Allan Bérubé's Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II was first published by Free Press in 1990. The book proved a new and startling thesis: that World War II was not only a key political event in the history of the world but a turning point in U.S gay and lesbian history.
Incorporating a range of materials like oral histories and government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Bérubé showed how the war had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it compelled people, even those against war, into joining by conscription. On the other hand, it afforded young gays and lesbians the opportunity to leave the confines of their hometowns and to embark upon literal and metaphorical journeys towards worlds of pleasure and community formation that affirmed their sexual identity in new ways.
As the war dragged on, the military, needing more bodies on the front but also suffering from its internalized and intense homophobia, devised new methods, including psychiatric "evaluations," that would allow it to keep gays and lesbians in its forces but simultaneously discard them through dishonorable discharges when they were no longer needed.
Eventually, in 1993, the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ( DADT ) policy codified this contradictory form of discrimination. The times and the wars are different now, and the activism around DADT reflects differing ideological conflicts as anti-war and anti-DADT activists sometimes clash and sometimes mesh on the issue. Regardless, Bérubé's book remains a critical piece of history that provides insights into a new era in gay and lesbian history. Out of print for several years, the book was recently republished by the University of North Carolina press, and it features an introduction by the historians Estelle Freedman and John D'Emilio, who were friends and colleagues of Bérubé. Windy City Times spoke to D'Emilio, a professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about the impact of Coming Out under Fire.
Windy City Times: Could you talk about the publication history of Coming Out Under Fire and what made UNCP decide to bring it back in print?
John D'Emilio: [ Going out of print ] is the peril that gay and lesbian authors face when they write a serious book and go with a trade press rather than a university press. The trade publisher promises money and wider distribution up front, which is true initially. But unless you sell a lot of copies, they are not going to keep it in print. And that's what happened with this book. They loved the book, but a book about gays and lesbians, even if it's about World War II, doesn't sell tens of thousands of copies.
As for the re-publication: Estelle and I are the literary executors of Allan Bérubé's estate and we approached the University of North Carolina Press with a proposal that they bring this out in print, and that we do another collection of Allan's writing. This one just required an introduction. The other one, My Desire for History, will come out sometime in the spring.
WCT: What do you think is the lasting significance of Coming Out Under Fire?
JD: There were certainly enough of us figuring out this history at the same time. But it's Allan who was studying and focusing on WWII so intensely, who was doing those oral histories and scoping out government documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. He uncovered a history that no one had talked about, a history of gays and lesbians during the war, and both the persecutions and the freedoms tha cam cme about and he put gays and lesbians right into the heart of this 20th-century experience. But he also showed that WWII was a turning point in gay and lesbian history, that the sex segregation that war encourages and the literal mobility that it gave young men and women in the military made it possible for people to explore their sexuality in a way that, in peacetime, could not quite happen.
And so WWII created something that didn't quite exist before; it gave a push to community formation in cities; it made a segment of a whole generation realize, "Oh, I'm gay, I'm lesbian—and so are all you!" The book is about reclaiming a piece of history that was hidden and that has political implications. It's also about reinterpreting the past. It allows us to see the war as a vital moment in gay and lesbian history.
WCT: Bérubé writes about how this new era creates venues for gay social culture, like gay and lesbian bars. And yet bar culture as a major signifier of queer life seems so commonplace now—could you expand on the effects of the war on them?
JD: It's not as if there were no gay and lesbian bars before WWII but especially in port cities where gays and lesbians took their leave, like San Francico, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., we saw the gathering of so many young people. They were going off to war knowing they might never come back and they wanted to have a good time. That created a market for bars: it allowed these bars to survive economically, and then that boom just continued to the post-war period. Things [ like the development of gay bars ] that were happening very slowly through the '20s and '30s accelerated because of the war and that acceleration created something new.
WCT: He writes about lesbians, of course, but what was the effect of these wartime changes on gender roles during and after the war?
JD: Ironically, you can argue that the so-called "feminine mystique" of the post-war period and the conservative stereotype that we have of the suburban white family are partly reactions against the disruptiveness of the war years. The war years, out of necessity, created so much freedom for women. After the war, we couldn't completely go back to the way it was. Some women never went back, but there were still tremendous cultural and social pressures that did in fact drive many women out of the work force and into marriages and childbearing at very young ages. It's the paradox of war—it completely upsets and unsettles things. And sometimes that can be very liberatory and sometimes it also creates political and cultural reaction afterwards. And both things were true in this period after the war, a period of cultural and social reaction. Some people are still finding a new way.
WCT: It's clear that Bérubé was a professional historian, and the book is an assiduously documented and researched work of historical writing. Today, with the availability of so many tools for documenting people's lives and the Internet providing ways to connect and track down people who remember history, there's a surge in people finding subjects who will sit down and recollect and talk about times past. What's the difference between actually doing history and simply finding people to talk about the past and what was Bérubé's methodology?
JD: In the end, history is composed of people's stories but the stories don't compose themselves into meaning all by themselves. The stories are interesting, they're anecdotal, they're fun, they're fascinating. But the main methodology of historical research is to read everything and to keep looking until there is nothing else to find or until you're only finding things that are exactly like what you've already found. And it's the exhaustiveness of the research that a good historian does that allows him or her to then pull it all together in a way that's rich with detail and setting and character but also with meaning and interpretation.
Allan put a lot of work into this book, and whether he's writing about military policy, urban nightlife or purges, you know that he's writing with confidence because he's heard these stories again and again. He's found documents that contradict some historians. I'm all for people getting people to tell their stories but I want us to go beyond that.
WCT: What motivated you to help keep this book in print?
JD: It remains one of the two or three most important gay and lesbian history books, at least about the U.S., proving that a key event in the 20th century helped shape gay life afterwards. Military policy still isn't what it might be. So there's also a relevance to it, not just an antiquarian interest. I hope that the book being available again will somehow contribute to the current day, as in the current debate around Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so we can look at what the human cost has been and how the policy bears no relationship to anything other than homophobia. It's a very good read. It's history the way it should be written.
WCT: As I understand it, Bérubé was in fact anti-war, which makes his work on the military particularly interesting.
JD: Yes, he was against war. He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, very active in the anti-war movement, in Chicago and the Boston area, and personally against war. At the same time, the class and race and gender implication of the exclusion policy are enormous because in this very unequal society that we live in, military service is the route to mobility for large numbers of young working class people. To say that because you're gay or lesbian, this opportunity is going to be closed to you—it made Allan, the conscientious objector, furious. It's not as if researching all this made him pro-war or pro-military, but given that the military in America, since WWII, has been a primary route towards distributing benefits—not to the very privileged but, through the G.I Bill, veterans' benefits like health care creating the very possibility of social mobility. It's sad that we live in a society in which military service brings you all of this but, given that it does, that was his focus.
WCT: I do think that the situation today, where people are no longer conscripted, and where there's a deliberate targeting of poor youth of color in particular, makes that all somewhat different. But it's shocking to read how, in WWII, the military would deliberately force people into joining via conscription and then deny gays and lesbians the benefits they were due even when those were clearly vital for their survival.
Bérubé gives the poignant example of one man's family, to whom he had come out, writing his superiors and begging the military not to deny him the benefits—they were all they had for an income. And they were still refused.
JD: Yes, in the context of a war where men were being inducted, they would then label you for life through [ dishonorable ] discharges. You were stigmatized for life.
WCT: You mentioned My Desire for History, the forthcoming book of Bérubé's essays. What will that [ spotlight ] ?
JD: It includes works by Allan from his very first years of scholarship at the end of the '70s through the beginning of the '80s through work that was unpublished at the time he died. [ Editor's note: Bérubé died in 2007. ] The first section is about San Francisco local gay and lesbian history, the second on WWII and the military. The third section is a combination of autobiographical pieces and political analysis in which he uses autobiography to ask questions about sexual identity, class and race; it's more theoretical but very accessible. The last section is about labor; he was working on a book about the Marine Cooks and Stewards' Union, a radical union of the '30s and '40s and a very queer-inflected, multiracial union.
