gerry that the elongated confinement was simply a matter of paperwork-related delays. After more than 120 days on the Boxer, the sailors’ trials finally began. Of the men rounded up, five were acquitted of their charges. Fourteen were handed down 20- to 30-year prison sentences, until a Senate Naval subcommittee began investigating their cases. Roosevelt defended the investigation methods to the Senate, arguing that the health of the Navy depended on such operations. The committee, however, lambasted Roosevelt for the sexual acts that were used to entrap the sailors. The men were released from prison, their sentences commuted. They received dishonorable discharges prohibiting them from receiving any kind of military benefit or honors upon their death. In a letter that he ultimately never sent but that remained in his personal papers, Roosevelt wrote to subcommittee chairman Sen. Henry W. Keyes of New Hampshire: “My only hope is that you will live long enough to appreciate that you have violated decency and truth and that you will pray to your Maker for forgiveness.”

During World War II, when Roosevelt served as commander-in-chief, homosexuality was labeled as a disqualifying mental health diagnosis to service. As Bérubé notes, influential psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan and Winfred Overholser had convinced President Roosevelt of the need to screen draftees for mental disorders. Several psychology professionals, however, argued that service members implicated by such policies were not a threat, but simply different. And different, some argued, did not mean unfit to serve. 

It was not a popular viewpoint within the military at large. Many military officials, who rose through the system that resulted in the Newport Scandal, held and enforced the belief that gay individuals weren’t fit for service because they were dangerous psychopaths vulnerable to blackmail and incapable of proper military discipline.

When gay individuals were drafted during World War II, the first obstacle they faced was getting through the draft board and its Roosevelt-endorsed psychiatrists. Those who did make it past the draft board needed to survive the war without being caught. Those who received  “blue ticket,” named for the color of paper it was printed on, were discharged from the service without access to typical veteran benefits. Discharge records were public, which also made it difficult for these veterans to find employment outside of the armed forces. Thousands of blue tickets were handed out to service members for their sexuality throughout the war. These individuals were largely “found out” through whisper networks that turned service members against their compatriots. Lieutenant Lemuel S. Brown was slapped with a blue ticket in 1944 for “attempting to perpetuate an act of Homosexuality.” When soliciting a lawyer for help fighting the discharge, Brown wrote that his dishonorable discharge prevented him from receiving GI Bill benefits. 

A small but crucial group of psychiatrists quietly opposed these policies, taking risks that historians have since termed “humane errors.” These errors included altering official paperwork to omit references to homosexuality, providing medical diagnoses that allowed service members to be discharged under a certificate of disability rather than for misconduct, and, in some cases, even advising gay service members to feign a medical condition that would qualify them for an honorable discharge, as opposed to a blue ticket. Coming Out Under Fire includes many examples of these humane errors. One schoolteacher worried that his job would be in jeopardy if he declared himself homosexual to a psychiatrist on the draft board. The psychiatrist told him that their report would be worded so that “if these records were dug up a thousand years from now, there would be no way of their pinning homosexuality onto you.”

Psychiatrist William C. Menninger, who served in the Army Surgeon General’s office during the war, wrote in his 1948 book Psychiatry in a Troubled World that “many who were fundamentally homosexual were returned to duty with no mention or indication to commanding officers of the root of their difficulty.” That this was possible at all, even on a small scale, Menninger referred to as surprising, due to the “prevalence of such strong prejudices.”

When it was too late to alter records and prevent a court-martial, some psychiatrists defended service members in military court proceedings, arguing for less punitive outcomes. Edward A. Strecker, president of the American Psychiatric Association from 1943 to 1944, was one such voice of dissent; he wrote to Menninger after the war that “a blue discharge hardly seems fair … since many of these fellows made an earnest effort of service.” 

Small acts of defiance in defense of gay service members did not go so far as to dismantle the military’s anti-gay policy, which would bleed into the postwar Lavender Scare and more modern policies such as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But they stand as a moving example of courage in the face of discrimination. A number of postwar studies concluded that mass psychiatric screening of individuals at the induction point of enlisting was ineffective, and internally it was often considered a counterproductive farce. 

Other anti-gay policies failed because of their impractically rather than moral pushback. In the 1940s, U.S. Navy officials repeatedly floated — and ultimately shot down — the idea of creating formal detention camps for alleged homosexuals, which they argued would strengthen national security during the war effort. That such plans were discussed at all illustrates the depth of institutional homophobia that made gay service members vulnerable even if the most extreme proposals never materialized. 

Bérubé references these proposals as extreme manifestations of the same train of thought that drove blue discharges and witch hunts. Commander F.M. Harrison wrote in a 1942 letter to Winfred Overholser that discharged homosexual officers might retaliate by releasing secret military knowledge. Confinement of these men, Harrison argued, was “in the interest of national security.” Harrison’s concerns were echoed by Navy Surgeon General Ross McIntire, who suggested in a memorandum to the same chairman that homosexual individuals who were determined by a board to be a threat to military security ought to be “placed in a suitable detention camp for the duration of the war.” This was not the only discriminatory policy area on which McIntire was considered an authority; his leadership helped push the Red Cross to maintain racially segregated blood banks throughout the war.

Rear Admiral A.C. Bennett took another shot at getting such detention camp facilities established in 1944, asserting that the Navy owed a moral obligation to society as a whole to segregate gay service members for the duration of the war. Bennett’s proposal was shot down by his bureau chiefs, including McIntire, who sided with chief of Naval Personnel Randall Jacobs’ argument that it was in the interest of the Navy to win the war. 

Individuals interviewed by Bérubé often noted that facing discriminatory military policy made it difficult for members of the gay community to keep from becoming demoralized even after the war. “Many of them kind of crumbled,” Stuart Loomis, an Army psychologist, recounted to Bérubé, stating that the blue discharge veterans he knew “didn’t find a place for themselves in this world.” Efforts to prevent such mistreatment often remained stealthy and piecemeal, with the growing gay rights movement left fighting alone under intense scrutiny; documents obtained from the 1950s FBI Sex Deviates program note of an article published by ONE, the magazine of the Mattachine Society, discussing veterans attempting to overturn their blue discharges. 

Many civil liberties groups, reflecting prevailing legal and cultural norms in postwar America, did not consider the persecution of gay service members to fall within their definition of civil rights violations, as transcripts of letters authored by lesbian dischargees of the Women’s Air Force (WAF) to the American Civil Liberties Union in 1951 — and collected by Bérubé and scholar John D’Emilio in a 1984 article — make clear. One writer felt there was “no way to fight this thing,” and expressed frustration that “For every 10 girls they are discharging they recruit 20 more who will be put through basic and through tech school and then discharged and over and over again,” at the hand of witch hunts purging them out. Another woman asking the ACLU for help wrote that those serving at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio lived in constant terror.

Nobody asked my Squadron Commander about my character, nobody asked my work unit if I did my work well. (They, by the way, when I asked them for a recommendation for a civilian job, told me to write my own if I was in a way displeased with their’s—they recommended me without qualification). To all this no attention was paid. To Washington, I was a non-entity with a homosexual contact. I ask you, for all those girls left, is this fair?—is it in keeping with the principles we shout so loud? How efficient can our armed forces be, with this sort of psychological warfare raging within? As an individual, I’m powerless; as an organization, can you help them?

The ACLU wrote back that there was nothing it could do to assist because, as its lawyers understood it, the woman didn’t mention any civil rights violations. The WAF correspondent responded that she was lucky to have an understanding family, but that two girls discharged for homosexuality at her base had died by suicide.

The history books on anti-queer military policy represent a story of missed chances, of people who elected not to speak up and systems of discrimination that persisted when not enough people pushed back against them. It is a story with clear resonances today. In this context, Coming Out Under Fire offers both a cautionary tale — and a road map for fighting back against repression.

Want to read more reconsiderations of notable historical works? Start with Devin Thomas O’Shea’s piece on Henry Boernstein’s Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849-1866.