Abstract
The year 1967 marked a watershed in English law. Twenty-two years after the end of the Second World War, homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales by the Sexual Offences Act.1 Prior to the introduction of the new legislation, the hero of Alamein, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, urged the House of Lords not to sanction the legislation.
Our task is to build a bulwark which will defy the evil influences seeking to undermine the very foundations of our national character. I know it is said this is allowed in France and some other countries. We are not French, we are not from other nations, we are British – thank God.2
While Montgomery could not slow the momentum of the civil law nor the rumours that he himself was a homosexual, his concerns were shared by policy-makers within the Armed Forces. Indeed military chiefs and the Wolfenden committee agreed that decriminalising homosexual acts in the forces would affect discipline and threaten the safety of lowranking servicemen.3 As a result, homosexual acts remained punishable by military law even though they were made legal for civilian men over the age of 21.
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Notes
‘94–49 vote for change in homosexual law’, The Times, 25 May 1965. See also S. Hall, ‘Letters show Monty as “repressed gay”’, The Guardian Online, 26 February 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4142165,00.html, accessed 2 January 2007 and N. Hamilton, The Full Monty: Montgomery of Alamein, 1887–1942 [vol. 1] (London, 2002).
Home Office, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London, 1957), p. 53.
R. C. Benge, Confessions of a Lapsed Librarian (London, 1984), p. 25.
The War Office, Manual of Military Law (London, 1939), p. 115.
The Ministry of Defence, Report of the Homosexual Policy Assessment Team (London, 1996), p. 120.
D. McGhee, ‘Looking and Acting the Part: Gays in the Armed Forces-A Case of Passing Masculinity’, Feminist Legal Studies, 6 (1998), p. 210.
A. Belkin and R. L. Evans, ‘The Effects of Including Gay and Lesbian Soldiers in the British Armed Forces: Appraising the Evidence’, Centre for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military (Santa Barbara, 2000), p. 60.
C. D’Este, ‘The Army and the Challenge of War 1939–1945’, in D. Chandler and I. Beckett (eds) The Oxford History of the British Army (London, 1996), p. 272.
The War Office, Army Discipline: 1939–1945 (London, 1950), appendix 1 (a). There are no official figures for the number of officers court-martialled for indecency, nor for the number of men tried for indecency in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.
A. Jivani, It’s Not Unusual (London, 1997), p. 70; UKTV History, Love, Sex and War, episode one: ‘Sex with strangers’ (Testimony Films) 6 November 2006.
W. F. Mellor, History of the Second World War: United Kingdom Medical Series-Casualties and Medical Statistics (London, 1972), p. 829. 3,780,000 men served in the Army between 1939 and 1945.
The War Office, Army Discipline: 1939–1945 (London, 1950), appendix 1 (a).
C. M. Peniston-Bird, ‘Classifying the Body in the Second World War: British Men in and out of Uniform’, Body and Society, 9 (2003), 33.
E. K. Ginsberg (ed.), Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, 1996), pp. 2–3.
T. Shefer and N. Mankayi, ‘The (Hetero)Sexualization of the Military and the Militarization of (Hetero)Sex: Discourses on Male (Hetero)Sexual Practices among a Group of Young Men in the South African Military’, Sexualities, 10 (2007), 192.
See also P. Higate (ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, 2003)
and R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 2005).
P. Beck, Keeping Watch (Manchester, 2004), p. 13.
G. Braybon and P. Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London, 1987), p. 205.
T. Shefer and N. Mankayi, ‘The (Hetero)Sexualization of the Military and the Militarization of (Hetero) Sex’, 2007, p. 198.
According to Matt Houlbrook, ‘queen’ and ‘quean’ were used interchangeably in the first half of the twentieth century. However, in his Dictionary of the Underworld, Eric Partridge uses ‘quean’ as the standard spelling, hence, my adoption of this term. See E. Partridge, Dictionary of the Underworld (Hertfordshire, 1995), pp. 545–549;
M. Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–57 (London, 2005).
A. Jivani, It’s Not Unusual (London, 1997), p. 65.
A. Jivani, It’s Not Unusual, 1997, p. 65.
P. Higate, ‘Concluding Thoughts: Looking to the Future’, in P. Higate (ed.) Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (London, 2003), p. 209.
A. De Courcy, Debs at War: How Wartime Changed Their Lives (London, 2005), pp. 159–160.
J. Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago, 1999), p. xviii.
G. Ryley Scott, Sex Problems and Dangers in War-Time: A Book of Practical Advice for Men and Women on the Fighting and Home Fronts (London, 1940), p. 76.
J. Costello, Love, Sex and War: changing values, 1939–1954 (London, 1985), p. 164.
Traditionally, the queer community has always favoured the anonymity and sexual choice of the city. Matt Houlbrook has demonstrated that London drew thousands of migratory gay men onto its streets precisely because of its reputation as a sexual metropolis. New York was also a haven for gays and lesbians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See G. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994);
M. Houlbrook, Queer London, 2005.
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© 2009 Emma Vickers
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Vickers, E. (2009). ‘The Good Fellow’: Negotiation, Remembrance, and Recollection — Homosexuality in the British Armed Forces, 1939–1945. In: Herzog, D. (eds) Brutality and Desire. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234291_5
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