Book review for `One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II`

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Book Review : One of the Boys : Homosexuality in the Military during World War II

Military has a long history with the allegations of homosexuality . They both have always made strange bedfellows . The leadership of armed forces all over the world , usually traditionalists , has in general seen homosexuals as morally wrong , and a threat to solidity . At the start of a war the enormous task of mobilizing thousands of soldiers surpassed concerns about the sexual behavior of troops . But in the case

of prolonged war those military men who are found in disgraceful conducts such as homosexuality become a problems for the senior military leadership and they become increasingly determined to rid the services of these types of military men . Paul Jackson 's book - One of the Boys Homosexuality in the Military during World War II - has discussed this problem in very excellent literary style

In 1990 , Allan Byruby in his study -- Coming out under Fire : The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two -discussed experiences of gays and lesbians in the military of the United States during the World War II (Byruby 1990 , 1-22 ) The reading of Byruby 's book had a great excitement and compelled me to read Paul Jackson 's book on the World War II experiences of surprising Canadian servicemen (and women . Jackson 's book -- One of the Boys -- is a deeply researched study of homosexuality in the Canadian military during the years of the World War II . The book contains the result of hours of pouring over court-martial transcripts police reports , psychiatric assessments , and dozens of interviews

One of the Boys is one of the deeply research researched peaces of writings on the issue as the literature about any feature of gay and lesbian history from the pre-Stonewall period (or to use the Canadian equivalent , before Trudeau 's Omnibus bill ) requires widespread investigative literary work . No doubt it was not an easy task to discuss the coded disguising of homosexuality and Jackson has done a wonderful job while deciphering the coded phrases that were used to disguise homosexuality . In the hypermasculine , heteronormative world of the Armed Forces , Jackson has exposed a rich tapestry of homosexual experiences and thus has made a considerable contribution both to queer history and to the social history of the World War II

In One of the Boys , Jackson seems very careful in choosing words . He avoided using the term gay , which was rarely used in its modern sense during the World War II . He used those terms that were familiar at the time of World War II such as homosexual , queer , fairy or fruit . It seems that Jackson intentionally addressed the subject of homosexuality that he broadly defined to be "the ability to derive sexual pleasure from members of one 's own sex (Jackson 148 . By this way in fact Jackson refused to narrowly limit homosexuality to those who self-identified as such , or to exclude those who...