WWII Gay G.I.s recounts tale of losing their Lovers
Excerpt from the book Coming out under fire The history of gay Men and Women in World War Two: Combat soldiers often responded to each other’s personal losses with the deepest respect and understanding, allowing gay GIs to express openly their grief over the death of boyfriends or lovers.
Jim Warren’s boyfriend was hit while trying to knock out a machine-gun nest on Saipan. “They brought him back,” Warren recalled, “and he was at the point of death. He was bleeding. He had been hit about three or four times. I stood there and he looked up at me and I looked down at him and he said, ‘Well, Jim, we didn’t make it, did we.’ And tears were just rolling down my cheeks. I don’t know when I’ve ever felt such a lump and such a waste. And he kind of gave me a boyish crooked grin and just said, ‘Well, maybe next time.’ And I said, ‘I’m going to miss you. And I’ll see your mother.’ There were people standing around, maybe seven or eight people standing there, and I was there touching his hand and we were talking. Somebody said later, ‘You were pretty good friends,’ because I had been openly crying and most people don’t do this. I said, ‘Yes, we were quite good friends.’ And nobody ever said anything. I guess as long as I supposedly upheld my end of the bargain, everything was all right.”
Ben Small was even less able to control himself when his boyfriend was killed in the Philippines. But he, too, was surprised by the other men’s compassion towards him. “We had a funny freak attack of a Japanese kamikaze plane,” he recalled, “and I guess he was getting rid of his last load of these baby cutter bomb, these little bombs that explode at about three feet high so if they went off through a tent they exploded at bed level. I had just been in the tent of a guy I had been going with at the time. He crawled into bed, and I said goodnight and walked out the tent. And this plane came overhead and all we heard was explosions and we fell to the ground. When I got up too see if he was all right, the trust of the bomb had gone through his tent and he was not there. I went into a three-day period of hysterics. I was treated with such kindness by the guys that I worked with, who were all totally aware of why I had gone hysterical. It wasn’t because we were bombed. It was because my boyfriend had been killed. And one guy in the tent came up to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were gay? You could have talked to me.’ I said, ‘Well, I was afraid to.’ This big straight, macho guy. There was a sort of compassion then.”
After a raid in the Philippines, Ben Small remembered, a lieutenant who had been injured was being shipped back to the States, so the men “all went to the plane to see him off that night. It was an amazingly touching moment, when he and his lover said goodbye, because they embraced and kissed in front of all these straight guys and everyone dealt with it so well. I think it was just this basic thing about separation of someone you cared for, regardless of sex.” Small described this tender parting as “a little distilled moment out of time” when men’s “prejudices were suspended” and gay soldiers “could be a part of what this meant.”
This is something I've examined before, but I want to target this specific aspect in more depth. As you spend more time in diapers, and as your continence weakens, you become increasingly subject to the following principle:
The more prepared you are to not make it to the toilet, the less likely you are to make it. If a given person always wears protection appropriate to the severity of their incontinence, the likelihood that they will be able to make it to the toilet decreases relative to a version of themself operating under exactly the same conditions, with exactly the same degree of continence, but wearing underwear. This is due primarily to the increasing mechanical complexity and effort represented by sufficient protection for increasing continence needs.
I'm going to game out a couple of scenarios to describe in more detail what I'm talking about. Imagine two participants, A and B.
A
has incontinence of a specific bodily function, depending on the scenario
will void exactly thirty (30) seconds after feeling the need
is stationed fifteen (15) seconds away from a toilet
is wearing normal clothes and non-absorbent underwear
All of the above is also true of B with the exception that they are wearing diapers and additional protection appropriate to their continence level, and clothing appropriate to their diapers.
Pants wetting
A is wearing a shirt, pants and underwear. They dash to the toilet, pull their pants and underwear down, sit down, and voluntarily pee with 15 seconds to spare.
B is wearing normal clothes plus a cloth-backed diaper. They dash to the toilet, pull their pants down, awkwardly wriggle their diaper down, sit down, and voluntarily pee with 5–10 seconds to spare.
Night wetting
The scenario we're looking at here is mixed nocturia and bedwetting. Remember that we're not necessarily modelling either A or B as untrainees, hence why they're trying to make it to the toilet in the first place.
A is wearing pyjamas and underwear. They dash to the toilet, pull their pyjamas and underwear down, sit down, and voluntarily pee with 15 seconds to spare.
B is wearing diapers. They are heavier than the ones they were wearing in the first scenario, because B is a bedwetter by this point and therefore needs diapers that can make it through the night. The diapers are likely plastic-backed and use PSA tapes, making them harder to either wriggle out of or untape. (B may also be trying to be quiet because it's night time.) Due to the increased wetting volume and thus increased chance of leakage, B is also wearing waterproof pants.
Because B doesn't need sag or other fit disruption, but won't be awake to fix their own diaper during the night, B is also wearing outerwear to support the diaper and hold it close to their body. Optimistically, it's summer, B is wearing a onesie, and they've done this a few times. Pessimistically, it's winter, B is wearing a sleeper, and it's their first time doing this.
Optimistically, B makes it with a very thin margin of error, say 2–5 seconds. Pessimistically, B manages to get all the way down to their diaper before they feel it getting warm and find themself rather pointlessly standing there.
Messing
The scenario we're looking at here is an uncontrollable complete BM.
A is wearing normal clothes and underwear. They dash to the toilet, pull their pants and underwear down, and voluntarily mess with 15 seconds to spare.
B is wearing diapers. Because we know B has been in diapers for quite some time now and has fairly advanced and heavy incontinence, B has just started in pin-on cloth diapers. (In order to explain why they're trying to make it to the toilet at all, let's assume it's their first day in cloth diapers and their first time trying to avoid messing them.) They're also wearing latex rubber pants, which have a more flexible shell than PVC pants (making them ideal for cloth diapers of varying thickness) but also have waist and leg bands with a higher coefficient of friction, making them more difficult to pull down.
To provide space for their bulky cloth diapers, B is wearing overalls. The diapers aren't quite bulky enough to be supported by the overalls alone, so B is also wearing a onesie. To cover the onesie, they're wearing a shirt (under the overalls).
B dashes to the toilet, undoes the shoulder braces of their overalls, drops the front panel, undoes all six waist buttons really fast, lets their overalls fall to their knees, pulls their shirt up over their head and... gets no further, the seat of their onesie visibly getting heavier as they uncontrollably fill their diapers. Realistically, to get their onesie, rubber pants and diapers off, they would have needed at least another 30 seconds.
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