Novels With Gay Characters Connected to WWI and Its Aftermath

Ms Larrie Barton, 2023

A deeply emotional story that hit me especially hard. Partly it was the juicy sex scenes that drew me in and had me rooting for Ned and Charlie to get together and stay together. But it is much more than that. There were so many obstacles preventing these characters getting together: social stigma of homosexual relationships, the constant tension around being caught in an illegal sex act, class differences, accents and vocabulary, and mutual misunderstandings regarding the other’s motivations at pivotal points in the story. These are distinct, well-drawn characters with strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities that are conducive to secrets. All this makes these people believable and lovable. The narrative is structured in an interesting way, moving backward and forward in time, each time period informing the others. The story starts in the middle, but by the end the puzzle pieces all fall into place. Definitely one of my favorite reads of 2024.

Christopher Isherwood, 2013

Set after WWI, the book looks back at the War’s effect on various characters, one of whom is gay. An unusual novel, it does not seem to have a unified plot line. Isolated incidents are presented and the reader has to piece together the relationships between the many lives depicted. Yet Isherwood has a deep understanding of the many characters in his novel. What is impressive is the ambivalence he portrays in his characters’ feelings toward each other: Eric’s love-hate relationship with his mother Lily; Mary’s misunderstanding of the innocence of her sister-in-law Lily; Lily’s own innocence, even of her own manipulations and maneuverings. And there are many other complicated characters and relationships here. Also impressive is the fact that this book, published in 1946, dealt with homosexuality, even though it is not explicitly stated or depicted. “I remarked: You know what Edward is, and she agreed that we all knew what you were.” Even so this seems a bold move at that time. Perhaps it was the elliptical manner in which this novel is laid out that kept me reading to see how Isherwood was going to wind things up. The last sentence ties the book together.

Alice Winn, 2023

This novel has some of the most gruesome and realistic details of the violence of trench warfare in World War I. It brings to mind the violence of Homer’s Iliad, appropriate for characters who had studied the Greek classics in English “public schools.” The enduring tensions throughout the homosexual love story and the ever-present fear of being discovered or exposed give the reader a genuine sense of the depth of internalized homophobia and societal disgust in England of that era. At the beginning of the novel I was somewhat put off by these privileged upper-class boys who are being “educated to run the empire.” Their cruelty to their classmates is appalling. But later the issues surrounding British class differences emerge, and toward the end of the novel one character declares that things are changing. As the story progresses the war invades these school boys’ lives and they invade France, and the reader becomes more sympathetic to what the boys are going through. The tender ages of these school-boys-turned-soldiers becomes increasingly poignant — some as young as 16, many age 18, even in the officer rank. The massive number of deaths and casualties, as well as the ever present possibility of imminent death, pervades the scenes at the battle front. Later the abhorrence of society at home, the hatred of those who have not experienced war at the front, and the brokenness of those who live through the battles, echoes these same sentiments so prominent in All Quiet on the Western Front and the lesser known Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith, about British women ambulance drivers in WWI. Winn’s research for this novel is apparent, and the intensity of the writing and the plot make this story memorable.

Lance Ringel, 2020

A painfully endearing gay love story. My heart aches for the two young men who fall in love with each other. I felt vibes of Melville’s Billy Budd in relation to the young American Tommy Flowers, who presents with “one of those sweet-but-goofy farm boy airs.” His “best mate,” British private David Pearson, is equally charming. The novel depicts engaging characters as well as compelling plot details. The older Australian soldier Jamie Colbeck, survivor of many of WWI’s biggest battles, is perhaps the book’s most memorable character. Secrets and tangled love relationships cry out to be resolved before the story can come to a conclusion. There are rich details regarding logistics, trench warfare, military bureaucracy, and battle scenes, but in an interesting contrast, few details are described in the sexual encounters. And in one scene the author and the characters tiptoe delicately around the issue of homosexual rape by dropping only vague hints. But the book is intensely realistic in its portrayal of random deaths, the tedium of war, the absurdity of combat. Attitudes develop from “I want to kill Germans” to “we’re just trying to keep each other alive.” Author Ringel’s journalistic background shines through in the diligent research that was necessary to make this novel come to life.

Helen Zenna Smith, 1989

This is a fictional novel written as a first person account of a British female ambulance driver in WWI, intentionally a companion to All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Although essentially a heterosexual novel, it contains an important subplot involving two female ambulance drivers who develop a lesbian relationship and are not treated well. After encountering the brutality of war, the main character, Helen, experiences the same disillusionment as the soldiers in battle, the disdain for patriotic civilians at home, and the feeling of alienation from “civilized” society on the home front. From the “Afterword” by Jane Markus, 1989: “…Helen’s hatred is directed exactly onto the object the Propaganda Office has chosen for its posters, the fearful huge matriarch who points the way to the Front, the enormous maternal nurse who cradles the wounded. She is the Home Front, the Mother Country, the one who gives birth and also kills.” Markus describes Helen’s thoughts about “matriarchal militarism” in her mother and a rival British matron: “The two matrons, competing with one another over who can recruit more young men and how many of their own they can sacrifice for the war…” Another brilliant anti-war novel, but here from a woman’s perspective.

Jeff Stookey, 2018

My own novel depicts the young surgeon, Carl Holman, who has experienced the horrors of World War I and the loss of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the war, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is Oregon: the Ku Klux Klan is gaining influence, homosexual acts are illegal, and such a relationship will jeopardize Carl’s promising medical career. Musician Jimmy Harper has his own dreams for the future and his own obstacles to overcome before he will allow himself to accept Carl’s love. Acquaintance is a deep dive into gay and lesbian history based on extensive period research of the 1920s. This is Book 1 of the trilogy Medicine for the Blues, which explores the complexities of gender and sexuality through the historical lens of the early 1920s, a time when jazz was becoming popular, Freud was all the rage, social mores were shifting, liquor was illegal, and women had just gotten the vote.