Abstract
It is 8.30pm on Monday night in late July 1943, and the profile of an American serviceman standing by the south bank of the Brisbane River was clearly visible to passers-by He seemed to be looking for something as he peered out across a grassy enclosure sloping down towards the water. Two Australian soldiers — now only partially dressed in uniform and in the throes of passion — had piqued his interest. Their activities had attracted a voyeur although they were attempting to enjoy an inti¬mate moment alone in an overrun and overcrowded wartime city. The onlooker, in turn, caught the eye of police on patrol.
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Notes
This concept is George Chauncey’s: Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 179–205;
George Chauncey, ‘Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public’, in Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Saunders (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), 224–66.
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 31; Chauncey, Gay New York, 303–4. On the history of boarding houses and hotels in Queensland see
Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 67–69.
Lawrence Knopp, ‘Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis’, in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, eds David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995), 154–55;
Richard Tewksbury, ‘Cruising for Sex in Public Places: The Structure and Language of Men’s Hidden, Erotic Worlds’, Deviant Behaviour: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17 (1995), 4–9.
William Leap, ‘Introduction’, in Public Sex/Gay Space, ed. William Leap (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 7.
Wayne Murdoch, ‘We Went under the Shadows of the Trees in the Rockery; South of the River’, in Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, eds Graham Willett, Wayne Murdoch and Daniel Marshall (Melbourne: ALGA, 2011), 42.
For an excellent discussion on the significance of memorials see Ken Inglis with Jan Brazier, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008).
Graham Carbery, ‘Some Melbourne Beats: A “Map” of a Subculture from the 1930s to the 1950s’, in Gay Perspectives: Essays in Australia Gay Culture, eds Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (Sydney: Department of Economic History, the University of Sydney, 1992), 131–45.
Clive Moore, ‘Poofs in the Park: Documenting Gay Beats in Queensland, Australia’, GLQ, 2, 1–2 (1995), 324; Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, 101.
See for example Chauncey, Gay New York, 197–210; Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 49–52;
Steven Maynard, ‘Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5, 2 (1994), 222–31.
Paul Hetherington, ed., The Diaries of Donald Friend, vol. 2 (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2003), 19.
Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991), 67.
Philip Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 36; Chauncey, Gay New York, 179–80; Houlbrook, Queer London, 153–8.
Michel Foucault [trans. Robert Hurley], The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1986), 30;
David Bell, ‘Pleasure and Danger: The Paradoxical Spaces of Sexual Citizenship’, Political Geography, 14, 2 (1995), 146.
ALGA (Bill and) Louis interviewed by Geoffrey Stewardson (9 July 2001), 3. One Sydney teenager under the pretences of a school project used a staged photography session to gaze upon the body of a middle-aged family gardener. He was caught out when it was discovered there was no film in the camera; Adrian Dixson, ‘Adrian finds his Avalon’, in Being Different: Nine Gay Men Remember, ed. Garry Wotherspoon (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986), 66–7.
David. K Johnson, ‘Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture’, Journal of Social History, 43, 4 (2010), 867–92.
Houlbrook, Queer London, 182–86, Chris Brickell, ‘“Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-Structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–1950’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 21, 3 (2012), 467–95.
Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 225.
Kay Saunders, War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland 1938–1948 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 33–80.
See for example P. M. Mercer and C. R. Moore, ‘Australia’s Pacific Islanders, 1906–1977’, in Race Relations in North Queensland, ed. Henry Reynolds (Townsville: James Cook University, 1978), 195–216; Cathie
Ibid., Deposition [no number] [2 sets — sodomy and gross indecency]; Townsville Daily Bulletin, 10 October 1944, 3; Cairns Post, 10 October 1944. Queer Aboriginal history is yet to written and it only appears marginally in existing stories. The limited literature includes Jim Wafer, ‘Peopling the Empty Mirror: The Prospects for Lesbian and Gay Aboriginal History’, in Gay Perspectives II: More Essays in Australian Gay Culture, ed. Robert Aldrich (Sydney: University of Sydney with the Australian Centre for Gay and Lesbian Research, 1994), 1–62;
Dino Hodge, Did You Meet any Malagas? A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital (Nightcliff: Little Gem, 1993);
Noel Tovey, Little Black Bastard: A Story of Survival (Sydney: Hodder Headline, 2005).
Kay Saunders, ‘Racial Conflict in Brisbane in World War II: The Imposition of Patterns of Segregation upon Black American Servicemen’, in Brisbane: Brisbane at War, Brisbane History Group [comp. Helen Taylor] (Spring Hill: Brisbane History Group, 1986), 29–34.
On ‘Base A’ see NARA, RG495, Records of HQ US Armed Forces, Western Pacific, Entry 179, Provost Marshal General Correspondence Records 1942–45, Box 1277, Activities PM USASOS, Maj. CMP Maurice E. Persson, History of Provost Marshal HQs USASOS (13 September 1944). On Biak see Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 193.
Although John Hammond-Moore notes that in Australia in 1944, 201 enlisted men were discharged and 21 officers were asked to resign: he intimates that they were Black men; John Hammond-Moore, Over-Sexed, Over-Paid, and Over Here: Americans in Australia 1941–1945 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), 213. The same figure appears in NARA, RG495, Box 1277, History of PM Office HQ USASOS (31 March 1943–1 March 1944), 3, although there is no reference to troops of colour. by J. G. W. (Indexed 30 September 1943); and Ensign USNR R.C. McGuinnis to O/C Counter Intelligence Section (22 September 1943); RG495, Entry 11, Assistant Chief of Staff General Correspondence 1942–44, Box 22, 250.4, General Courts Martial, G-l to C/S (11 February 1943); and G-l to C/S (19 January 1943); and G-l to C/S (5 January 1943); RG495, Box 992, 333.5, AG Section, Col. W. C. Lattimore to Commanding Gen. USASOS (1 November 1943); and Investigation of Control and Conduct of Negro Troops in Base Section 7 (April 1944), 8. John Howard notes the frequency of homosex among Black prisoners in the American South in his Men Like That: A Queer Southern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 117–18.
Judith A. Bennett, Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 67.
Gwen Friend, My Brother Donald: A Memoir of Australian Artist Donald Friend (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994), 97.
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Smaal, Y. (2015). Queer Geographies. In: Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-36514-9_3
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