Life Before Stonewall

Last week new york city's population swelled by several hundred thousand people as lesbians and gay men from around the world gathered to celebrate Gay Games IV and the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. The Games attracted 10,000 athletes from 44 countries, including a 37-year-old black lesbian grandmother who wrestles and the first figure-skating competition featuring same-sex pairs. There were at least 25 dances -- from prom formal to disco -- some for as many as 5,000 people; events with corporate sponsors ranging from Joseph E. Seagram & Sons to Continental Airlines and AT&T; a one-man show with Sir Ian McKellen on Broadway, and a cocktail party honoring 120 gay government officials -- the largest number ever assembled in a single room.

To many Americans -- gay and straight -- the Greenwich Village riot sparked by a few drag queens outside the Stonewall Inn a generation ago marked the beginning of modern gay life in America. That's why last week's was the longest, largest and most elaborate celebration of gay life ever held. And it should put to rest all doubts about the community's diversity, its growing clout inside mainstream American institutions -- or its legendary ability to party.

But the present notion of a gay identity really began to take shape almost 30 years earlier, with the outbreak of World War II. The wartime draft acted like a giant magnet, pulling all types of men together from every hamlet and metropolis. As a result, the army became the home for the largest concentration of gay men ever found inside a single American institution. Volunteer women who joined the WAC and the WAVES experienced an even more prevalent lesbian culture.

Discoveries:

The army did attempt to stigmatize homosexuals by collaborating with the psychiatric establishment to try to exclude them from the military. But postwar studies concluded that those efforts were mostly a failure. Instead, many of the gay men and lesbians who served their country in uniform gained a dramatic new vision of their diversity and ubiquity. To a few, the experience even suggested how powerful they might one day become. The army's role as an unwitting engine of gay liberation is one of the great ironies of recent history.

Some gay soldiers who were sent abroad were amazed by what they found. A 26-year-old army captain from Cincinnati was dumbfounded in 1945 when he first walked into the Boeuf sur le Toit in Paris: "It was a great gay nightclub," he remembered. "Beef on the roof! Suddenly you realized the size of homosexuality -- the total global reach of it! There were hundreds of guys from all over the world in all kinds of uniforms: there were Free Poles dancing with American soldiers; there were Scotsmen dancing with Algerians; there were Free French; there were Russians. It was like a United Nations of gays. It was just incredible. There were men dancing with each other! I had never seen that before in my life!"