Pride in Defence

The Australian Military and LGBTI Service since 1945

Noah Riseman, Shirleene Robinson

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780522876758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Since the Second World War the Australian military has undergone remarkable transformations in the way it has treated lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex service members: it has shifted from persecuting, hunting and discharging LGBTI members to embracing them as valued members who enhance the Force's capabilities.LGBTI people have served in the Australian military since its very beginnings, yet Australian Defence Force histories have been very slow to recognise this. Pride in Defence confronts that silence. It charts the changing policies and practices of the ADF, illuminating the experiences of LGBTI members in what was often a hostile institution.Drawing on over 140 interviews and previously unexamined documents, Pride in Defence features accounts of secret romances, police surveillance and traumatic discharges. At its centre are the courageous LGBTI members who served their country in the face of systemic prejudice. In doing so, they showed the power of diversity and challenged the ADF to make it a far stronger institution.

Chapter 1

Hidden gay and bisexual men, 1944–73

In late 1943, authorities from the US Army informed their Australian counterparts that an investigation had identified almost fifty Australian soldiers who were allegedly involved in homosexual acts. The Australian commanders knew that they had to deal with this, but they had a problem: there was no clear policy about how to manage homosexuals.¹ This is not to say that the Australian Army had never grappled with the presence of homosexuals. Peter Stanley has identified cases of men charged with disciplinary action in World War I for homosexuality,² and there is at least one identified case of an Australian soldier charged with ‘sodomy’ against an eleven-year-old in Britain.³ Tabloid newspapers like Truth occasionally featured stories about servicemen charged or convicted in civilian courts for acts of gross indecency.⁴ Commanding officers could prosecute homosexuality under broad rules such as ‘disgraceful conduct of a cruel, indecent or unnatural kind’ or ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’.⁵ Both Yorick Smaal and Garry Wotherspoon also provide numerous examples of World War II servicemen participating in kamp subcultures (to use the parlance of the era) in home front cities.⁶

The Navy has a more transparent paper trail showing prosecutions for homosexual acts. The annually published Return of Naval Courts-Martial and Disciplinary Courts shows that nine sailors were charged for sodomy, acts of gross indecency or indecent assaults between 1916 and 1945, only two of whom were acquitted.⁷ A 1939 naval document even expressed concern that some men were self-confessing to being ‘homo-sexualists’ to secure their own discharge. The memo recommended that such discharges should be classified as ‘unsuitable’ and that the dishonourable ‘services no longer required [SNLR]’ be attached to them. This would both punish those undesirable men and deter heterosexual men from feigning homosexuality to discharge from the Navy.⁸

The revelations from New Guinea in late 1943 seemed more serious. Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett have found examples of World War II commanding officers being relatively tolerant of homosexuality, so long as the men were discreet. Officers even tolerated gender non-conforming practices so long as they happened within particular bounds, such as drag shows for troop entertainment.⁹ Now that the Americans raised the issue of homosexuality, discretion was gone, and the Australian Army needed to deal with the problem of homosexuals in its ranks. For nine months, Army officials deliberated the formulation of a policy on homosexuality, presenting the first formal directive on homosexuality in 1944. In cases involving minors, violence or public obscenity, commanding officers should take disciplinary action against homosexuals. Other cases should be treated as medical issues, with psychological evaluations guiding whether the member could be ‘treated’ and retained in the Army. If they could not, then they would be discharged on medical grounds.¹⁰

The World War II precedents, both in policy and in practice, laid the foundations for how the Australian services dealt with male homo/bisexuality in the post-war era. As historians such as Graham Willett, Garry Wotherspoon, Robert Reynolds and Shirleene Robinson have written, the 1950s and 1960s were a time when there was much public silence surrounding homosexuality. That could be good for men who were inconspicuous, but it posed challenges for those wanting to be openly gay/bisexual or for those who were not discreet. Gay and bisexual men sometimes cruised for sex in public places known as beats; in fact, Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance was one known beat during and after the war.¹¹ Those who were caught faced stiff penalties, and police were known to entrap gay/bisexual men. The topic of homosexuality appeared in the media mostly through published accounts of police actions or court reports, and there was a marked increase in convictions for homosexual acts in the 1950s.¹²

In the armed forces, too, the 1950s and 1960s were a time of silence around male homosexuality. Whereas women who joined the military in the 1950s and 1960s transcended expected constructs of femininity and therefore came under greater scrutiny, men who joined the services were fulfilling cultural expectations of masculinity. Silences were partly reflective of the fact that male involvement in the military was considered both desirable and patriotic. The silences around homosexuality meant that service police gave little thought to the presence of gay or bisexual men, so the practice of hunting homosexual men was not common. Oral histories from gay and bisexual ex-servicemen reinforce the notion that silences worked in their favour: many recall same-sex activity happening regularly on bases or ships, and it being a non-issue. Fellow servicemen regularly knew or suspected certain men to be gay or bisexual, and they were happy to overlook it or sometimes even to approach them for sexual favours. It was only when someone became too open—whether caught in public or attracting attention from someone more hostile to homosexuality—that authorities intervened. Even then, the absence of a strong policy, and military desires to keep the issue of homosexuality quiet, meant that authorities dealt with these gay or bisexual men discreetly, letting the cycle of silence continue unchallenged.

This chapter explores the many complexities around silences and the experiences of gay and bisexual men from the end of World War II until the early 1970s. Importantly, the focus of this chapter is on men. As chapter 2 explores, lesbian and bisexual servicewomen faced a much more hostile environment during this era. This chapter first explores the challenge of gay/bisexual men’s own identity constructions. Silences around homosexuality and the enduring power of heterosexism—the assumption of heterosexuality as ‘normal’ and other sexualities being deviations—often made it difficult for men to realise, articulate or explore their sexual orientation. The Vietnam War experiences of gay/bisexual men are an interesting microcosm of the entire era because there was little homosexual activity, often because servicemen did not yet realise they were gay or because there were few same-sex opportunities. Yet for those who did have the opportunity, authorities often turned a blind eye to homosexual acts. This practice of tolerating homosexuality, so long as the men were discreet, continued on Australian ships and soil. The chapter finally turns to what happened when men were not discreet, showing the ways authorities policed homosexuality. The lack of coherent policies meant that investigations and discharges were inconsistent both within and across the services, just as homosexuality was emerging as a topic of public interest.

The archetypes

Silences among gay and bisexual men from the 1950s and 1960s could endure for decades, with many men denying, repressing or hiding their sexuality and never living an openly gay life. The passing of time makes it harder to uncover stories of homosexuality in the immediate post-war period, as many gay or bisexual servicemen from that era have since died. Nonetheless, some openly gay men who served in that era, or the families of deceased veterans, have shared stories. The gay and bisexual men from that era loosely fall into three archetypes: those who embraced their sexuality and pursued same-sex encounters; those who did not realise their sexuality until later in life, after they discharged; and those who knew they were gay or bisexual but tried to sublimate it, either by having relationships with women or by practising celibacy (mostly).

Some of the gay men who accepted their sexuality had an aura of boldness, engaging in what one might consider risky behaviour given the public taboos around homosexuality. Graham Jamieson, widower of Tom Goldsby, relates stories that Goldsby used to tell about his time in the British Army (1947–49; 1950–52) then the Australian Army (1952–58). One anecdote from the British Army in the Korean War involves Goldsby calming down a nervous comrade in the trenches by having sex with him. In a more feasible but equally bold tale, Jamieson describes when Goldsby was on sentry duty in Australia and a messenger arrived at the base. Goldsby said to his mate: ‘“You cover for me. I’m going to go back and fuck this bloke.” Tom said when he got to the bloke’s room, the bloke says, “Make sure you take your boots off. They’re clean sheets.”’ From 1955 to 1957, Goldsby was stationed in Penang and conducted regular patrols and ambushes during the Malayan Emergency. Goldsby forged a relationship with a local Malay man, who embarrassed Goldsby by dedicating a song to him over the radio. Jamieson does not know how Goldsby explained that away to his mates and just speculates that he ‘deafed it’.¹³

One reason Tom Goldsby got away with his bold behaviour is that, by all accounts, his peers liked him. In 1972, ‘Hadrian’ wrote about his fourteen years in the Army, including service in New Guinea, Borneo and Korea. During his career he had numerous conversations about homosexuality with other soldiers. He believed that ‘the average soldier couldn’t care less’ and that soldiers were more prone to judge each other by their ability. Hadrian recalled only one man who was discharged for homosexuality, but attributes that to the man being ‘universally disliked’. When he was caught and discharged for homosexuality, ‘Everybody cheered like mad, not because the WO [warrant officer] was camp, but because he was such an utter bastard.’¹⁴

Tom Goldsby was not the only Australian to have a same-sex relationship in Malaya. Bob Flanagan had joined the Army in late 1959 and served in Melbourne for two years, where he was already having sexual relations with men. In 1961 Flanagan began a two-year deployment to Taiping and then Seremban as one of sixteen Australians serving alongside about a hundred British soldiers. One weekend night in Kuala Lumpur, Flanagan went to a bar-café which hosted dances that catered to a gay and gay-friendly clientele. He met a working-class Malay man on a motorbike and began a relationship that lasted for a few months. The gentleman even introduced Flanagan to his family as his Australian ‘mate’. Flanagan then met another gay Malay, this one a wealthy owner of an orchid farm. That relationship lasted only a few weeks because an Australian soldier-mate found out and became jealous. As Flanagan recalls, the mate ‘came up and threatened to knock the shit out of the bloke I was dancing with, and that’s when he took me straight back to Seremban. We booked into a hotel and we had sex.’ The other man was a cook and had access to his own room, so for the next eighteen months he and Flanagan had a relationship.¹⁵

Bob Flanagan does not know if the other Australian soldiers ever knew about the relationship, although he suspects they did not because he believes they would have ‘probably belted the shit out of us or something like that’. The British, however, did catch Flanagan and the cook in bed one time; he recalls: ‘They didn’t act shocked; they were quite comfortable with us being in bed together—“Come on, you bastards, get out of bed and let’s play cards.” You know, just like, “Finish your breakfast”, or something like that. So I found their attitude was different to the Australians.’¹⁶ Flanagan’s worries about the Australians suggests, from his perspective, a more open culture of tolerance in the British Army. That said, given the close quarters, the nature of the relationship and the fact that the British soldiers caught Flanagan and the cook, it is quite likely that some of the other fourteen Australians either suspected or knew about their relationship. A key factor here that other cases in this chapter reinforce is that when servicemen were discreet, it was easy to turn a blind eye.

Brian Allen served in the British Army from 1953 to 1956 and subsequently emigrated to Australia, serving in the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers from 1959 to 1980. In both armies he used to ‘fool around’ with civilians at beats, and the occasional soldier as well. Allen did a stint with a UN peacekeeping force in South Korea in 1965, where he even picked up a Korean man. At numerous stages throughout his career, especially in the 1970s,...