Australian Army Journal

HISTORY
‘A Homosexual Institution’:
Same-sex Desire in the Army During
World War II
everyone was protected.’ 42 Pseudonym John was ‘having an experience’ with a sailor,
about the same age as himself, who insisted there were no homosexuals in the Navy
— which didn’t stop the two of them having ‘a nice time together just the same’. 43
For others, sex with other men occupied a realm apart in other ways — it was not,
for example, to be understood as cheating on girlfriends. 44 Some activity was
simply a response to particular erotically charged moments. Hadrian asserts that
the crowds at the Atherton town centre toilet dispersed only during interval in the
movies when many of the men left to ‘give the picture crowd a go’. 45 The screening
of pornography on film nights would usually generate an increased interest among
straight men in the chance to be sexually serviced. 46
The sheer scale of participation by straight men is perhaps the most surprising
element of these memoirs. Pseudonym John remembers ‘lots of other fellows who
just wanted to get their rocks off’ and he jokes that, within five minutes of Darwin
being re-opened to soldiers in early 1944 after the last of the air raids, a beat
(a cruising ground for men seeking sex with one another) was established —
it ran the full length of the main street in town and the bombed-out buildings
provided privacy for their sexual encounters. 47 All that was required was eye
contact while sauntering along the street, a casual greeting to indicate interest
and ‘you had a customer’. 48 Hadrian’s initial cautiousness and timidity evaporated
when he happened to find himself in the public toilet that the Army had erected
in Atherton town centre to cater for the influx of men: ‘every square inch of walls
[was] covered in graffiti, whose explicitness changed my mind about the Australian
Army in one fell swoop’. Returning at night he found the toilet ‘filled’ with men of all
ranks ‘from lonely privates to the occasional Major’. 49
It is not surprising, perhaps, that Hadrian believes that the troops were less
prejudiced in relation to homosexuality than the rest of the population. This also fits
with other recollections. Even reasonably public sexual encounters were greeted on
occasion with good-humoured interest. Pseudonym John reports an episode when
he happened to look into the cabin of a truck that he was in the back of and found
his mate Ron performing oral sex on the driver: ‘Look at this fellows!’ he urged the
others in the back of the truck with him — and he reports no offence being taken. 50
Australian Army Journal
Culture edition 2013, Volume X, Number 3 Page 32