Abstract
The Australian army had been good to Eric. His deployment to New Guinea in late 1943 had been the most enjoyable time of his life. Here, far from home, in the steamy tropics of the south Pacific, this young soldier discovered a remarkable queer world that rivalled the complex urban subcultures back home. New friends, sexual delights, passing romance and lasting love were all possibilities on the streets of Port Moresby, then swollen with young servicemen from Australia and the United States.
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Notes
Garry Wotherspoon, ‘Comrades-in-Arms’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 212;
Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 105p.
Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 33.
Ray Hartley, ‘Our Hearts Were Young and Gay’, in Being Different: Nine Gay Men Remember, ed. Garry Wotherspoon (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986), 34.
Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett, ‘“A Homosexual Institution”: Same-Sex Desire in the Army during World War II’, Army Journal, X, 2 (2013), 30–1.
Ken Inglis with Jan Brazier, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 188–238.
Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958), 99–100. For the British in the Great War, these feelings manifest as an idealistic or passionate crush according to Paul Fussell in his The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 272.
Paul Hetherington, ed., The Diaries of Donald Friend, vol. 2 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2003), 19.
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981);
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003);
Anthony Rotundo, ‘Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800–1900’, Journal of Social History, 23, 1 (1989), 1–25.
Kenneth Harrison, Road to Hiroshima [The Brave Japanese] (Adelaide: Rigby, 1983), 136.
J. G. Pairman (int.), ‘In Which We Serve: Conversations with Some Who Did, and One who Still Does’, Outrage, 67 (December 1988): 36–8. in the Forces’, 4.
David Dexter, The New Guinea Offensives; Australia in the War of 1939–1945; Series 1, Army (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1961), 15.
QSA, A/28934, Criminal Depositions [Cairns], CCCT Sittings (10 May 1948) Deposition [no number]; Townsville Daily Bulletin, 11 May 1948; Cairns Post, 11 May 1948, 3; QSA, A/18439, Criminal Files-Supreme Court, Northern District, Townsville, TSCT Sittings (12 August 1946), Deposition [no number]. On Australians and homosex in European camps see Pairman, ‘In Which We Serve’, 36. On Americans and homosex in Japanese camps see J. E. Nardini, ‘Survival Factors in American Prisoners of War of the Japanese’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 109 (1952), 243.
Nardini, ‘Survival Factors in American Prisoners of War of the Japanese’, 243. Also see Frank Bongiorno, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2012), 187.
Mark Johnston, Whispering Death: Australian Airmen in the Pacific War (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011), 3.
For an excellent history of the RAAF see Johnston, Whispering Death. Also see John Robertson, Australia at War 1939–1945 (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1981), 17;
Joan Beaumont, Australian Defence: Sources and Statistics (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 216.
For more on queer onboard geographies see Paul Barker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea (London: Longman, 2003), 67–71. On homosex on board ships in the RAN see for example NAA, A1194, 29.09/8563B, Department of Defence Return of Naval Courts Martial (Quarter Ended 31 March 1944), Entry 5870 (14 January 1943). For the US Navy see for example NARA, RG313, Box 21, Vol. I, Statement by G. W. B (Indexed 6 October 1943).
Sydney Smith, Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, 9th ed., vol. 2 (London: J. A. Churchill, 1934), 276.
Noah Riseman, ‘Serving Their Country: A Short History of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Service in the Australian Army’, Australian Army Journal, X, 3 (2013), 15–16.
Judith A. Bennett, Jacqueline Leckie and Angela Wanhalla, ‘Mother’s Darlings: Secrets and Silences in the Wake of the Pacific War’, in The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrances and Culture, eds Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh (London: Routledge, 2015), 214. Judith A. Bennett gives an excellent overview of the complexities of inter-cultural relationships in her Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), esp. 28–41. 157–76;
Gilbert Herdt, ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Ian Stuart, Port Moresby: Yesterday and Today (Sydney: Pacific Publications, 1973), 141.
Kim Munholland, Rock of Contention: Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 89. John Lawrey gives a figure of 17,000 in his The Cross of the Lorraine in the South Pacific: Australia and the Free French Movement 1940–1942 (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1982), 93.
Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991), 89–90;
Dino Hodge, Did You Meet Any Malagas? A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital (Nightcliff: Little Gem, 1993), 12, 29; Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, 109; Michael Pate, An Entertaining War (Sydney: Dreamweaver, 1986), 72–73.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 70.
Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire, 255–79; John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 471–72;
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), 23–39.
Peter Robinson, The Changing World of Gay Men (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–18.
John Barrett, We Were There: Australian Soldiers of World War II Tell Their Stories (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987), 367.
Jill Julius Matthews, ‘The History of the Exhibition of Pornographic Film in Australia’, in Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945 to 2010, eds Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 18.
David Walker, ‘The Getting of Manhood’, in Australian Popular Culture, eds Peter Spearritt and David Walker (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 141.
Mark Johnston, At the Frontline: Experiences of Australian Soldiers in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 712.
Lawson Glassop, The Rats in New Guinea (Sydney: Horwitz, 1963). Glassop’s work is presumably based on his own wartime experience and much of the material for this book was taken from his first novel which was published during the war, We Were the Rats (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1944).
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Smaal, Y. (2015). Men in Uniform. In: Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-36514-9_4
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