What does it mean when vast and profound change does not come from the actions of a few heroic individuals, but from organic cultural shift made possible by seizing war-time opportunities by collective effort?
The following is a reading used the Sunday at Tree of Life UU Congregation for a By the Numbers service led by Kristal Larson, the Executive Director of the LGBTQ+ Center Lake County. "this sermon continues an exploration the queer journey after coming out using the Book of Numbers as a guide. The discussion begins by centering the unique challenges of being openly queer. It explores the need for finding safety and security in close community and among allies." Tree of Life worships in the shared space of Ridgefield/Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, 8505 Church Street in Ridgefield at 10 am.
Lesbianism was never illegal in Britain. When Parliament criminalized sex between men in 1885, Queen Victoria reportedly refused to believe women did any such thing, and the clause was quietly dropped.
That legal gap didn't make life easy, but it did mean the military couldn't court-martial them for existing so during World War II, tens of thousands of lesbians took full advantage of that loophole.
The Women's Auxiliary Air Force, known as the WAAF, peaked at 181,000 members in 1943. The Women's Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, reached 75,000 at their height in 1944. Both services pulled women from across Britain and put them in barracks together, gave them meaningful work, and sent them far from the surveillance of family and small-town life for the first time. For many queer women it was the first time they had ever met others like themselves.
The official position in both services was that lesbianism was a psychological defect, a form of arrested development traced back to the assumed passions of girls' boarding schools. Dame Katherine Trefusis Forbes, the first director of the WAAF, called lesbian women "misfits." But the war needed bodies, and both services needed to retain skilled personnel desperately enough that the official position and the actual practice diverged significantly.
Emma Vickers, whose 2013 book Queen and Country found that senior officials generally looked the other way provided women were discreet. The unwritten rule was that sufficient evidence was required to act, and sufficient evidence was surprisingly difficult to establish when everyone around decided not to look.
Women found ways to arrange their lives accordingly. Oral histories held at the Imperial War Museum document lesbian couples who managed to get posted to the same stations together, over and over, as they moved through the war. .
Off base, pubs and certain clubs in London and other cities functioned as informal gathering points where queer servicewomen could find each other without anyone having to explain anything directly. The Union Jack Club in London was documented as one such haven. Women learned to read the room, to recognize the signs, to know which table to sit at and which questions not to ask directly. It was a social infrastructure built entirely out of discretion, proximity, and the particular freedoms that wartime dislocation accidentally provided.
When the war ended, many of those women went home. Some went back into the closet. Some didn't. The communities they'd built in barracks and pubs and postings didn't disappear entirely; they fed into the small, largely invisible lesbian bar culture that survived in British cities through the 1950s and 1960s, largely unnoticed by a society that still officially didn't believe any of it was happening.
Tip-O'the-Hat to Queer historian Bill Browning.
