1914-1939
OR: War, what is it good for? The gays, in a way.
So where were we before I accidentally got a job, a life and hobbies and neglected this project just a bit? We were with the Victorians, a right bunch of weirdos, who were in the midst of one of the greatest societal shifts (and every historian of science’s favourite event): the Industrial Revolution, that was shaping how people thought of themselves and how communities were made. Despite “gross indecency” being illegal, the queers1 were still, with a lot to thank that shifting society for, increasing their own visibility, and creating art and community. And now, society was going to shift again, because for reasons that are genuinely best explained with this Horrible Histories sketch that low-key has homosexual undertones I had never noticed before, a war was brewing.
When World War One broke out, as a statistical certainty, gays were fighing in it. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were both prolific war poets, who you learned about in year 9 English lessons2, were almost certainly lovers, which you almost certainly didn't learn about in year 9 English lessons. They met in Craiglockhart War hospital in Edinburgh and when they parted Sassoon wrote to Owen:
“Someday, I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes through Colinton; and how we laughed till the meteors showered around us, and we felt calm under the winter stars. And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time … [we] knew we loved one another as no men love for long.” (Edencamp, 2021)
Alternate title for this blog: “I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled and danced”.
With a literal war going on and the societal change and mobilisation that came with fighting it, naturally ideals were shifting. The image of the macho-patriarch of a nuclear family and ultra masculine soldier was crumbling. In their letters home soldiers share a softer, more tender comradery, and teased the naive image of what was expected of them, instead celebrating, despite criticism from politicians back home, “effeminate and deviant” emotions and behaviours that got them through. Some took it even further, fantasising about being women, maybe it was just a desire to be anywhere other than the hellscape of the trenches, but one wrote:
“We poor, poor men are so completely wicked. I wish I were a girl. I wish I weren’t a man! […] If only I were bedecked with curls, with stockings á la jour, I would charm a lieutenant, and I’d dance an extra round / My breasts would arch themselves as I waltz about in high heels”3
and, admittedly I’m no expert, but that seems pretty trans. This change in ideas of strong masculinity was used, especially in Germany, in the years that followed to fight for acceptance. Not only had the gays “proved” themselves not be a devient threat, and instead patriotic soldeirs who faught alongside everyone else, they urged people to realised that the supposedly effeminate traits they had been teased for their whole life was the exact traits soldiers needed to cope. (Crouthamel, 2014)
Back at home everyone was freaking out about women's sexuality. With men gone fighting a war, they were doing actual-real-life-out-of-the-kitchen jobs and conservative critics were losing it. Women were smoking, gaining economic independence, and though managing heavy machienary and wearing military uniforms and combat boots, they were embracing masculine parts of their identity they’d never had the permission to before. But with all these jobs, nicotine hits and tastes of financial freedom they were getting notions. Lesbian notions4. (Faderman, 1999). Before she got stuck down her Well of Loneliness, Radcliffe Hall would later fictionalise this in her psychological short story Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. Originally written in 1926 but not published until 1934, it tells of an awkward, unhappy childhood of Miss Ogilvy, who defies the quiet, doll loving expectations of young girls. However, during the war her tenacity and physicality becomes a strength rather than a disappointment. When she returns, emboldened by her wartime experience, she meets and falls both in love and into bed with another woman who she meets while exploring the caves on an island off the south coast of Devon. There’s also travel back to the Bronze age in what's either time travel, a dream, or some kind of magic trance and I’m confused too. (Mambrol, 2022) That along with them having some high profile criminal trials of their own, most notably that of Canadian Dancer Maud Allan in 1918, where she sued a journalist for reporting that she was a lesbian in an article called, I kid you not, The Cult of the Clitoris, lesbians had well and truly arrived in public consciousness. (Cohler, 2007).
First World War (spoilers - there will be another one) done, and rising up through the ruble, Berlin became the queer capital of Europe. Even though homosexual relations between men was illegal and wearing clothes that didn't match one’s sex could result in arrest for being a public disturbance, it wasn't strictly enforced; queer spaces were abundant and on the whole tolerated, if only because it kept the queers out of the public eye. One such bar was Eldorado, it had a sign above the door declaring “HERE IT IS RIGHT”5, music, dancing and a drag queen who ended their act by taking off their breasts and throwing them at the orchestra, again proving that the more things change the more the nonsense drag queens do stays the same.
Berlin also became a hotbed for studying sexuality, mainly by all around legend Magnus Hirschfield, who set up the world’s first known gay rights organisation in 1897. He’s the guy on the right wearing glasses with the incredible walrus moustache.
He declared that same-sex attraction wasn’t pathological, instead innate with no other links to character; he considered gender that existed beyond the binary, acknowledging a large spectrum of identities and that “there are no empty points present but rather unbroken connecting lines.” Everything he did was in the name of "science to justice”, aiming for his research to overturn Paragraph 175 of German Criminal Code, that criminalised homosexuality. In 1919 he opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexual Science. Despite frequent attacks by the press who used it to further the narrative of jews, such as Hirschfield, being overly sexual degenerates, they offered medical care, including potentially the first ever gender affirming surgeries, training, research, public education, acted as a social hub and held costume parties, like the one pictured above, and issued the first legal documents for people to be recognised as their true gender. (Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021). The documentary Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate is a fantastic documentary about this time in Berlin, its culture and the people living in it.
3,000 miles and an ocean away, post war New York was getting rowdy too. The Harlem Renaissance was a “spiritual coming of age”, with the celebration of Black music, theatre, and art away from the repression it suffered in the white mainstream; African Americans were owning their own publishing houses, newspapers, playhouses, nightclubs, and inventing what it meant to be cool. (National Museum of African American History & Culture, 2020) It was also super gay. As if Bessie Smith singing
“When you see two women walking hand in hand,
just look ’em over and try to understand:
They’ll go to those parties, have their lights down low
only those parties where women can go.” (Loher, 2022 p. 97)
wasn't enough, Gladys Bently was knocking about, dressing androgynous and masculine, openly flirted with women on stage, and even married in an illegal civil ceremony. When she moved to San Francisco she set up Mona’s 440 Club in 1939, widely thought to be the first lesbian bar. (Loher, 2022 p. 155) . A bar visited by Tulluah Bankhead, a Hollywood and Broadway actress, who described herself as “ambisextruous” and who may or may not have been a spy. In her 1980 autobiography she said “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.” Legend.
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In case you haven’t noticed by now, one of my many strange fascinations is early 20th century queer women, and there's one more I want to talk about because she tops (pun intended) my list of people I want to hang out with if I had a time machine. Marlene Dietrich. Born in Germany, 1901 her professional violin career was cut short due to a wrist injury, and she pivoted to theatre, becoming a staple of the 1920s German cabaret scene. After a few small roles in German cinema, she moved, with her husband and child but they weren’t going to get in her way, to Hollywood in the 1930s. Her character in Shanghai sacrifices herself to save her male lover, and her performance in this scene in Morocco from 1930, which I’m not even going to describe you just need to watch it, became my Roman Empire nearly 100 years later. Fellow film makers of her time described her as a “joyous bisexual with an appetite for many loves,” (Rich, 2023), and many modern commentators say it was this bisexuality that was the key to her success. In an era before the Hays code6, her ambiguous sex appeal was a massive draw, and with the timelessness of people loving celebrity scandals, her affairs with Cary Grant, JFK and Frank Sinatra, as well as Greta Garbo and Edith Piaf, made it easy to be obsessed with her. (Rosenthal, 2025)
But soon there was another world war brewing. With facism came a crackdown on any individual expression and homosexuality: the Nazi Party shut down Eldorado and turned it in the headquarters of the military organisation the SA, and constant vandalization caused our friend Hirschfeld to flee to Switzerland in the weeks before Hilter became chancellor. His institute and most of his work was destroyed.
Being on the other side and fighting it was pretty grim too. The US military asked recruits about their sexuality as part of psychiatric screenings, and homosexuality was grounds for a Blue Discharge, which would give you no military benefits and admission to a mental institution. (Foreman, 2020)
Even so, drag queen Terry Gardener served in the Royal Navy as a cook. Fellow Naval veteran John Bearmore, in his recounts of his time the war, tells of Freddie, an immensely popular coder, whose queerness was no secret, who impersonated Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields when the stress of battle reached its height, and regularly relayed messages and commanded troops by shouting “open fire, dear.” (Fryer, 2025)
This photograph of Phyllis (sometimes Philis) Abry and her lover Mildred appeared in promotional materials for the Women’s Arms Auxiliary Corps, an American service placing women in essential non-combat roles.
After being kicked out of a prestigious private high school when her love letter a felow female classmate was found, Phyllis joined the service, omitting to mention her sexuality by stating that the only reason she didn't have sex with men was because she was waiting until marriage. She met Mildren working in radio repair and their photograph was chosen as they represented the hardworking ideals of the WAAC. After the war they lived together for a while before Mildred left to go to university in Reno. Phyllis died in 1995, after a marriage to a man and with 4 children, however in an interview that was published in 2000 she said that she "couldn't ever forget who I truly was”. (Concepcion, 2020).
The WAAC wasn't the only time women left in the US during the war were dressing in jumpsuits. While I am aware A League of their Own, both the 1992 movie starring Geena Davis and the waaaay gayer 2022 TV remake with Abbi Jacobson and D’Arcy Carden that I’m still angry didn’t get a second season, is fictional, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League did exist from 1943-1954, and these fictional adaptations are based on the real lives of players, lesbians and lovers Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel. Netflix and longstanding frenemy Ryan Murphy made a lovely documentary about them.
And then, prehaps most importantly, there's Alan Turing. He studied at Kings College, Cambridge in the 1930s, a place through that the nineteenth and early twentieth century known, as shown through the research of Simon Goldhill7, to be a place of male intimacy and "romantic friendships”, a bubble where queer men lived and loved in close quarters in a “rather happy community”. There Turing developed the “undecideable problem” a mathematical feat that, for reasons I am not smart enough to understand, shows that there can be no complete truths, a beautiful metaphor and an incredibly influential factor in modern day commuter science. The day after Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Turing began work at Bletchley Park to decipher the German coding system, the enigma, and he cracked it, allowing food and other resources to be sent to the front line without interception, and allowing prior knowledge of Germany's attack plans, shortening the war by an estimated 2 years and countless lives, getting him a super secret OBE in 1945. (Cambridge University, 2012). Then he moved to Manchester where a burglary by the friend of an ex lover led the police to arrest him for “gross indecency". An OBE and wartime heroism couldnt save him from chemical castration with oestrogen, loss of all secuity clearance, denial of entry to the United States, and death aged 41 in suspicious circumstances that were ultimately ruled to be suicide. (Brierly, 2025) None of that miserable end can take away how his work is still a crucial part of all modern computing, how his smug little grin looks at you when you pay for anything with a £50 pound note, you know after you explain that yes they are legal tender and no you're not a drug dealer, or the slightly disappointing runway by Tia Kofi he inspired on Drag Race UK season 2.
Much like in the First World War, World War Two significantly shifted the opinions on queerness. The Blue Discharges that homosexuals got from the army, got them fighting publicly against their discrimination, in some ways for the first time and they were organising in protest. If there’s anything the gays love, its organising in protest. And yep that is a tease for the next chapter.
Veterans recount the war giving them an enormous appreciation for the necessary camp and wackiness that queerness brings. One said of his queer comrades in the Normandy landings, “They had this amazing capacity to see the ridiculous part of life” (Fryer, 2025). Yes, yes we do.
Footnotes
1. To read more about the method and ethos of writing this history, and about the project in general please read the introduction to this project: ON WRITING QUEER HISTORIES.
2. Because I am a nerd and a hoarder I still have my work book from year 9 English (shout out Miss Hart) and I can confirm,while I didn’t actually do any work on Sassoon, did study Owens' Dulce et Decorum est in an essay that was called “confident and detailed” and earned me a recognition
3. This quote has shown me to be a terrible academic. I struggled to get an original reference, because if you follow the chain it becomes German very quickly. I don't speak German, and my friend who does is busy.
4. This is the best line I’ve ever written, after it I genuinely took the rest of the day off.
5. This being my second favourite sign in a gay bar just behind the one in the women’s toilets in Revenge, Brighton that asks “does your boyfriend know you're here?”
6. What's the Hays code I hear you ask??? - there's a whole chapter on that to come
7. Despite being told in the first week of my history degree to be wary of sources that make too much comment on the personal character of the figures we study Goldhill never got that memo - he describes Rupert Brooke as “extremely unpleasant,” and while he was “very cute and much beloved, was also absolutely foul in his behaviour.”
Brierly, C. 2025. The queer men of H staircase. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/queer-cambridge
Cambridge University, 2012. Alan Turing - Celebrating the life of a genius. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtRLmL70TH0
Cohler, D. 2007. Sapphism and Sedition: Producing Female Homosexuality in the Great War. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30114202?seq=5
Conception, 2020. Phillis Abry: Who I Really Was. https://news.va.gov/75857/phillis-abry-really/
Crouthamel, J. 2014. Sexuality, Sexual Relations, Homosexuality.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/sexuality-sexual-relations-homosexuality/
Edencamp, 2021. #ForgottenFriday: LGBTQ+ History Month Special: A man of his word, Siegfried Sassoon. https://edencamp.co.uk/blog/forgottenfriday-sassoon/
Faderman, L. 1999. The Great War’s Leabisn Legacy. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AHSI&u=leedsuni&id=GALE%7CHCDWLD902911443&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&aty=shibboleth
Foreman, 2020. "Coming Out Under Fire": The Story of Gay and Lesbian Servicemembers. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/gay-and-lesbian-service-members
Fryer, 2025. Queer Life during the Second World War. https://www.niwarmemorial.org/collections/blog/queer-life-during-the-second-world-war-1
Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2021. Magnus Hirschfeld. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld-2
Loehr, K. 2022. A Short History of Queer Women.
Mambrol, N. 2022. Analysis of Radclyffe Hall’s Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. https://literariness.org/2022/09/24/analysis-of-radclyffe-halls-miss-ogilvy-finds-herself/
National Museum of African American History & Culture, 2020. A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance
Rich, 2023. Early Hollywood’s “Joyous Bisexual” and Her Most Daring Onscreen Roles. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/06/awards-insider-little-gold-men-pride-flashback-shanghai-express
Rosenthal, M. 2025. Marlene Deitrich 1901-1992. https://www.queerportraits.com/bio/dietrich
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