The US army and navy set in place a range of policies to discharge queer personnel administratively the Australian army buried its head in the sand and wished the whole thing would go away. Psychiatrists in the US had a head start on their Australian counterparts who struggled to find legitimacy in the local context, while the American forces focused on homosexuality in a way that Australian officers did not. There were also variations among the attitudes and practices of medical experts and military commanders during the war. Non-gendered middle-class queer identities in the US (where some men began to dissociate their gender roles and sexual identities) prefigure Australian equivalents. Camp, or kamp, didn’t really even develop in Australia until the end of the 1930s. Different terminologies point to different sexual economies. Exclusive gay bars, for instance, can’t be dated earlier than the 1960s in Australia, decades after they began in the US. Generally speaking, life in large US cities was richer than the Australian experience given the economies of scale. Queer men were subject to state interdiction and moral outcry regardless of nationality, and queerness varied across class, ethnicity and geography. YS: Australian and American lives shared similarities and differences during the Second World War. JB: How did American understandings or experiences of queer sexualities differ from Australians’ at this time? Given that masculine ‘butch’ men in Australia were discreet, circumspect and only occasionally interested in homosex, queer men often relied on each other to adopt a ‘male role’ in intercourse even if their preferences lay elsewhere. One of the points I’ve stressed in the book is that these gendered lives were self-generating and self-sustaining. Sexual passivity usually accompanied ‘female’ identities, but not always.
Others were married to each other in elaborate ceremonies of revelry, merriment and carnality. Some ‘carried on’ in the streets of Brisbane mocking each other in coded ways even in public. Self-described cissies and queens adopted feminine traits and performed gendered cultural ceremonies. Gender inversion was the central thread in queer identities and self-presentation by the time the Second World War erupted, at least for working-class men (we know little of middle-class lives). Private Maurice Earley as Carmen Miranda (Australian War Memorial, 026033) In regional towns and rural areas interaction was probably limited to intimate partners and perhaps the odd friend, although the circulation of men and ideas between the city and bush meant that regional Australians were not unfamiliar with queer ways of being and doing. Things were less sophisticated beyond the confines of capital cities like Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Queer opportunities and possibilities for intimacy, romance and friendship were evident in large urban department stores, for example, especially among the window dressers, tailors and floorwalkers. Intimate parties brought men together in female dress, powder and paint. By the interwar years, men were meeting for sex and sociability in working-class bars, cafés, cinemas and sometimes in social groups. It is not until the 1890s that queer subcultures began to develop with any level of sophistication in larger Australian cities. The mollies familiar to London’s streets during the eighteenth century did not migrate to the hostile environment of the colonies, even if we occasionally glimpse exceptional cases of flamboyancy in the early records. Yorick Smaal: An urban queer lifestyle was only beginning to mature in Australia by the 1920s and 1930s. Justin Bengry: How would you characterize queer identities and communities in Australia before the Second World War?
Smaal’s work offers not only an exciting local study, but one inflected by global processes, challenging us to think of queer history in the most expansive of terms. Sexual fluidities still characterised queer communities and male identities before a more rigid sexual binary emerged later in the century. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and even language, in Australia. Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict.