So I got angry and decided more people need to know about this guy:
This, dear friends, is Wing Commander Ian Gleed, DFC, DSO, Croix de Guerre. He was a spitfire pilot in WWII in his early twenties and also pretty fucking gay.
He was around from the very start of WWII, fighting in France, the Battle of Britain, and eventually the North African Campaign, where he was tragically shot down over Tunisia.
Gleed published a memoir in I think 1942, before his departure for Tunisia, Arise to Conquer (I mean…really?) where his family were very surprised to discover passages about a girlfriend called Pam. When asked about this by his sister, Gleed told her he’d invented said girlfriend because readers ‘like a touch of romance’. Read, ‘the publisher was a bit worried by the implications my lack of girlfriend and circle of queer friends would have’.
Implications which no one knew where 100% true.
Ian was sadly KIA over Tunisia, but the truth was eventually revealed, decades later, by one of his boyfriends….
That blonde creature is Christopher Gotch, another spitfire pilot stationed at the same airfield as Gleed (Chris was also badass enough to age himself up on the RAF application form and get away with it, but that’s by-the-by). Chris talked about his relationship with Gleed in the 1990s. …
How do you proposition another man in that day and age? According to Christopher, you sneak into their room, kiss them straight up, make an invite to your own room, and then tear off like an absolute cad, which is exactly what Gleed did. Being in his right mind, Christopher said ‘alrighty then’, leading to an 8 month relationship complete with having to hide naked in a cupboard to avoid being caught by the Group Captain.
…the more you read about Ian Gleed the better it gets, so just do. He had the cat from Pinocchio painted on his damn spitfire punching swastikas for heaven’s sake, so everyone would say over the radio ‘here comes Figaro’:
So, if you need an LGBT+ hero to cheer you up, check out my darling boy Ian Gleed.
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