Military Men, Sex and the Law

17 December 2024

Soldiers, airmen and navy sailors hold a complicated place in gay history and culture. They have  epitomised masculine endeavour, incited desire, and bridged civilian and military worlds. Servicemen have had a complex relationship to policing and punishment. Most sexual encounters between men in the armed forces, or between military men and civilians, went unnoticed and unpunished during the middle of the twentieth century. But when the law did come into play, two distinct patterns emerged.

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Bundled into hammocks aboard ship.

The first involved servicemen arrested and charged for having sex together. In 1942, leading seaman John Reader, 31*, and signalman William Brook, 19*, attempted buggery aboard the HMS Breeze, a navy ship berthed at Wellington’s Queens Wharf. Reader and Brook got intimate below decks, but a gaggle of eager young ratings watched them through an open hatchway. One went to get his camera; another fetched the duty petty officer. When questioned during a court martial, they freely admitted their enjoyment: ‘Doing a little bit of Peeping Tom eh?’ ‘More or less.’ ‘It was a great shock and excitement,’ a nineteen-year-old sailor exclaimed, because ‘it was the first sodomy I have seen in my life’.

These witnesses were asked about the position of Reader’s thighs; one demonstrated the angle of Reader’s body by leaning over a table. Another thought the motion of Reader’s hips ‘suggested sodomy’. Brook, the younger man, was presumed to have been a regular participant in such activities because his anus was shaped like a funnel. During the middle of the nineteenth century, criminologist Ambroise Tardieu wrote that passive partners had conical anuses – and the idea persisted as late as the 1970s. Both seamen were found guilty of committing ‘gross indecency’. Brook went to Waikeria Borstal, and Reader served his one-year sentence at New Plymouth – the prison where most homosexual offenders were incercarated [see here].

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A group of sailors wearing their button flap trousers. 

In another Wellington court martial, two men masturbated one another when stationed as night lookouts on the roof of the Rongotai air force base. Under questioning, one of them recalled taking straw mattresses up there without permission. ‘I liked being on the roof’, he said. At the Burnham army base near Christchurch, men hung out in one another’s sleeping quarters. One pair of soldiers had a routine: they visited one another of an evening to drink beer, listen to the radio, and fool about. They were found out, and found guilty of indecent assault in the Christchurch Supreme Court. Most army cases were dealt with by the normal courts, not courts martial.

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An unpopular serviceman might be singled out for harsh treatment. Reader’s lawyer claimed his client’s unpopularity on the ship led to ‘a frame up’ – but Reader’s erotic interests were hardly unusual. Seafaring lore told of ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’ and, in 1962, an Otago University researcher noted that ‘the navy is regarded as a breeding ground for homosexuality’. Others, too, were held responsible for the sins of their comrades. Army soldier Arthur Fee was found guilty and sent to New Plymouth, but the others in his Fort Dorset barracks were not even charged. In the Wellington Supreme Court, members of the jury recommended Fee be granted leniency. According to a report in the Waikato Times, the jury referred to ‘the state of affairs that existed in the barracks and the probable encouragement given to him’.

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Arthur Fee’s police mugshots, 1941.

Some servicemen approached unwilling partners, or coerced other men into sexual activity. Senior officers might pressure junior men, old hands tried it on with new recruits, and a few physically stronger men assaulted their slighter barracks mates. In one case, an army nurse sedated his charges with drugs and got into bed with them. As was common at the time, the authorities paid little attention to the impact of sexual coercion on the victims. Instead they focussed on establishing guilt.

There was a second pattern of legal response. When service personnel became sexually involved with civilians, often the military men’s masculine status saved them from punishment. During the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the wharves and streets were vital spaces in which men met and queer worlds took shape [see here]. Locals and visitors picked one another up, had sex, and sometimes struck up enduring friendships. If members of the armed services did appear in court, they were usually discharged without conviction. In one example, two twenty-year-old marines hooked up with a pair of local men the same age in Dunedin’s Queens Gardens in 1949. While the marines did not even appear in front of a judge, both local men were tried and found guilty. One was probationed, the other imprisoned.

 

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Left: Trevor Nunweek and a friend in the Square, Christchurch, 1940s. Right: A photo card ‘to my own Trevor’ from Bruce, an American marine, 1940s.

There were more instances like this. In Auckland, in 1941, a gunner in the territorials admitted to having sex with local men and performing in drag at queer parties. ‘I used facial make up on those occasions. I did a vocal turn. My object was to entertain my friends’, he told a judge and jury. He walked free, as did a sex partner who also had military credentials. But two of their young civilian friends were not so lucky. They admitted their part in various sexual encounters, and were incarcerated: the sixteen-year-old went to Waikeria for two years, and the twenty-year-old to New Plymouth for three. In another case, a group of young civilians appeared in a Christchurch court during the 1940s, but their incorrigible soldier mate – assumed by police to be ‘the moving spirit’ in their sexual exploits – vanished into thin air. The local lads came from ‘respectable’ families so they got away with a term of probation and a naming and shaming in the local newspaper.

These stories of military men, their friends and lovers gesture towards the tangled knot that bound together masculinity, sexuality and social status in New Zealand some eighty years ago.

* I have used pseudonyms in order to comply with the conditions that govern access to restricted records at Archives New Zealand.

 

Sources:

Brickell, C. (2024) ‘New Zealand’s Military and the Disciplining of Sex Between Men, 1940-1960’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 33(2), 188-210.

Brickell, C. (2012) ‘Queens Gardens, 1949: The Anxious Spaces of Postwar New Zealand Masculinity’, New Zealand Geographer, 68(2), 81-91.

Coutts, B. (2020) Crossing the Lines: The Story of Three Homosexual Soldiers in WW2.

Waikato Times, 22 October 1941, 6.

Williams, H. E. (1962) ‘Homosexuality: Aspects of This Problem Aboard Ships’, Preventive Medicine Dissertation, University of Otago, 45.

 

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