UK announces a memorial for LGBTQ war veterans
The UK’s first memorial for armed-forces personnel that identify as queer is to be built at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
The government has announced a contribution of £350,000 towards the project, which was one of 49 recommendations of an independent review into the historical treatment of people who were sacked or forced out of the military for being queer.
It wasn’t until the year 2000 when the British military stopped firing anyone found to be queer.
The government has promised compensation for those impacted by the military’s systemic homophobia but there have been no details released as to what compensation might potentially be available.
Queer war history
We don’t often hear about LGBTQ people as war heroes, but the reality is that throughout history there have been queer people present and playing their part.
Contributing to the lack of visibility of LGBTQ people during wartime has been the criminalisation of homosexuality.
Homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised in the UK until 1967 – 22 years after the end of WWII.
Consequently, many gay men enlisted or conscripted during wartime would have tried to keep their sexuality hidden – for fear of being ostracised or reported to their superiors for ‘indecency’.
Records show that during WWII at least 230 men from the British armed forces were charged and sent to prison because they were gay.
But life in the military was liberating in many ways for gay men – a homocentric world in which intimacy between men was commonplace.
This phenomenon wasn’t limited to the UK. Ports such as San Francisco became hubs for gay men as sailors who completed their service at the end of World War II adopted it as their home and embraced the freedom and sexual liberation of a fresh start in a new city.
Let’s take a look at some of the queer wartime heroes that we can all be proud of.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing is one of the UK’s most notable heroes of WWII.
Turing was a mathematician and code-breaker at Bletchley during WWII. He was described by Winston Churchill as the ‘biggest contribution to the victory against the Nazis’.
What was Turing’s reward? A prison sentence for ‘gross indecency’ and chemical castration. State-sanctioned homophobic persecution drove him to suicide at the age of 41.
Ian Gleed
Ian Gleed joined the UK’s Royal Air Force at the age of twenty, qualifying as a pilot in 1936.
A gay man whose sexuality was widely known among his friends, Gleed had to be discrete in order to avoid being court-martialled by the military.
Gleed flew for the RAF throughout WWII, receiving numerous honours.
In 1943, while on patrol over Tunisia, Gleed was shot down and killed.
Dudley Cave
Conscripted in 1941, aged 20, Dudley Cave was a gay man who joined the UK army as a driver.
During the fall of Singapore in 1942, Cave was captured by the Japanese. As a prisoner-of-war, he was put to work building railway in Thailand and then held in prison until the end of the war.