650,000 and as many as 1.6 million gay men served in the American military in World War II, according to Allan Berube’s landmark 1990 study, Coming Out Under Fire. Any of them could theoretically have stayed home simply by declaring their sexual orientation—“All you have to do is to tell them you’re queer, and you’re out,” a gay character explains in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening—but few actually did, either because they felt as patriotic, and as threatened, as everyone else, or because they craved adventure
