Turns out soldiers in both world wars had a ton of gay sex in their downtime
a Twitter user on April 1. Yes, it must have — and two new books are here to prove it by shining a light on the role gay men played in both world wars.gay sex in the wwi trenches must've hit so crazyIn Memoriam by Alice Winn is a romance between two young soldiers fighting in World War I, while Luke Turner’s Men At War blends history and memoir to look at World War II soldiers outside of a straight, cisgender ideal.
Together, these books point to a growing fascination with what queerness looked like for 20th-century military men.Winn and Turner aren’t pulling their queer war narratives from thin air.
Winn’s In Memoriam, though fictional, is heavily inspired by the poems, letters, and other writings of WWI soldiers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. “It’s not as if I could find primary sources for what gay sex was like at the front,” Winn told Yahoo News, “but it seems unlikely that it never happened.” Indeed, though there are no concrete accounts of gay sex in the trenches, historial records show that more than 230 British soldiers were court-martialed and imprisoned for “homosexual offenses” during WWI.Meanwhile, Turner’s Men At War tells the true stories of gay men who fought in WWII, like flying ace Ian Gleed and army officer Dan Billany, along with other military personnel who didn’t conform to hetero-masculine stereotypes.“I was very adamant that I didn’t just want this to be a book about sexuality,” said Turner.
