Waleed Aly asked about homosexuality, page-47

" Why are HC posters obsessed with Waleed? "

I think the colonel wants to come out.


IT WAS a hot night in Borneo and eight Australian soldiers were sitting around discussing film stars they fancied. The war had just ended - Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ashes - but most soldiers in Asia remained on active duty in the all-male environments they'd become accustomed to. They were starved of relationships with women, so the fantasy of screen idols was an intense one.
One boy said June Allyson was his favourite, another liked Susan Hayward, and a third dreamt of Betty Grable. When someone spoke about Marlene Dietrich, things got steamy. One of the horny soldiers, writes Roderic Anderson in his memoir Free Radical, said how much he wanted sex. But when someone put on a ''sissy voice'' and said ''I didn't know you cared!'', the sexual potential of the situation became explicit - so nothing more was said.

A few days after this incident, however, those same eight soldiers were drunk on ''jungle juice''. Anderson writes that the lights were blown out, they ''groped each other, paired off and disappeared into the night''. Afterwards, an unspoken conspiracy of silence buried the matter; no one discussed whether they were ''making do'' or whether it was a more permanent orientation.

One of the key episodes outlined in the fuller file is about a series of incidents in New Guinea in late 1943 involving a group of self-identifying homosexual - or ''kamp'' - men. The records include the life stories of 18 of these soldiers, who were interviewed by a major after they were reported for illicit sex by a United States defence investigator.
The soldiers' names and identifying material have been withheld, but the file details how army authorities, for the first time, began to tackle the idea that there was a difference between homosexual behaviour and homosexual identity.
Dr Willett, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Australian Centre, suspects that the men agreed to tell their stories in detail in exchange for a medical discharge rather than a dishonourable one.
The historians, whose research was partly funded by the Australian Army History Unit, say they had long suspected homosexuality in the armed services was far more common than traditionally acknowledged. They initially pieced together fractured accounts from novels, diaries, memoirs, oral histories and official records. The accounts include ''situational sex'' between men - ''making do'' because there were no women around, so that ''butch'' men might have sex with ''queens'' with no loss to their masculine status. This is possibly the case with some of the 1945 ''jungle juice'' soldiers in Borneo. Other incidents the researchers came across involved a more clearly articulated homosexual identity.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-secret-history-of-sexuality-on-the-front-20121220-2bp9m.html

" shoot straight you bastards "

Raider