One of the Boys by Paul Jackson

Author:Paul Jackson [Paul Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2010-03-14T05:00:00+00:00

RECRUITMENT

Individual servicepeople enlisted for a variety of reasons– patriotism, adventure, social pressure, peer pressure, ethical and political convictions, and financial need. Some queer men saw the military as an opportunity to escape communities in which they felt socially constricted. Ralph in Waterloo and Jim in Hamilton were both young men, twenty-one and twenty-five years old respectively, when they enlisted in 1941. Both had repressed their homosexual desires until that time and deferred to heterocentric community standards in imagining and fashioning their social/sexual lives. Ralph remembers those standards in Waterloo, Ontario, as oppressive: “When I was seventeen, I guess, in my last year in high school, it was expected that you would acquire a girlfriend and my former chums were all pairing up, and this girl latched on to me and, for about two years, until I joined the army, I’d see her about once a week; never got past the stage of heavy necking … it was just a kind of social pressure: you had to do it … there was no choice in the matter. And it was expected that we would eventually marry and have babies.” When she pressed that they marry before he was sent overseas, Ralph protested, “ ‘No, if I’m not killed, I’ll probably be injured or something, you know, it wouldn’t be fair.’” In fact, he was relieved to get a letter from her a year later, informing him that she was marrying somebody else. As he came to explore his sexual desires years later, he understood that his early discomfort resulted from his having had no sexual or romantic interest in women.6

Jim also felt pressured to marry a neighbourhood girl in Hamilton. Although he had considered her to be a friend, he became uncomfortable when everyone, including the girl, came to assume that they would marry. He, of course, never mentioned his homosexuality, and so “they expected something would happen and I wasn’t inclined that way.” After enlisting, he was sent to Camp Borden, “which was too far away to be convenient and then suddenly [I] went overseas– that’s probably the only thing that saved me [from marriage] … if I hadn’t been in the army and if I had been home all the time and she were home, then it would be put up or shut up, and an awful lot of marriages happened for that very reason.” Neither Ralph nor Jim, at that stage in his life, had acknowledged his homosexual desires consciously. Nevertheless, discomfort with the sexual and social roles prescribed for them was at the heart of their decision to enlist. If they were unsure of how to define their sexuality positively, they did know what they were not. Both knew that they were expected to marry even though they did not respond romantically or sexually to women. Many young homosexual men, at the time of their enlistment, had little insight into the significance of their sexual and emotional desires, if they acknowledged them at all. Their communities had offered them no positive help in articulating their needs.

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