A soldier from a Kansas farm had spent his youth skinny-dipping in the local pond with his friends plenty of outhouses, and even some school bathroom stalls, had more than one seat city high-school kids showered in an open room with nozzles along the wall, sans curtains or dividers, daily after gym class. Tenement kids slept three and four to a bed. Most kids - especially poor kids, but everyone - had far less of a sense of physical privacy than we do. It would literally never occur to a lot of these guys that their photos give off sexual heat. To them, sex was for men and women, end of story, and God knows there are no women in these pictures. But of course a significant number of these guys found themselves at least partway up the Kinsey scale, and had experienced in some way sex with other men, whether just a fleeting encounter or something more permanent. (There are well-documented stories of gay soldiers in the U.S.
#MILITARY GAY MEN JERK OFF FULL#
#Military gay men jerk off full#Īrmed forces going back to George Washington’s army, and the Newport sex scandal of 1919 occurred two full decades before this era.) I think it’s fair to say that most of these pictures were made without the least thought of their sexiness, but that the camera’s eye - as in so many things - reveals something true not only about the subject but about the photographer as well. The photos, Hanson points out, typically appear in collections of more conventional pictures, and there are only one or two in an album’s worth. Nobody would try to get away with skulking around, snapping these photos every time the guys stripped down - but one? Sure. That funny skinny-dipping photo would just be a punctuation mark, tucked into the album of memories that got assembled back home in ’46. (Nearly all these pictures are anonymous, grabbed from estate sales and eBay and the like.) No, this was - at least on the surface - foxhole bonding, of the type we hear about from soldiers going back thousands of years. As Hanson notes in her essay, when you start a week with 30 men and end it with 15, those survivors have shared something incredibly intense.
Military culture fosters that kind of intense relationship deliberately, because it’s about the only thing that makes the inhuman work of fighting even remotely tolerable, and has the mysterious power of making ordinary souls capable of heroism when the time comes. When the guys in your unit matter more than anything, you’ll do what you need to do to get them out alive.How we got here: In 1992, many people thought that the discrimination was nearly over.
#MILITARY GAY MEN JERK OFF TV#
"I remember being in the Castro," says John Forrett (army reserve, 1987–99), "and watching the TV at a bar with some friends, watching Al Gore and Bill Clinton swearing that if they became the tag team for America they were going to get rid of the harassment of gays and lesbians serving in the military." But when the tag team prevailed, they underestimated the resistance to such a reform from a coalition of social conservatives, religious groups, and a large part of the military itself. The consequence, the following year, was a messy kind of compromise that became colloquially known as "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." Gay people were allowed in the military but only as long as they didn’t reveal their sexuality to facilitate this, all members of the military were also prohibited from inquiring about anyone’s possible orientation.
This was presented as a kind of victory for the forces of progress-you were no longer excluded from serving-but it could instead be seen as solidifying discrimination.