Lesbian women and gay men served in the armed forces during world war 2 and other major conflicts.2/28/2024 ![]() ![]() To help examiners distinguish gay men from other enlistees, psychiatrists wrote into military regulations lists of stereotyped signs that characterized gay men as visibly different from the rest of the population. Military psychologists devised supposedly foolproof guides to ferret out homosexuals who tried to enlist in the military. The military’s policy that homosexual acts were a crime that merited discharge gave way to a psychiatrist-controlled theory that homosexuality was an illness, and the sick person, not the act, became the target of anti-homosexual policies and directives. In 1942, the relatively new profession of military psychiatrists warned of the “psychopathic personality disorders” that would make homosexuals unfit to fight. ![]() With the growing acceptance of the validity of psychoanalysis in the medical profession in the 1920s and 1930s, attitudes towards sodomy and homosexual individuals had changed. However, until 1942, no specific proviso barred homosexuals from serving in the military. Anti-sodomy laws and regulations had been around since the Revolutionary War, leading in some cases to dishonorable discharge, courts-martial, or imprisonment for military men found having sex with other men. ![]()
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