On American soldiers serving during WWII:
“Sensitive” men often found one another while working on the extraordinarily popular “soldier shows” for which the USO provided the know-how and the materials. These shows were written, directed, and performed by men in the armed forces. Since there were no women in outlying camps, enlisted men would perform female roles in drag. Performances ranged from comic portrayals of burly men in dresses to realistic female impersonation. For actors and audiences, these performances were a needed relief from the stress of war. For men who identified as homosexual, these shows were a place where they could, in coded terms, express their sexual desires, be visible, and build a community. These lyrics for a “female” trio in a soldier show demonstrate how homosexual enlistees introduced their own humor into skits: Here you see three lovely "girls" With their plastic shapes and curls. Isn't it campy? Isn't it campy? We've got glamor and that's no lie; Can't you tell when we swish by? Isn't it campy? Isn't it campy?16 Later in the war, when WACs were available to perform with men, their involvement was limited; usually they worked backstage to help the men be made up as women. An indication of the popularity of female impersonation in soldier shows is evident in Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army. Written for an all-soldier cast, it premiered on Broadway in 1942 and a year later became a hit Hollywood film with Ronald Reagan. Both the Broadway and film versions featured soldiers dressed as women.
--A Queer History of the United States (2011), Michael Bronski; Chapter Eight: Sex in the Trenches
Fascists rely on a sanitized homogenized understanding of a hazily golden national history to hawk their wares to their recruits and dehumanize their enemies. Moral panics, too, rely on inaccurate popular understandings of history to promote attacks on their victims. Like every other human endeavor, these things spread themselves through stories.
WWII looms large in the American memory; we remember it as the last "innocent" conflict on our world stage, inaccurate as that is. (There is no such thing as an innocent player in a world war.) The military preoccupation with fascism and gender looms large, and WWII offers that for far-right ideologues searching for conformity, too: the masculinity of combat, the catharsis of the foxhole, the rigid conformity of the decades that follow. In the memory of such stand-up paragons of masculinity, the fascists will bellow, how can you permit the degenerate decadence of the modern drag queen, the obscenity of a trans woman being so much as permitted to exist? Surely the rejection of that masculinity would have disgusted and upset these fine soldiers, and how could you insult such icons?
But it isn't true. Drag, genderbending, and queerness were entertainments our grandfathers and great-grandfathers sought out, participated in, and shared with one another. Some of the queer ones fucked about it, and so did some of the straight ones, but not everyone. Some of the soldiers were playing, and some weren't. Either way, "female impersonation" was a staple of entertainment, both in the form of soldier-entertainers and for audiences back home. It continues to be a form of popular mainstream entertainment today, of course: only consider Mrs Doubtfire and Monty Python and RuPaul's Drag Race and Blackadder and MASH and Tyler Perry's Madea and Hairspray, to name only a few of many.
There's more than one way to knock down an image and an idol cherished by bigots, my friends. Don't forget that the stories the lazy fascists tell about how it was long ago and far away aren't the only stories left to tell. It turns out that the past wasn't any less full of degenerates and queers than the present is--or than the future will be.
