Two new books are here to prove it by shining a light on the role gay men played in both world wars.
Two new books are here to prove it by shining a light on the role gay men played in both world wars.© Provided by Queerty

“Gay sex in the WWI trenches must’ve hit so crazy,” mused a Twitter user on April 1. Yes, it must have — and two new books are here to prove it by shining a light on the role gay men played in both world wars.

In Memoriam by Alice Winn is a romance between two young soldiers fighting in World War I, while Luke Turner’s Men At War blends history and memoir to look at World War II soldiers outside of a straight, cisgender ideal. Together, these books point to a growing fascination with what queerness looked like for 20th-century military men.

Winn and Turner aren’t pulling their queer war narratives from thin air. Winn’s In Memoriam, though fictional, is heavily inspired by the poems, letters, and other writings of WWI soldiers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. 

“It’s not as if I could find primary sources for what gay sex was like at the front,” Winn told Yahoo News, “but it seems unlikely that it never happened.” Indeed, though there are no concrete accounts of gay sex in the trenches, historial records show that more than 230 British soldiers were court-martialed and imprisoned for “homosexual offenses” during WWI.

Meanwhile, Turner’s Men At War tells the true stories of gay men who fought in WWII, like flying ace Ian Gleed and army officer Dan Billany, along with other military personnel who didn’t conform to hetero-masculine stereotypes.

“I was very adamant that I didn’t just want this to be a book about sexuality,” said Turner. “I wanted to include men who were heterosexual too but who sit outside expectations of a vigorous war-like masculinity.”

Conversations about queerness at wartime are popping up through less formal channels, too: a recent viral Twitter thread pointed out that the leather subculture has its origins with returning WWII combat veterans who, having discovered their queerness while at war, didn’t want to settle down and form a nuclear family.

The thread goes on to discuss how there were whole gay bars dedicated to servicing military men while on shore leave, as well as how military regalia became “so fetishized” in gay culture. (And don’t worry — Leah Tigers, the writer behind the thread, cites her sources, including historians like Magnus Hirschfeld and John Loughery.)

Narratives about queer people in war settings are likely to draw controversy from gay and straight people alike: straights, for gay people messing up their hypermasculine idea of the military, and gays, for feeling lumped in with the heteronormative stereotype of soldiers. But that attitude is reductive from both sides, said Turner, and enforces an unnecessary binary.

“Some people in LGBTQ+ circles don’t want queer people to be warriors,” he said. “I think sometimes there’s a feeling that that’s aggressive hetero-masculine behavior. But I think that’s wrong, as much as the homophobic view that queer people can’t fight is wrong.”

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