Gay in the navy
I'm a British Royal Navy officer — and I'm gay. I feel favor I've had to operate twice as hard as my straight peers.
Editor's note: Insider has verified the identity of the journalist, but they asked to remain anonymous to retain their privacy.
On my 25th birthday, I made a life-changing decision: I unified the Royal Navy as a warfare officer. Not long after, I made another bold decision: I came out as homosexual to my fellow officers.
After that, one thought repeated in my head: "Don't let them think gays are weak."
I repeated that thought as I crawled through the mud in the pouring rain and stumbled over hills in the snow. It became my driving force during training. As motivating as the thought was, I later realized I was putting myself in a box that no one else was.
Coming out as gay in the Royal Navy went surprisingly smoothly
When I joined the Navy three years ago, I already had a degree in social sciences and secured my dream position. But I was still lacking something. I wanted wider life experience, real-world skills, and more confidence. When I met up with an old confidant who had joined the military, I saw how he improved himself. So I took his counsel and
Privacy notice
If you’ve browse any of my previous blog posts on Earth War II, you already know that 300,000 women served in the newly founded women’s military servicegroups during WWII, including Army, Army Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines. Of those women, nearly 100,000 served in the Navy’s WAVES (Women Recognized for Volunteer Emergency Services). With that large number in mind, it should be no surprise that some WAVES were queer and would likely explain themselves as LGBTQ+ today.
While the military at this time was officially against allowing LGBTQ+ detecting people into the military, they also were desperate for more service members. So in some ways, there was a similar mentality to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the 1990s and 2000s. Ben Small, a gay man who served in the Army Breeze Corps during WWII, remembered the mentality was “If they’re gay, fine. Just so long as they didn’t embarrass anybody or do anything on the premises.”
However, during enlistment, the US military actually conducted psychological screenings on potential GIs. One of the purposes of the screenings was to resolve if the potential GI was homosexual. Anyone mind to be
Pride Month 2023 - Exploring LGBTQ+ history in the Royal Navy
The Queer and Now
For three hundred and ten years the Royal Navy hunted down, persecuted and sometimes even hanged homosexuals found within their ranks. Execution ceased after 1861, but life imprisonment remained a reality. The partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 did brief to sway the notion of the Armed Forces, and it was not until 2000 that actual change was made.
The Royal Navy were not alone in their persecution of homosexuals, or indeed anybody else from within the LGBTQ+ community, but for some there is still the image that they promote an aggressive, macho, alpha-male stereotype.
However, over the past twenty-three years, the Royal Navy has develop a beacon of progress and acceptance. In a statement on their website in January 2020, the Royal Navy wanted to send a clear message: “the Naval Service welcomes all talent to its ranks, regardless of your sexual orientation or gender identity” – a far cry from the “gay panic” that gripped Naval officials just forty years previous.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the forbid on homosexuals serving in the forces being lifted in 2020, naval bases an
“I did it for the uplift of humanity and the Navy”: FDR's Lgbtq+ Sex-Entrapment Sting
Sherry Zane sheds light on a black covert operation that targeted homosexual Navy men.
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On March 16, 1919, 14 Navy recruits met secretly at the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, anxiously awaiting instructions for their recent assignment. The senior operatives explained that the volunteers were free to exit if they objected to this special mission: a covert operation to entrap homosexual men under the authority of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
By the end of the sting, investigators had apprehended more than 20 accused sailors and imprisoned them aboard a broken-down ship in Newport harbor. Anxious and afraid, the suspects remained in solitary confinement for nearly four months before they were officially charged with sodomy and “scandalous conduct.” The incident also foreshadowed laws and policies that the future President Roosevelt would put in place.
In this episode of the MIT Press podcast, podcaster Chris Gondek talks to Sher
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