Australian Army Journal

HISTORY
‘A Homosexual Institution’:
Same-sex Desire in the Army During
World War II
Introduction
On Anzac Day 1982, a small group of ex-servicemen approached the Shrine of
Remembrance in Melbourne to lay a wreath in memory of the mates they had served
with in past wars. Bruce Ruxton, then Victorian State President of the Returned and
Services League, intercepted them. ‘There is no way you can lay a wreath,’
he declared, summoning a nearby police officer to escort the men away.
The problem was that these soldiers were members of the Gay Ex-servicemen’s
Association and ‘poofters’ were not the type of people Ruxton wanted to see
included in a day of remembrance that was rapidly taking on a sacred aura.
He went further, telling the Weekend Australian the next day that ‘I don’t know
where all these queers and poofters have come from. I don’t remember a single
poofter from World War Two.’ 1 Buzz Kennedy, a columnist for the same paper,
surveyed his mates from the 2/32nd, 2/28th and 2/43rd Battalions and reported that
they had all agreed: ‘ours was an entirely heterosexual mob’, Kennedy declared.
He went on snidely to question the gay veterans’ credentials: ‘With the visual
evidence of the size of the gay community in 1982, the question has to be:
where were they then?’ 2
Almost immediately, others wrote to the papers to correct the memories of these
two old war-horses. A doctor reported that ‘while the recorded number was small,
they did in fact exist’. 3 Another asserted that the batman (personal attendant) to no
fewer than three of the most famous Allied generals was ‘one of the gayest fellas
I have ever met; gay as a Christmas tree’ in fact. 4 A third declared that there had
been ‘quite a few [who] were tolerated as long as they took no for an answer’. 5
The belief that there were no homosexuals in the Australian armed forces is not new.
The official history of the Australian Army Medical Service’s work during World War I,
published in 1943, flatly denied the presence of ‘moral perversion’: ‘There is no
evidence pointing to any significant homosexuality in the Force, and this is on par
with Australian experience in general. The records of the [AIF] therefore provide no
contribution to the place of the homosexual in a total war effort.’ 6
But for historians of homosexuality the question has always been one of ‘absence
or invisibility?’ Absence of evidence is not, as we know, evidence of absence.
Since they began their work in the 1980s, Australian gay and lesbian historians
have been inspired by the gay liberation slogan ‘we are everywhere’ to find out
whether this is true; to see where homosexuals might be found — digging through
archives, interviewing women and men, hunting for clues and evidence — only to
discover that, yes, we were there, even in the armed forces. In this endeavour,
Australian Army Journal
Culture edition 2013, Volume X, Number 3 Page 25