The writers restoring queer lives into world war history

[Behind the Aegis]

‘It seems unlikely there wasn’t gay sex at the front’: The writers restoring queer lives into world war history

Alice Winn is talking to me about her debut novel, In Memoriam, a love story between two young officers set in the trenches of the First World War. “It’s not as if I could find primary sources for what gay sex was like at the front,” she says, “but it seems unlikely that it never happened.”

She has a point. The homosexual feelings, if not the actual encounters, of officers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are clearly recorded in their poems and letters. In more concrete terms, 270 British soldiers were court-martialled during the conflict for “gross indecency”, as illegal homosexual activities were known. So yes, of course there was gay sex at the front.

Winn’s novel, which imagines these acts in an explicitly erotic way, is one of two new books that set out to challenge the stereotype of British masculinity in the 20th century’s two world wars. Luke Turner’s Men at War, released next month, is part-history, part-memoir, and explores the complex but underdiscussed spectrum of masculinity that defined the Second World War. Both books question the ideal of the straight, cisgender serviceman, who in films and fiction is too often portrayed as the only true hero of the conflicts. In these new accounts, fluid gender identities and queer sexuality are revealed to have been no barrier to courageous acts.

Winn, 30, a screenwriter living in New York, says that the initial inspiration for her book came from reading the digital archive of the newspaper at her old school, Marlborough, where Sassoon had also been a pupil. “I devoured all the papers from 1913 to 1919 and it was like nothing else I’ve ever read,” she says. What fascinated her about the papers was the real-time reports of the war that older and former pupils sent back. “At first they are all excited,and then they write about gallant deaths, and then it changes tenor as the horror sets in.”

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