Coming Out Under Fire

The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II

Allan Bérubé

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899649
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding antihomosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontation--not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on GIs' wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fough--one for America and another as homosexuals within the military. Berube's book, the inspiration for the 1995 Peabody Award-winning documentary film of the same name, has become a classic since it was published in 1990, just three years prior to the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has continued to serve as an uneasy compromise between gays and the military. With a new foreword by historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, this book remains a valuable contribution to the history of World War II, as well as to the ongoing debate regarding the role of gays in the U.S. military.

CHAPTER 1
Getting In

Early in 1943 Robert Fleischer, who lived with his family on Manhattan's Upper West Side, went down to the Grand Central Palace induction station for his physical. When he reached the psychiatrist's office at the end of the line, he was scared to death of being found out. This nineteen-year-old draftee wanted desperately to get into the Army to avenge the death of a cousin who had been killed at Pearl Harbor, but he had heard that the Army was rejecting gay men for military service. Carefully planning to hide his homosexuality from Army examiners, Fleischer was surprised when the psychiatrist merely asked him “Do you like girls?” to which he responded with a truthful yes because, he recalled forty years later, “I liked girls!” Fleischer wondered why the psychiatrist hadn't figured him out. “My God,” he thought, “couldn't he see my curly platinum blond hair that was partly bleached, the walk, maybe the sissy S in my voice—all the things that I thought would give me away?” But as he left the induction station, he sighed with relief that he had been found fit to serve in the United States Army.

Fleischer was one of 18 million young men in the United States who were examined at 6,400 draft boards and 108 induction stations during World War II.¹ His encounter with the Army psychiatrist took place because an expanding military screening system increasingly focused on homosexuality. Before the war, the military had had no official procedure for preventing gay men from entering its ranks. But when the war heated up in Europe, psychiatric consultants to the Selective Service System in Washington began to piece together a rationale and initial procedures for excluding homosexuals. As their colleagues at induction stations across the country received directives from headquarters instructing them to disqualify homosexuals, they faced the same dilemma as the psychiatrist at Robert Fleischer's physical exam—whether to reject these young men and women or ignore them and quietly let them slip into the Army. And as word got out that homosexuals were being rejected, gay men and lesbians had to decide whether to hide or declare their homosexuality to the psychiatric examiners posted at the military's gates.

The psychiatric profession's campaign to promote psychiatric screening got off the ground during the summer of 1940 when, in response to the full-scale German air bombing of Britain, Congress authorized expanded defense budgets and passed the conscription act. Prompted by a growing sense of urgency, and pursuing their agenda of showing how psychiatry could contribute to the war effort, leading American psychiatrists set out to persuade the Selective Service System to give psychiatric as well as physical examinations to selectees.

Two of the most influential psychiatrists in the campaign for “Selective Service psychiatry” were Harry Stack Sullivan and Winfred Overholser. Sullivan, a forty-eight-year-old practicing psychiatrist who described himself as a “slight, bespectacled mild-looking bachelor with thinning hair and mustache,” lived in Bethesda, Maryland, with his devoted male companion. By the 1930s Sullivan had broken off from traditional psychoanalysis to create a theory and practice of “interpersonal psychiatry” that profoundly influenced modern American psychiatry. As president of the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation and coeditor of the journal Psychiatry, Sullivan's aim was to apply the principles of psychiatry to society as a whole. His wartime accomplishment in this area was to design and implement what journalist Alfred Deutsch called a “magnificent plan for psychiatric screening of draftees.”² Overholser, also forty-eight, but a married man with children, used his positions as superintendent of Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington and chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Neuropsychiatry to help Sullivan implement his plan.³ Together with Harry A. Steckel, chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Military Mobilization Committee, of which Sullivan and Overholser were members, these men developed the military's wartime program for psychiatric screening.⁴ Amid the confusion and uncertainty in Washington during the peacetime mobilization, it took only these few men with vision, an agenda, and dedication to bring about rapid and far-reaching policy changes.

In May 1940, as soon as President Roosevelt asked Congress to expand the armed forces, Sullivan and his colleagues at the White Foundation went to work drawing up their screening plan. At the same time Overholser, at the request of the Federal Board of Hospitalization, wrote a memorandum that convinced Roosevelt and his Selective Service advisers of the need for such screening. In late October, following the first draft registration day, Sullivan, Overholser, and Steckel met at National Headquarters in Washington with Selective Service Director Clarence Dykstra and representatives of the War Department to draw up a final version of Sullivan's proposal. They called for the appointment of over thirty thousand local board examiners who would conduct psychiatric interviews no shorter than fifteen minutes, the establishment of over six hundred Medical Advisory Boards with one psychiatrist on each to review problem cases, a second psychiatric interview at Army induction stations, and an extensive program to educate all examiners in the basic principles of psychiatry. Within a few weeks the Army adjutant general and the director of Selective Service issued directives to all Army corps areas and draft boards launching this new program. A month later, Sullivan was appointed as psychiatric consultant to SSS Director Dykstra, who was friendly with psychiatrists and fully supported Sullivan's plan. Thus began what was called the “honeymoon period” in the marriage of psychiatry and the Selective Service.

Psychiatrists used economic arguments to convince War Department and Selective Service representatives of the necessity of psychiatric screening. The federal government, they argued, had spent over one billion dollars caring for the psychiatric casualties of World War I, who—by the beginning of World War II—still occupied more than half of all Veterans Administration hospital beds.⁵ Screening could reduce these costs by weeding out potential psychiatric casualties before they became military responsibilities. But these psychiatrists also promoted screening to enhance the prestige, influence, and legitimacy of their profession, which other physicians had for decades dismissed as the “Cinderella” of the medical specialties. Military screening offered psychiatrists the opportunity to introduce tens of thousands of physicians and draft board members to the value and basic principles of psychiatry.

These early efforts to establish a screening program to determine the mental health of potential soldiers carved out the territory on which others would build an antihomosexual barrier and the rationale for using it. Ironically, both Sullivan and Overholser, as well as some of their colleagues, shared what they called “enlightened” views on how the military should handle its homosexual personnel. Harry Stack Sullivan himself was homosexual but kept this part of his life private. Professionally, he believed that sexuality played a minimal role in causing mental disorders and that adult homosexuals should be accepted and left alone—a controversial position that made him a dissident among psychoanalysts in the United States.⁶ Winfred Overholser, from his position on the National Research Council, crusaded more actively against the military's traditional system of sending homosexuals to prison. Whenever he could, he tried to shift, as he wrote to a colleague, “the hard-boiled attitude of some of these worthies” toward one of accepting homosexuality as a problem to be handled by psychiatrists, not prison guards. Overholser believed that military officials, as well as the public, did not think rationally about homosexuality because the subject was “so overlaid with emotional coloring that the processes of reason are often obscured.”⁷ Although both of these men believed that some “overt” or “confirmed” homosexuals should be excluded from the armed forces for their own good and for the good of the military, they and many of their colleagues cautioned that these rejectees should not be punished, discriminated against, or morally condemned.

Sullivan's initial plan for psychiatric screening, consistent with his own psychiatric theory, included no references to homosexuality.⁸ But his belief in the relative unimportance of “sexual aberrations” in determining mental illnesses was undermined as his plan passed through Washington bureaucratic channels. To each revision of Sullivan's initial plan, other psychiatrists added fragments of the more-dominant psychiatric theory that homosexuality was a mental disorder that should disqualify a man for military service. Throughout the war, whenever psychiatrists tried to reform the military's policies on homosexuals, their proposals were subjected to this same process of compromise and modification. Memoranda were reviewed by committees and circulated among officials who attached “indorsements” stating their own opinions, objections, and suggestions for revisions. The most activist psychiatrists were frustrated by the red tape that passed their proposals through this military chain of command, placing final decisions in the hands of a few high-ranking officials, many of whom harbored prejudices against both psychiatry and homosexuality. This bureaucratic process itself, by expanding the volume of directives, memoranda, and revisions, helped build the momentum of the military's wartime preoccupation with homosexuality.

The first directive to grow out of Sullivan's initial plan for psychiatric screening, Medical Circular No. 1, was issued by the Selective Service on November 7, 1940, to more than 30,000 volunteer physicians at local draft boards.⁹ Sullivan called this circular “a child's guide to psychiatric diagnosis” because its purpose was to explain psychiatry to community physicians who had had no training in psychiatry and who were likely to doubt its scientific merit or clinical value.¹⁰ Circular No. 1 explained in lay terms five psychiatric “categories of handicap”—expanded to eight in later revisions—and concluded with a list of miscellaneous “deviations” examining physicians should watch for. Homosexuality was not mentioned in this first screening circular.

By May 1941, however, after the Army Surgeon General's Office had issued its own screening circular to induction station examiners and Selective Service revised Circular No. 1 to bring the two directives into line, both screening directives for the first time included ‘ ‘homosexual proclivities” in their lists of disqualifying “deviations.” The Army circular also listed “many homosexual persons” among those to be rejected because of “psychopathic personality disorders,” whereas the Selective Service circular instructed draft board doctors to refer all suspected homosexual cases to the regional Medical Advisory Board psychiatrists for closer examination.¹¹ In January the Navy had issued its own directive inaugurating a procedure for eliminating the “neuropsychiatrically unfit.”¹² It had declared unfit those individuals “whose sexual behavior is such that it would endanger or disturb the morale of the military unit”—a new Navy screening category that as yet only implicitly disqualified homosexuals.

Thus, by mid-1941, several months before the United States declared war, the administrative apparatus for screening out homosexuals at three examination points—the Selective Service System, the Army, and the Navy—was already in place and backed by Director of Selective Service Clarence Dykstra, the surgeons general of the Army and Navy, and their respective psychiatric consultants.

Sullivan, Overholser, Steckel, and other psychiatrists who developed the new screening guidelines began their project by modifying the military's more rudimentary World War I qualification standards to reflect the changes in psychiatric theory that had developed in the 1920s and 1930s. The mental-disorder categories in World War I had been based on the brain-disease model of insanity—the dominant psychiatric theory in the United States in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The brain-disease model classified various mental and “moral” (emotional) abnormalities—among which homosexuality was included—as symptoms of brain lesions and neurological disorders caused by heredity, trauma, or bad habits such as masturbation, drunkenness, and drug addiction. Most physicians considered neurology to be the most scientific approach to mental disease, and it was for this reason that the primary focus of military screening for mental defects during World War I was on intelligence and the nervous system rather than on personality disorders. If any homosexuals were rejected as such in World War I, it was because they had physiological disorders or had prison or insane asylum records as “sex perverts,” not because they had homosexual personalities or tendencies.

In the early twentieth century, there still was no professional consensus on the causes, description, treatment, and nomenclature for homosexual conditions. But most psychiatrists believed in the brain-disease model and developed surgical or physical-therapy procedures to treat homosexual patients.¹³ During the second and third decades of this century, however, a minority of psychiatrists in the United States moved beyond the mere description and categorization of symptoms and began to relate them to one another as progressive stages in the development of mental disease. The marginal but growing interest during these years in Freud's psychoanalytic theories, which described homosexuality more as a psychosexual than a constitutional condition, was only part of the American profession's increasing attention to the personality behind the symptoms. This new approach took into account a patient's unique life situation, integrating biological and personality factors, and led psychiatrists to try to diagnose severe disorders in their early stages in an effort to prevent mental disease. Sullivan, Overholser, and their colleagues who developed the military's World War II policies were schooled in this psychoanalytic approach to mental illness. By the late 1930s psychoanalytic theory and techniques had dominated American psychiatry and had spawned dissidents who, like Sullivan, developed their own schools of thought.

Immediately after World War I, those psychiatrists who believed that they could identify men with less grossly observable personality disorders, screen them out of the military, and prevent psychiatric casualties in combat succeeded in changing Army regulations. In 1921 the Army issued expanded psychiatric screening standards that remained in effect until the eve of World War II.¹⁴ The framers of these interwar standards drew on the theories of personality development to construct their list of psychiatric disorders, but the military regulations encased these new psychiatric concepts in the theory and language of degeneration, which ranked human beings into hierarchical categories based on characteristics that were considered inferior or “degenerate” by virtue of their deviation from a generally white, middle-class, and native-born norm.

The framers of the Army's interwar physical standards listed feminine characteristics among the “stigmata of degeneration” that made a man unfit for military service.¹⁵ Males with a “degenerate physique,” the regulation explained, “may present the general body conformation of the opposite sex, with sloping narrow shoulders, broad hips, excessive pectoral and pubic adipose [fat] deposits, with lack of masculine hirsute [hair] and muscular markings.” A young man with a “scant and downy beard” or a ‘ ‘female figure” was also to be closely observed for evidence of “internal glandular disturbances.” In addition to these “anatomical” stigmata of degeneration, the interwar standards listed “sexual perversion”—a broad category that included oral and anal sex between men—as one of many “functional” stigmata of degeneration. The Army standards also listed “sexual psychopathy” as one of many “constitutional” psychopathic states—biologically based psychiatric conditions that, through heredity, bad habits, or injury, caused a person to lose the ability to adjust to civilized society. With these 1921 standards, the Army established its first written guidelines for excluding men who displayed feminine bodily characteristics or who were sexual “perverts” or “psychopaths.”

During the two decades between the wars, however, without pressure from the psychiatric profession and with a shortage of volunteers, psychiatric screening standards existed only on paper and were rarely implemented.¹⁶ In their 1940–1941 revisions of the interwar standards, Sullivan and the other framers of the psychiatric screening plan for World War II dropped such outdated biological categories as “anatomical and functional stigmata of degeneration.” But throughout World War II, both the Army and Navy continued to describe homosexuality as a’ ‘constitutional psychopathic state” and to diagnose homosexual men and women as “sexual psychopaths.”

After Selective Service issued Medical Circular No. 1 to draft board physicians, Harry Stack Sullivan began the second phase of his screening plan—to teach the nation's psychiatrists how to put into practice the new guidelines for mass psychiatric screening. In December 1940 Sullivan, Overholser, and Steckel were appointed as a three-man advisory committee to the Selective Service to plan and direct a series of regional two-day seminars that took place from January to July 1941.¹⁷ At the same time, the Navy Surgeon General's Office, Bellevue Hospital in New York, and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, also held seminars on military psychiatric screening for their personnel.¹⁸ Lecturers advised psychiatrists to teach others in the medical profession what they had learned at the seminars. Many of the lectures were published throughout 1941 in psychiatric and medical journals, educating an even wider audience of professionals.

The psychiatrists who conducted these seminars greatly expanded their profession's discussion of how the rejection of homosexuals could improve the military's preparedness for war. Seminar lecturers described gay ...