Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Love, Lust & Fighting in World War II

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

It can be hard to comprehend the magnitude of historical events, with World War Two a prime example of this.By 1945, some 3 million British people had served. As such, the rich diversity of masculinity and sexuality of those men is often reduced or hidden from the history books.With Remembrance Day approaching, we've spoken to Luke Turner, author of Men At War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, to look beneath the buttoned up uniforms and shine a light on the different kinds of men who served.Who was the D-Day hero who later transitioned to live as a woman? Were the 1940s more of a sexual revolution than the 1960s? And what does our sidelining of much of this history tell us about our shared remembrances of the Second World War? This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up now for your 14-day free trial.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Blaper Twixters, tis I, Kate Lister, I am here for thee. I've gone a bit oldy-fashioned and timely talking. I don't know why I've done that, but I am here with thy fair do's warning. Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults

about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects on you should be an adult too. Well, that's covered our asses. If you happen to listen to this, get offended. Tough tits don't come crying to us because fair do's you were warned. It's September 1940 and the Luftwaffe are raining bombs down on London. But down here from street level amongst the bomb shelters and the darkened corners, relief and escape from the relentless fear and terror of war is found in some of the city's darker corners. Whilst some cower, some cuddle,

and some, well, they do a bit more than cuddling, and why not, quite frankly, I would as well if a bomb was going to fall on me. You might think that this sounds like some kind of perverse wartime erotica, but no, this all really happened and was an issue of national security. In fact, a home intelligence report from the government reported that in several London districts there were, quote, cases of blatant immorality which could deter others from using them. Not quite the spirit of the blitz that we are used to hearing about, is it? Indeed, as Quentin Crisp wrote of wartime London, as soon as the bomb started to fall, the city became a paved double bed. And this was not just confined to London's shelters. Oh, no, no, no, no.

And of course, it wasn't just straight sex that was happening either. Of course it wasn't. There were plenty of LGBT people signing up to go, to war, and they have a history too. And that is what we are talking about today. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society. With me, Kate Lister. Sometimes it is really hard to comprehend the magnitude of historical events. In order to try and get our heads around it, we often reduce and simplify them. And the Second World War is absolutely no exception. Think about it. By 1945, some three million British people had served, and each one with their own hopes, fears, desires. As such, the rich diversity of sexuality and masculinity amongst those who served is often left out of the history books, particularly those who were gay or bisexual or just anyone else on the sexuality spectrum.

Today's guest is Luke Turner, author of Men at War, Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering, 1935. And in that book, Luke takes a look at the masculinitys and sexualities of the men who served. Who was the D-Day hero, who later transitioned to live as a woman? Were the 1940s more of a sexual revolution than 1960s? And what does our sidelining of this history tell us about our shared remembrances of the Second World War? I am ready to get to it if you are. Hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Luke Turner. How are you doing? I'm all right. I've got a cup of tea hiding from the sun, bizarrely, given the weather.

But I'm pretty good, thank you. I have started the day with a cold can of pop, which is a really stupid option. And I've just been staring at your tea thinking that I made a bad. That was a bad call, given you having to wear a Yeti to keep you warm. You needed a brew. Nobody can see this, but I have got a huge furry Udi on, which looks like I've skinned a Muppet. But I'm very nice and warm, and I'm thrilled to be talking to you because your new book, Men at War, loving, lusting, fighting, remembering 1939 to 1945 is out now. what made you want to write this book, Luke?

What brought you to this research? Well, I guess the overarching thing is that I've always been obsessed with the war since, Second World War, since I was a kid. I was just obsessed with the war. I built model kits. I watched war films. And it became more sort of subtly interested in the history as my childhood went on. But when I got to my teenage years, I felt like the war was something like,

I didn't quite as feel as comfortable with it. And it was at a time when I was questioning sexuality. and, you know, the Second World War memory got very connected to football and there was all the jingoism and anti-German sentiment around the 1996 European Championships. And I was kind of going, as somebody who might feel like I might be gay or very confused about sexuality, it's like there's this homophobic aspect to remembering the war.

And it was almost like the memory of the war had been sort of ceded to this sort of right-wing, jingoistic, quite macho-force sort of thing. But then in recent years, I guess I got more interested in the Second World War again. I started reading a history books again. I started listening to more Second War podcasts. I started building model airplanes again. It used to be careful with that stuff.

Well, yeah, I mean, I have got one over there that I'm halfway through and there's one here that's finished. And I started thinking about the war in a different way. And, you know, obviously I write about sexuality quite a bit, my first books about being a bisexual man and the sort of struggles of that identity. And I started thinking about the war and thinking, there's this whole theory that, you know, when men are all together, they get desperate and they start having sex with each other. I was kind of like, well, actually, is the Second World War a time

when all the rules of society were thrown on their head? And there was a great fluidity of sexuality and a great allowance of fluid sexuality. And then I felt that I wanted to just use that and use the prism of kind of bisexual, queer, gay men in the Second World War to look at the wider masculinity of men who fought and why Britain as a country was so obsessed with the war. and what that means today and how it affects our contemporary politics. So that's the kind of long, slightly weird answer of how I wrote this kind of odd book that covers so many things. It's not an odd answer at all. It's a fascinating answer.

Because you're right. When we think of the war, and obviously we're now generations that really the last people who fought in it are kind of exiting stage left as we speak. But it occupies this strange state of cognitive dissidents that on one hand we think of it as uber macho, men, at war, men going and protecting the home and women staying and super heterosexual. But then we've also, we do hold a space for it of like all boys together, Winston Churchill famously called the Navy, so it's all rum sodomy and the lash. So we do have this sort of strange queering of it without really realising that we're doing it. Yeah. And I think there's a, you can see in some of the kind of, I guess, post-war humour, there's a sort of wink, nudge, nudge, wink about a lot of

that stuff. But I kind of wanted to look behind that a little bit and look at the testimony of people who were there at the time and sort of see what their view was and try and do some sort of historical research about how much it does show up. Queer sexuality shows up in the records, but also a different heterosexual sexuality. You know, I think there's a lot of excellent work written about how women went into the workplace and that had a huge social impact. But I think the war gave women a sort of element of sexual freedom. Sometimes they were still sort of misogyny related to sexual behaviour by women, which I write about in a book. But I just felt there was just this fascinating, muddling up, a queering, yes, but also in, well,

heterosexual in inverted commas, because part of the book is my theory that nobody is really particularly heterosexual. I think everybody is on a grey scale, and I think the Second World World War slightly, you know, proves it. Just a couple of glasses of wine away. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, there's a lot of testimony by sexologists writing after the war, where one of whom even invented the term war queer, which was a man who was gay for the duration and then sort of went back home to his wife. I would say they were a war bisexual, but that term didn't really exist. But there's a lot of sort of, I went out for drinks with

an American officer. We ended up in the same bed. And, you know, I feel so ashamed I can never go back to feeling as I did before. And it's obviously there's a lot of internalised homophobia with that. Perhaps there was a moment of realisation of sexuality, but people didn't have the words to express it. I've written about the history of sex and the war, sex work in the war, the First World War and the Second World War, and I think you're absolutely right. There is nothing like the threat of impending death. There is nothing like have this bat on and please walk into a machine gun son to radically change people's attitudes to sex and morality. I would argue that that is pretty consistent throughout history. Yeah, I find that really interesting. I mean, I kind of didn't really go into the First World, but I've read a lot about it. I do find it interesting. the number of brothels around on the Western Front. And it was all sort of like the officer brothels and the, that's right, isn't it? And it was almost like, it seemed like in the First World War, it was a bit more open than in the second. But it's like, as Quentin Crisp, you know, I wrote about the naked civil servant a lot in the books. I love it. I love his writing. He was a wonderful character. And, you know, he said that as soon as the bomb started falling, the streets of London became a double bed.

You know, and I thought that was fantastic, this idea of the blackout and all this furtive going on. And I've always loved the kind of, I mean, I know we're in a sort of age of sex positive empowerment and all of that, but I grew up having to hide everything. And I probably am a bit sort of hooked on that thirtive Englishness around sexuality. There's a certain appeal of that, even though it's very problematic. But obviously there was a lot of that going on in parks and on the canal banks and all sorts. I mean, you would, wouldn't you? Well, yeah. Like the bombs are falling overhead.

Should we, you know, let's have a snog. That makes perfect sense to me. Exactly, exactly. So obviously, if people are enlisted and going to war, they're going to be gay, queer, bisexual, transgender people go into war as well. But how do you find their histories? Because this was a time when being gay could have ended you up in prison. Alan Chirin famously shortened the Second World War.

His work was so important. And yet he was chemically castrated afterwards for being gay. How do you find these histories when, by its nature, had to be hidden because it was so heavily punished. I mean, that was what the big challenge, particularly as I was researching the book during COVID, which meant all the archives were shut. Ah, yes.

And so on. And what I find fascinating is that there are very few testimonies that come through to us. And so they are this sort of like laser beam into that past. And you get a tiny insight. But there's the whole carpenter archive at the British Library, LGBT Archive with some incredible oral histories. I use that quite a lot. There was a wonderful program called It's Not Unusual.

from the late 90s, strangely enough, which is kind of a very progressive program for that time, I think. And there's an amazing episode about queerness in the Second World War, and there was RAF pilot called Christopher Gosh on there, and he talked about his commander, Ian Glead, who was a Spitfire race, like a classic RAF sort of tallyho, chocks away, shoot down Jerry for breakfast kind of character. And he sort of outed him on this TV program,

which is, you know, kind of a sticky thing, but he'd done it. So, you know, I was able to then read Ian Glead's memoir where he writes about a lover called Pam, who didn't actually exist and his family were very surprised about. And you kind of read the biography of Ian Glead, and it turns out Pam was a young friend of his, it was clearly his lover. So there was this sort of just this snapshot of a character there. A lot of it has come down through the Test of Books.

Dan Billany was a teacher and he was kind of a working class autodidact, basically. And he was gay and pretty openly gay And he fell in love with a man In a Prisoner of War Camp in Italy And together they wrote a book called The Cage When they created a third character Who was a gay man But it's really strange

Because Dan Bill and he was in love with this guy, David Dowie They wrote a book together about this impossible infatuation By creating a third character But they still worked on this book together Which suggests there was a tolerate Even this man was having someone in love with him And it wasn't requited He still wanted to do this project

and they eventually left their prisoner of war camp and disappeared. They died together. So there are these incredibly powerful stories sort of in that way where you have to kind of pick through. But then there were people like Dudley Cave, who I found about via Peter Tatchel. And he was a soldier, gay soldier in Japanese prison of war camps. Like a lot of people had an appalling time in there.

But he was out as gay after the war and was a gay activist. He founded the LGBT Switchboard. did a lot of work around getting LGBT remembrance at the cenotaph with outrage. Absolutely wonderful, man. I wish I could have met him. So there were these sort of few characters who were more sort of wrote formal books. Another guy, Peter DeRome, who wrote a memoir, a very twinkly man, who later made Super 8 gay porn in New York, which BFI released on DVD, very hot.

Probably the hottest DVD the BFI has ever released. I recommend the erotic films of Peter DeRome, highly recommended. I'm making a note as we speak. Yeah, yeah, he was amazing. So there are these very few people in the whole carpenter archive and sort of tells you a lot. But what's interesting is a lot of these testimonies talk about having sex with multiple men. So there's through these little glimmers you get of sexuality or suddenly this light appears on all these other men who are having a lot of gay sex in the background, supposedly straight a lot of them. Yeah, you know, what happens in the war, stays in the war type of thing.

Well, exactly. That's the thing. And I do think, you know, obviously it's quite well known that in the 1950s society became very conservative. The kind of nuclear family was all important. Everybody wanted to forget about the war. And there was a great period of conservatism. And I call it the great repression in the book. And that's where Alan Turing was caught and humiliated and castrated. It's very sad because in things like the Mass Observation Archive, you have testimony from gay men or in Hall Carpenter Archive. And some of the people I write about the book. And they were terrified. And they were burning letters from lovers who died in the war. Police raids on public toilets went up massively and gay pubs trying to catch gay men. So I always feel like there was this sense that we did all this stuff in the war that was shameful as a society. We need to now clamp down on it. Goodness me, wasn't it? Did we really do all that? And there was this sort of reaction against it with this horrible, homophobic conservatism that I think gay men, bisexual men, ball the brunt of.

And I think women did as well because they were forced back into domestic arrangements often into unhappy. You know, actually if you've been delivering bombers around Britain for the war, then suddenly you stop. You've got to go back into domestic life and your husband's come back, maybe traumatised. And I've Tupperware parties. Yeah. It's just a huge sort of deadening of Britain that happened in the 50s. And that's where I think there's a relevance now because there is a certain powerful sedgment on the right way. of British politics that sort of thinks this was the glory days. Let's return to the 1950s

when everyone knew who they were, everyone was white, everyone was heterosexual, everyone was pumping out children for the nation. And people see that as a nostalgic time, or as I see that as a very tough and quite bleak and grey, soggy wool, decrepit time after the kind of chaos and complicated liberation of the war years. And it certainly isn't the whole picture, is it? Maybe you're the same to me, when you're researching the histories of marginalised groups of people and people that faced huge punishment to disclose this stuff, oral testimony becomes like absolute gold dust. Did anybody come up and speak to you after the book or after you started to do this research to say, I've got a story to tell you?

Well, I mean, this has been the thing. After finding it's so difficult to find stories of people in the second one, more. The amount of people who've come up to me since the book came out and saying, oh, it's fascinating. because, you know, my great uncle, he never married. We were always sure this and that. And you're like, oh, right, well, you know, I wish I'd found you before. And, you know, even in my own family,

my mum's family were in the Plymouth Brethren, an extremely hardcore, hardline Christian sect. And it seems that some of her uncles, my great uncles or cousins removed or whatever, there was at least one or two who seemed to have been gay. And I was trying to find out about them, but there's just a sort of silence because they were ostracized from the family.

And so, yeah, there are these sort of little, quiet stories where people have feelings about their ancestors. And, you know, there aren't, I don't think there are any more queer people now than there were in the war. I think it's just we approach in a different way. There is that problem as well. How do we see, you know, sexuality at that time? So I think the idea of fluid sexuality didn't, as far as I could work out.

Not in the way that they could vocalise it the way that we do now. If the words had been around. That bisexual as a word didn't really exist. I mean, one of the people I really love in the book and probably fell in love with the most is called Mickey Byrne, who was a commando who ended up at German Prison of War camp in Colditz, the notorious Colditz, P-O-W camp

where all the kind of establishment officers hated him because he kept trying to, he used to work with the enlisted men who were their servants, encouraging them to fight for a better future of Britain and the posh sort of reactionaries at Douglas Bada, the fighter race, thought this was really not on, and you should be tried for treason. But he was bisexual and wrote about it. And he's one of the only men who kind of understood that fluid sexuality that I found and could really articulate it in a very, very beautiful way, his struggles with it,

that were very familiar, to be honest, very familiar for my life. And I think for a lot of bisexual men. I'll be back with Luke after this short break. In the lead-up to the Second World War II, what you were saying earlier is that there's a period of relative sexual liberation is often followed by a lot of repression. It tends to be cycles that we go through. After the First World War, we did enter, not for everybody, but if you were, I had a bit of money, knew where to go.

There was a more tolerant period around sex rights and thinking of like the Bloomsbury group, who were shagging each other six ways from Sunday, everything in between. Paris was known as like the lesbian capital of the world, that Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly went there and had all these amazing love affairs. And they were protected by money and privilege,

But people did know that they were gay. They were gay bars. There was lesbian subculture. They were gay. In Germany, before the Nazis came in, there was Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexological Research. It was becoming something that was more openly discussed. And then the Nazis came to power and they repressed it. And obviously, what people were primarily fighting for was to not have the country invaded

by this megalomaniac dickhead who was killing everybody. But did you find, like, a sense in your reality? that gay and queer people knew what was on the line for them and what was coming if they got in charge? I think that's definitely the case. Kind of maybe not overtly so, but definitely sublimity. I mean, Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, wrote that book about what's called the Glamour Boys, who were the kind of gay men who, you know, Berlin was a bit of a gay paradise in the 20s before the Nazis came. And I think they went and were working very well with Churchill, which I find fascinating.

Churchill is now seen in this appallingly binary way that does my head in the left think he was a racist, warmonger, terrible, the right think he's an unimpeachable hero. It's very complicated. But obviously he was working with all these gay men, and they working with him as part of the campaign against appeasement because they knew what Nazism was. And I do think, you know, I write a lot about heroism

and masculinity in the book. And, you know, I grew up with a very homophobic notion that gay men were effeminate, that they weren't warriors, is they couldn't be heroic in a traditional sense because who were the gay men who were alive in the Second World War that I knew. Kenneth Williams.

You know, Kenneth Williams is a total hero of mine. I love him, an absolute hero. But he wasn't, you wouldn't have thought of him as a soldier. Even though he writes a lot, but spoke a lot about the war, and I quote him a lot in the book. But then I started thinking about these people like Ian Glead or Mickey Byrne, these gay men who were warriors and quite tough people. And it's like, well, they, yeah, they knew gay people.

and there must have been a lot of gay people fighting in the military who knew exactly what they were up against. They were as more at risk of persecution if we'd lost than anybody else apart for Jews and travellers. And therefore they definitely had a motivation to be fierce warriors that heterosexual men arguably didn't in the same way. What was the army's stance on this in the Second World War? Did they have an official policy around same-sex relationships

or did they just attempt to turn a blind eye and pretend it wasn't happening? I mean, that's the interesting thing, is that, you know, technically it was forbidden. It was against the articles of war. The RAF had a weird legal case where they were trying to work out who should be expelled from the service for different behaviours. And there's this sort of conferences about basically thieves and homosexuals do we chuck them out because we kind of need them. The Navy sent out one of their operational signal orders, which was all about how to investigate sodomy and, you know, you need a medical officer and all of this. And, you know, there's all these sort of inappropriate behaviors. They're a very grey term.

It could be a catch-all. But statistically, there was less than 2,000 court marshals and even fewer prosecutions for homosexuality in the military during the Second World War. Arrests in toilets and so on went down massively during the Second World War. And, you know, obviously there were bigger problems, bigger things to be investigated. So I do think statistically it's kind of incredible. There were less than 2,000 court marshals, given how many misdemeanor. millions of men were in the military. I think there's a lot of testimony within units that officers

turned a very blind eye to it. There was one someone I write about whose lover was in his squadron and got shot down and killed, and the commanding officer called him in first to tell him, even before he told the family and gave him leave to sort of soften the blow and to prepare him. And Dudley Cave was very angry about the official structures of the military. You know, he said after the war, and when he was in this campaign against the Royal British Legion, saying the army turned a blind eye to it all when it was useful, and then afterwards turned on us. They forbade gay men to serve in the military. They prosecuted gay men.

And there was no remembrance of gay men at the cenotaph. And the Royal British Legion were homophobic, aggressively homophobic. Group captain Mountford, who he was having this letter spat with, was a very homophobic. I mean, I'm happy to say the Royal British Legion now is very different. They have a big LGBT section and there's positive changes happen there. But I think definitely the official military turned a blind eye to it by and large. Not entirely. I'm not saying it was an easy for gay men in the military, but there was obviously a certain leniency.

And I think a certain sense that if someone was good at fighting and they were a decent person and they, you know, weren't inappropriate, that was fine. And obviously there were other men for whom people knew they were gay like Dudley Cave writes about in his prisoner of war camp, there was one soldier who went by the name of Clarice or something like that who you could always find in the mangrove swamp. And a lot of soldiers went to her, him, depending on how they identified. I think it was a man for kind of relief. So I think there was a sort of a blind eye to a lot of these activities. Dudley Cave is a fascinating person in your book and so brave and so courageous with picking up

the campaign after the World War. I think what attracted me to him to him. him was the fact that he was imprisoned in Burma, and I know that my grandfather liberated those prisoners of war camps. Oh, wow. But we didn't know that until after he died. He was such like a lovely, gentle, mild-mannered man, unless you mention the Japanese, in which case, you would suddenly get this rage of anger, and it would always catch everyone off guard because it was so weird and precise. We never knew why. And when he died, we found that he had liberated the prisoner of war camps in Burma. And that's what's very interesting, again,

as well as Dudley Cave's LGBT activism. I mean, I can see why men who were in those prisoner of war camps or saw them like your granddad were so angry because the Japanese did treat prisoners appallingly. They thought surrender was shameful and they'd starve them and executed them and forced them to build the railway on the River Kwai, which is the film was about, which is where Dudley Cave was.

But his whole, you know, he was a Christian, a Unitarian Christian. And after the war, he had a big, drive for reconciliation with the Japanese. He went to peace ceremonies with one of his former captors, a translator, on the River Kwai, and was all about reconciliation and trying to build understanding with the Japanese, which is very, very beautiful. And he got a lot of stick from fellow former prisoners for doing that. And I can understand that. You know, but I really try not to be sort of judgmental and kind of finger-waggy and so on. But I find Dudley Caves' intense humanity,

very, very beautiful. I was really moved by that. And I think it's because I know that, like, obviously my grandpa and many other men would have been furious, like, their whole lives. And the fact that he actually went back to try and build connection, I found, I found that really profoundly moving. And after that, he campaigned for gay and queer representation in remembrance services and plays, didn't it? Yeah. Outrage used to do an unofficial remembrance service at Senataph, where they'd lay a pink triangle, which was obviously the symbol that the Nazis made gay and bisexual men. where in concentration camps. And actually, you know, long after his death, his campaign was successful.

I think it was 2021. You had LGBT servicemen and veterans and service women marching openly as part of remembrance parade. You know, and I think that's a wonderful, a wonderful tribute to something that Dudley Cave started in the 70s and 80s when it was impossible, inconceivable, that that could happen. I'm old enough to remember the 80s and how homophobic culture was. And that was why I went away from the war because I thought, you know, the war was not for queers. Yeah. And I couldn't have been more wrong. No, you could not have been more wrong.

Absolutely. One of the interesting things in your book, I thought this was fascinating, was another thing that the war did. If you want to attempt to look at a positive, I don't know if you could call it that. But surgery, the technical skills around surgery, what people are capable of, the fine art of surgery, obviously improved dramatically. because of course surgery is going to improve when you've got poor lads being blown to bits on the battlefield. But you're drawing out links between that and gender reassignment surgery, which I had never even thought of before.

That was fascinating. Yeah, yeah, that was one of the most exciting things to kind of make that connection was that, you know, I'd read books about Richard Hillary, the Brathlete-Britter fighter race who was severely burned, you know, a bit of a hero of mine as a kid. And he went to a hospital in Sussex. It was called the Guinea Pig Club,

where they would fix men's faces. And the surgeon from there, Archibald and Macondo, who were his rivals, they pioneered this rhinoplasti surgery. And they were doing men's faces, but also men's genitals, when they kind of had really unpleasant injuries in their genitals. And after the war, that same technology was used for the first gender reassignment operations, both on trans man, trans woman. And I write about Roberta Cowell in the book,

who was a Spitfire pilot in the war, and a very angry man, kind of a man's man, really into aggressive masculinity, hated anything city, was massively homophobic, drove cars, was into motoring, flying Spitfires, got shot down, was in a prisoner of war camp. And then after the war, obviously, suffering for PTSD as well, I realised they were intersex and sort of started to understand where the resentment and their rage, male rage came from, was being in the wrong body. And their first gender assignment on a man to become a woman

was on Robert, then Roberta Cowell. And there's an amazing story, which I write about in the book, where Roberta Cowell is in a pub having a drink and some idiot comes up, bastasioed kind of chap, going on about what he'd done in the war to try and impress her. And he was doing this sort of waving his arms around

to show him he was in his spitfire, and I know jolly it came in and I had to, you know, to lower the flax, but I couldn't because the controls were shot away. And Roberta Cowell had to point out that he was referring to the, I can't remember it was Spitfires did or didn't have pneumatic and it was actually hydraulic, but one way around. You know, so Roberta just totally schooled this idiot, you know. And I love that story.

I mean, I think Roberta Cowell's later life was more complicated around her gender, but I think that's part of the time. You know, we could see the bigotry against trans people now, I think in the mid-20th century. who'd have been even worse. So it's kind of maybe not surprising Roberta Cowell's gender reassignment caused problems for her later in life. I do think it's complicated. But it is wonderful that it's exactly the same surgery, still being used to. The McKindow technique is still being used for trans people today. And that comes expressly from medical advances in the Second World War, building on medical

technologies from the first, because the plastic surgery techniques kind of leapt ahead in the First World War, then everyone forgot about them for years and then had to revive the research in the Second World War. So I think that's a really sort of a positive and a very beautiful story that comes out of the war. I think so. I think so. I think one of the sad... I mean, there's a lot of sad history when it comes to the war,

but one of the saddest things about queer history, gay history, is when you read these stories and people are so laden with shame and guilt and they shouldn't have been carrying any of it. There was no need to feel like that. But obviously that's, you know, 2020. looking back, but that always breaks my heart when you read those stories about how the hatred that people feel towards themselves. Yeah, I mean, that's the really sad aspect to, you know,

even Mickey Byrne, his sense of shame, he was blackmailed in those very common sort of gay blackmail situations that used to happen in cruising places. And in a lot of the whole carpenter archives, there's a lot of shame. And a lot of the research by sexologists, there's just impossible shame. I mean, I do think that also applied to heterosexual. men in a strange way because there was so much shame around things like masturbation. You know, I think the male body and sexual behavior and, you know, women were actively shamed, which I write about in the book, you know, all that kind of keeps schum, she's not so dumb, all those famous propaganda posters that you can have on your wall.

And they're pretty misogynist, really. It's sort of like the woman is this slutty character who's going to go, yeah, yeah, vector of disease, she's going to take all the secrets that you blab and tell the Germans, you know, there was a huge amount of shaming in all directions in the war. But I think on this very personal private level, whether it was in, well, their partners were away or in their units, miles away from anywhere, people did overcome that shame for a short time.

J.H. Witter, who are right about in the book, an appalling man, he totally overcame all shame and behaved like an absolute monster to a lot of women on his travels across Europe. And I wanted to bring him in as well as an example of this sort of, you know, I'm not just celebrating masculinity here. I wanted to critique it as well. and he was a right bastard.

You mentioned Mickey Burn there. I thought his story was fascinating because he started off as a Nazi sympathiser, didn't he? What was his story? Yeah, I mean, he really is my favourite, I think. I was going to ask you who your favourite person you wrote about was. He was gorgeous. I could see myself in him.

Not in a kind of gorgeousness way, but the fluid sexuality and the shame and the confusion and not the Nazi sympathising. But he was a sort of, middle class quite well-to-do fella, ended up writing about motor racing. And then in the 30s, he went to the Nuremberg rally. And he even met Hitler and Hitler gave him a signed copy of Mind Camp. And it's very disturbing. There's pictures of him at the Nuremberg rally. He wrote these articles praising the Nazis and the marching. He even went to one of the very earliest concentration camps

when it was kind of used for political prisoners and the mentally ill communists and was sort of variety about how these people were barely even human. He totally absorbed all of this horrible nonsense. And he actually kind of recanted when he came back to Britain and sort of was woke up in a start. And essentially, you know, he was very concerned about the fate and the opportunities for working people. He got with good intentions. And I think he saw what Hitler was doing, as many Germans did, as being the saving Germany and giving people work and sorting out crime and all of this. And so he was taken in by it. And he came back to Britain and sort of realized it was, goodness me, this was terrible.

And spent a lot of time working class communities and then became a lot more left wing. And in his memoirs, he writes, you know, I could have destroyed my letters to my mum where I'm praising Hitler. I could have destroyed these articles I wrote. But I felt it was very important that I didn't and I published them and I own up to how I was taken in by this because this stuff is dangerous and this menace will always be here. And people need to understand how you fall for it. Which is just so... That's brave, that.

Incredibly brave. And he was brave, you know, not just in the kind of going on this crazy raid to San Nazaire, where they tried to blow up the docks. And then the next day there was a German film crew there, filming these prisoners walking along. And they basically put a load of explosives in the ship, and they hadn't gone off yet. But Mickey Burr knew it was going to go off,

that they rammed into the docks. And so he's walking along, and he does the V for Victory site in front of the German cameras. So the Germans are putting this news rail out, say, we've captured the British on their failed. raid, but he's doing a V for victory, and then a little while later, the ship blew up and destroyed the docks. And he always looked after his men in the POW camps. He was a very good poet, he wrote a novel about being in cold hits. He was just a really incredible man. And there's

a really sweet, kind of amazing story about, he had a friend in the Netherlands. And, you know, there was a big famine in the Netherlands at the end of the war. And her daughter was dying and needed medicine. And Mickey Burns sent all these cigarettes to her so she could sell them on the black market to buy medicine for her daughter. And her daughter survived. Many years later, Mickey Byrne was in a cinema watching a film, one of Audrey Hepburn's first films. And it turned out it was her. The girl he'd saved was Audrey Hepburn. And I didn't manage to get that story in the books. It didn't quite fit. But it's just this sort of lovely little incident in a just a wonderful man's life.

He had a partner, a female partner, and I know it was hard for him to be with her, but they made their relationship work. I think towards the end of his life after she died, he was in a relationship with men primarily, living in a little house in Wales. But he's just an absolutely beautiful character. And some of these, you know, Mickey Burn is not a film made about him a while ago,

but they're just not really known, and it's just been really lovely to write about them and hopefully bring their lives to greater attention in some way. Where are we up to today with gay history in the military? I mean, thankfully, it's, you know, we're not even, don't ask, don't tell. We're certainly not throwing people out, etc. But we still have people around living today who were dishonorably discharged from the armed forces on the grounds of being homosexual.

And it's been like a permanent stain on their record for their life. I mean, and I know that Alan Churin was given a pardon. And then there was voices after that going, he shouldn't have been pardoned, because it was never a crime in the first place, which is quite a strong argument. Yeah, I think I'm sort of two minds because it's almost like you can't undo what was done. So if you say, oh, it wasn't a crime in the first place,

so we just wipe it. I think it doesn't acknowledge the state's guilt. Maybe the state giving a pardon is saying, we apologize to you. And I think there needs to be, I think there are the movement to apologising and I think to people who's post-war with this honourably discharge has been moving on slowly.

I have spoken to queer people in the military since the book came out, all ex-military, and they've told me some absolutely sort of mind-ending stories about what was going on. I mean, one guy told me about how, you know, in the book I write about how the guardsmen, they're sort of, you know, one of the highest regiments in the British army. They guard the palaces, they're stationed in London,

they're the ones with the pointy helmets, with the feathers, and they ride the horses with the huge leather boots. But they were notorious for sort of doing favours in the parks. Shock-y. In the National Archives, there's all these mini- of conferences between the police and the army kind of go, how are you going to sort this out, and how many people have we prosecuted, the guards that are at it again? And I thought this must have died out like, you know, around the war years or the 50s or something. I was talking to a soldier,

former soldier, and he said when he was stationed in those barracks in central London, he'd gone on his morning jog around the rose bushes, which anyone who's familiar with London's queer cruising seed in the London Parks will, the rose bushes in the Royal Parks will have a resonance. And he'd been on his jog going, oh, this is clearly a morning hookup area. Very interesting. He said, my jog occasionally did have a little detour. But apparently, the whole tradition of the guards cruising in the parks was killed by gay people being allowed to serve in the military. Because when it was forbidden, you could go and cruise in the park, and there might be some guardsmen there. But because it was illegal, you'd get back to the barracks.

no one would ever say anything because it was totally taboo. As soon it was allowed to be gay in a military, you couldn't go because somebody might dob you in because there might be an out person who might say, I've seen him in the park. So I thought that was kind of like a really interesting twist on how complicated sexuality is in these spaces or how we can't just see it in black and white. You know, you hear all the time about bullying in the military, bullying of women, bullying of queer people, racist bullying. I think anywhere where you have, essentially what is still,

even though there's a lot more women and queer people can now be out in the military, it's still quite a batch of organisation just by its very nature. So there's obviously going to be problems, but I do feel like things have shifted in a big way. And with remembrance coming up, you know, there'll be the LGBT people marching openly again. So, you know, I'm not kind of idealistic about it, but I do think there's positive changes have been made.

Absolutely. Luke, you have been amazing to talk to today. and your work is so important in re-appraising who fought and what happened in the Second World War. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? In the Rosegard? Yeah, no, I've retired. I've retired from such things, so, alas. I'm very bad.

I don't have a website, but I'm on the Twitter X thing for now. Luke Turner Esquire, ESQ, which is a lot fancy than I really am. And I'm on the blue sky one, which I much prefer. It's a far more pleasant. place, look for Luke Turner on there. And then my website, The Quietus music website, I can be found fire there. So I'm

lurking in many places, but not rose bushes anymore. Thank you so much for talking Tuesday. I've enjoyed this so much. Thanks, Kate. It's been great. Thank you very much, indeed. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Luke for joining me. And if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe me you just fancied saying hello, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Napoleon's sex life to Rosemary Kennedy in our Kennedy Women's special. All come in your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Seats, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.