Don’t ask.

James Lord’s posthumously published memoir covers the period between his enlisting in the United States military on 5 November 1942 and his return home and honorable discharge on 11 December 1945, with a short epilogue that gives a résumé of the novel he wrote afterwards, which he destroyed after Knopf had refused the manuscript – understandably, I might add. One wonders if his estate felt obliged to publish My Queer War as he left it when he died and he would have revised the manuscript had he lived, for it sorely needs revision. Notwithstanding, there is much in the book to interest us.

My principal plaint is the painfully prodigious purpleness of the pretentious prose. (Yes, the fellow is fiercely fond of alliteration, not to mention the multisyllabic mouthfuls of monologue he musters.) It is most blatant in the opening chapters. I cannot say whether his style improves later in the book or I simply became habituated to it, for I could not bring myself to reread the earlier sections and make a comparison. His name-dropping also annoyed me, though we can expect a person in his early twenties with artistic aspirations to be infatuated with celebrities, and Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann are worthy names to drop. Nor can I say if he always writes like this. Mr. Lord was a highly respected art critic and memoirist whose work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I was briefly tempted to get a copy of his A Giacometti Portrait, a detailed description of Giacometti in the process of painting his (Lord’s) portrait, but if the writing is anything like what we find in My Queer War...

Most of the book deals with the author’s less than heroic participation in World War II. It also chronicles the beginning of his active sex life, though “passive” may more aptly describe it, since he frequents gay clubs and attends sex parties less to cruise than to be cruised and never seems to take the initiative with any of his prospective partners. Although he never allows the reader to lose sight of his position as a gay man in the military, his queerness and that of the numerous gay soldiers with whom he rubs elbows (among other things) is a sub-theme, less engrossing and less queer than the war as he experiences it.

And a queer war it is. Lord enlists in the air force, is sent to learn about chemical warfare but soon finds himself making inadequately piss-poor drawings of machines until his superior learns he is gay and puts him on semi-permanent KP, whence because he scores high on a test he has guessed wildly on and he didn’t want to take in the first place – an officer to whose outfit he no longer belongs has signed him up for it – he is finally transferred to military intelligence. There he studies French language and culture in preparation for what assignment nobody can tell him because it’s “classified”. What he and his fellow trainees do learn from the program is that once in Europe they can go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything they want by telling whoever challenges them that it’s classified. We find ourselves in the world of Catch 22, but one where the characters grumble and half-heartedly play along with the charade instead of revolting against it as Yossarian does in Joseph Heller’s masterpiece.

Once on do-nothing active duty, Lord is shunted back and forth between pointless postings and assignments of shocking barbarity where sadistic personnel revel in the opportunity to flout the Geneva Conventions, justifying their cruelty on the grounds that these aren’t POWs, they’re displaced persons; or after the armistice that, since the war is over, they’re just prisoners, not prisoners of war; or the commanding officer who requires forced confessions under torture to meet his quota of captured enemy spies, like a cop handing out speeding tickets. I began the book expecting it would expose the idiocy of DADT; its relevance to contemporary issues is rather to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

My Queer War will furnish supporters of DADT with reasons not to repeal it, for by and large the gays we meet there do not make very good soldiers. For them, whose way of making up their minds is to close them, it will not matter that the straights are no more competent or that the presence of homosexuals in the showers does not undermine morale. Monotony and brutality do. At most a couple of sentences address DADT directly, one of them on the very first page: “by a blatant lie I’d already betrayed civic decency by putting on the U.S. Army’s uniform. But I could chalk that up to poetic license.”

One wonders how much of this book we can chalk up to poetic license. Lord’s memory for detail is just too good. He does mention that he kept a diary, and perhaps he hung on to it all these years, but I seriously doubt he jotted down the conversations he reconstructs, which range from the inanely illiterate to the pompously inane. Also the names, many of them reminiscent of Catch-22. On the other hand, there really was a General Twaddle, and nowhere does the author say he changed any names to protect the not-so-innocent, though Lord knows under DADT homosexuals in the military need protection. A score or more of aged veterans could lose their benefits. How unjust that those guilty of the crimes against humanity he documents have nothing to fear.

To those looking for a story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality My Queer War offers no new insights, nor will those interested in the pre-Stonewall gay scene find what then went on in secret all that different from what today goes on behind closed doors but is no secret. The ineffectual protagonist is not particularly likable, and we can dispense with the author’s moralizing on what he witnessed over half a century ago, for the events speak for themselves. Still, it serves as a reminder that war, however noble its purpose, always brings out the worst in human beings and we perpetrated horrors on foreign soil before we ever set foot in Viet Nam.

Better written and minus the commentary, the story My Queer War has to tell would be well worth reading. I would definitely go see the movie version, if it comes to that.

[Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-21748-8]

                             

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