Other incidents the researchers came across involved a more clearly articulated homosexual identity. This is possibly the case with some of the 1945 ''jungle juice'' soldiers in Borneo. The accounts include ''situational sex'' between men - ''making do'' because there were no women around, so that ''butch'' men might have sex with ''queens'' with no loss to their masculine status. They initially pieced together fractured accounts from novels, diaries, memoirs, oral histories and official records. The historians, whose research was partly funded by the Australian Army History Unit, say they had long suspected homosexuality in the armed services was far more common than traditionally acknowledged. The soldiers' names and identifying material have been withheld, but the file details how army authorities, for the first time, began to tackle the idea that there was a difference between homosexual behaviour and homosexual identity.ĭr Willett, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Australian Centre, suspects that the men agreed to tell their stories in detail in exchange for a medical discharge rather than a dishonourable one.
The records include the life stories of 18 of these soldiers, who were interviewed by a major after they were reported for illicit sex by a United States defence investigator. One of the key episodes outlined in the fuller file is about a series of incidents in New Guinea in late 1943 involving a group of self-identifying homosexual - or ''kamp'' - men. Now, historians are telling a different, more realistic story thanks to the release of an army file on the discharge of male homosexuals in WWII.ĭuring investigations over the past two years, researchers Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett gained almost complete access to the National Archives file, first released in 1992 but in a heavily edited form that revealed little. Official silence, a veil of secrecy and even outright disbelief about wartime sex among servicemen has reigned supreme ever since, compounded by mythologies about Aussie diggers and the ''mateship'' legend.
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