With a small book, Emma Vickers attempts to fill a big gap in the histories of the military and of sexuality. In Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45, Vickers explodes the myth that individuals who desired members of the same sex did not participate in the Second World War by exploring the interaction between those desires and the practices of the British government. She argues that the British armed forces had a pragmatic attitude towards same-sex activity that created a temporary and conditional tolerance for expressions of same-sex desire during the Second World War.
The book is organized topically, and in the first chapter, Vickers gives a historical overview of the medical boards inspecting British recruits since the Boer War to demonstrate that physicians were not interested in excluding homosexuals. Instead, their main concern was excluding unstable individuals who might receive pensions for war-induced mental disorders. She attributes this lack of concern about sexuality to the demands of mobilizing 10 percent of the population for military service and to the widespread belief that effeminate men would be “straightened out” by military discipline and exercise. Her key insight is that British law, medicine, and popular culture viewed same-sex desire as acts in a moral and criminological framework rather than as identities. Homosexuals, in other words, had not yet emerged in Britain.
In the second and third chapters Vickers looks at the experience of soldiers with same-sex desires on and off duty in order to show the war provided greater opportunities for expressing their sexuality. She explains that the Navy promoted homosocial ties with the buddy or “oppo” system, which assigned new recruits to a more senior colleague and to a recruit who was approximately the same age. In the Army, the Royal Air Force, and the women's services, a more informal buddying up system made close emotional bonds between members of the same sex the norm. Vickers uses the concept of “homosex,” same-sex activity that makes no assumptions about the sexuality of its participants, to understand them. Vickers shows that when those bonds became sexual, military authorities generally tolerated homosex due to the absence of women and to the threat of venereal disease from prostitutes. Drawing on oral history interviews with queer veterans, she also argues persuasively that the “people's war” rhetoric of the British government allowed those usually deemed “peripheral citizens” to be included in the ranks of the military if they were discrete (69).
In chapter 3, Vickers examines unofficial sources of tolerance. One of her great insights comes from her analysis of how servicemen appropriated spaces that were used by the armed forces, such as London parks, army trucks, and foreign locales to escape sexual constraints. She also shows that queer soldiers could express their sexuality more openly if they were regarded as good fellows who were accepted and valued by their units. The queer veterans she interviewed often fit in by exaggerating their feminine qualities through camp and female impersonation. Vickers interprets this behavior as a way of reassuring heterosexuals they were nonthreatening. Undoubtedly, she is right on this point, but the requirement that one conform to demeaning stereotypes suggests that tolerance was more limited than Vickers contends.
In chapter 4 Vickers documents how pragmatism influenced military discipline related to same-sex offenses. Vickers cross-references indecency charges related to same-sex offenses in the registers for the Army, the Royal Air Force, and the Navy with corresponding records in the military charge books to determine the exact acts and the resulting punishments, using a series of informative tables to show her findings. Disciplinary procedures were undertaken when men violated the wartime norms of tolerance through indiscretion, inefficiency, and the absence of consent. Although she notes that officers were convicted at lower rates than were enlisted men and were never imprisoned, she inexplicably fails to ponder how class influenced the treatment of officers. Vickers explains the relatively small number of individuals who were formally punished by offering anecdotal evidence that informal punishments such as voluntary reduction in rank and reposting were the norm. She also reveals that few men and women received medical discharges for being homosexual. By contrast, she does not say how many military personnel caught engaging in homosex were discharged as “services no longer required,” abbreviated as “SNLR.” An administrative discharge, “SNLR” stigmatized veterans as morally unfit, so employers typically refused to hire them. Allan Berube demonstrated the potential significance of administrative discharges for queer US veterans in Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (2010). He found approximately five thousand queer veterans who received “undesirable” or “blue” discharges and argues that their fight to overturn these discharges began the gay rights movement in the United States. Vickers missed the opportunity to investigate whether the same was true in Britain.
In her conclusion, Vickers substantiates her argument that the war did not have a lasting impact on public attitudes toward homosexuality by examining the rejection of what the archbishop of Canterbury called “wartime morality” in the 1950s (155). Queer men were associated with the threat of Communism, and prosecutions for same-sex activity soared. Concurrently, medical studies changed understandings of same-sex desire: from being a moral defect it was seen as a mental illness. Vickers argues that the sympathy engendered for homosexuals promoted tolerance in civilian life, but intolerance in the British military only increased.
Although her evidence is limited (she interviewed just ten queer veterans) and mostly pertains to men, Vickers demonstrates that gays and lesbians served in the British armed forces during the Second World War, largely because military necessities fostered a short-lived tolerance for same-sex desire. Much of this story has been told by Berube in an American context, but she finds an important difference in the later shift in Britain to medical understandings of homosexuality. In addition, her attention to the fluidity of sexual identities and to how various spaces shaped same-sex subculture extends the findings of queer history to military history. These contributions, along with Vickers's straightforward prose and use of illustrations, will make Queen and Country interesting to general readers as well as to scholars.
