Book Review: My Queer War

James Lord (Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir) wanted to leave college in October 1942; at 20, he hated every minute of campus life and harbored a secret that shamed him. Volunteering for the U.S. Army and heading off to war seemed like the perfect escape. My Queer War reveals what this young man, so innocent of worldly experience, learned about himself, the army, the enemy, Europe and even the artists he worshipped (Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann, among others) during his tour of duty from enlistment until discharge in December 1945.

As he headed to Europe on a troop ship in July 1944, Lord wrote, "All adventure, of course, is concerned with going somewhere, attaining a destination, whether actual or spiritual, one remote from a point of departure," but harsh realities, not neat abstractions, awaited him on the other side of the Atlantic. Trained in military intelligence, his initial assignments in Europe struck him as either ridiculous or pointless. His commanding officers also fell short of expectations: they were either sadistic martinets or closeted homosexuals who made passes at him at inopportune moments. Unfortunately, he couldn't keep his opinions to himself.

Lord is brutally honest about his immaturity and unpreparedness for army life. People who saw that he was bucking the system and asking for trouble tried to warn him--"Study to be heartless," one superior advised. As he records here, he heard their words but could not abandon his idealistic prewar moral framework about right behavior. As retribution for Lord's inveterate and unwelcome candor, one officer sent him to interrogate prisoners of war--but at that POW camp, Lord got more than bargained for. He writes, "Had I fled college for fear of being found out to be queer, the gnawing guilt thereof, only to find myself faced [with the intractable horrors of that camp]?"

Overwhelmed by both the atrocities he witnessed and the rampant absurdities of the army, he asked himself, "Was it merely the war? Being queer in the war, making the war queer." Portraying his actual war duties as farcical (he was awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious achievement--for nothing, he says), Lord delivers a sobering and heartbreaking account of the personal battle he fought to come to terms with his inexperience, hero worship and sexuality in the unforgiving theater of war. In poignant summary, Lord (who died at 86 in 2009) writes, "I stood by the ragged edge of the action in fear and fascination, and I dreamed that maybe mere proximity might make the story of my queer war the history of an epic." --John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A frank, heartbreaking memoir of a gay man's experience in the European Theater of World War II.

 

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