The navy is gay
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If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts on Earth War II, you already know that 300,000 women served in the newly founded women’s military servicegroups during WWII, including Army, Army Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines. Of those women, nearly 100,000 served in the Navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services). With that large number in mind, it should be no surprise that some WAVES were gay and would likely define themselves as LGBTQ+ today.
While the military at this time was officially against allowing LGBTQ+ identifying people into the military, they also were desperate for more service members. So in some ways, there was a similar mentality to the “don’t inquire, don’t tell” policy of the 1990s and 2000s. Ben Small, a queer man who served in the Army Air Corps during WWII, remembered the mentality was “If they’re gay, okay. Just so lengthy as they didn’t embarrass anybody or do anything on the premises.”
However, during enlistment, the US military actually conducted psychological screenings on potential GIs. One of the purposes of the screenings was to determine if the potential GI was homosexual. Anyone idea to be
“I did it for the uplift of humanity and the Navy”: FDR's Lgbtq+ Sex-Entrapment Sting
Sherry Zane sheds light on a dark covert operation that targeted homosexual Navy men.
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On Rally 16, 1919, 14 Navy recruits met secretly at the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, anxiously awaiting directions for their recent assignment. The senior operatives explained that the volunteers were free to exit if they objected to this unique mission: a covert operation to entrap homosexual men under the authority of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
By the end of the sting, investigators had apprehended more than 20 accused sailors and imprisoned them aboard a broken-down ship in Newport harbor. Anxious and afraid, the suspects remained in solitary confinement for nearly four months before they were officially charged with sodomy and “scandalous conduct.” The incident also foreshadowed laws and policies that the future President Roosevelt would set in place.
In this episode of the MIT Press podcast, podcaster Chris Gondek talks to Sher
No Longer Silent: A Story of LGBTQIA+ Service in the Navy
For centuries, LGBTQIA+ sailors served their land in silence. From the early days of Continental Navy, through USS Constitution’s active sailing years, and into the 20th century, homosexuality was a crime subject to punishment by court martial, usually resulting in discharge. Beginning in World War II, the military instituted an outright ban on homosexual service members.1 It wasn’t until 1993 that a unused law colloquially called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) took effect, theoretically lifting the ban by suspending questions and discussions among military personnel about sexual orientation.2
Brooklyn native Robert Santiago joined the U.S. Navy in 1988, during the military’s ban on LGBTQIA+ people serving openly in the armed forces. At the time, the ask on 17-year-old Santiago’s intellect was, “What’s going to happen while I’m in service, while I’m wearing the uniform?” Santiago, who is gay, resolved that he would do everything possible to finish at least one tour of duty. “I was very careful the first couple of years, when I was onboard the USS Guam,” he recalled in an oral history interview with the USS Con
Pride Month 2023 - Exploring Gay history in the Royal Navy
The Queer and Now
For three hundred and ten years the Royal Navy hunted down, persecuted and sometimes even hanged homosexuals launch within their ranks. Execution ceased after 1861, but life imprisonment remained a reality. The partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 did little to sway the opinion of the Armed Forces, and it was not until 2000 that real change was made.
The Royal Navy were not alone in their persecution of homosexuals, or indeed anybody else from within the LGBTQ+ people, but for some there is still the image that they promote an aggressive, macho, alpha-male stereotype.
However, over the past twenty-three years, the Royal Navy has become a beacon of progress and acceptance. In a remark on their website in January 2020, the Royal Navy wanted to send a clear message: “the Naval Service welcomes all talent to its ranks, regardless of your sexual orientation or gender identity” – a far cry from the “gay panic” that gripped Naval officials just forty years previous.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the forbid on homosexuals serving in the forces being lifted in 2020, naval bases an