Posts on Facebook today celebrating the release of Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken, who is amazing in his role (as usual) as Sergeant Toomey, but I cannot even think of that movie without remembering the scene where they gay soldier (private Hennessy, played by Michael Dolen) is taken out of a troop line by Toomey and some MPs, presumably after they pressured the other private he was involved with to name him, and driven away between them in a jeep. I can still see the look on his face and while I understand he was an actor playing a part it was so very disturbing. Great acting on everyone’s part but I cannot think of that movie without thinking of that scene. That Hennessy was the only one to stand up for the two Jews in the troop against the bigots (the character has a great line when asked by one of the bigots if he’s Jew too) just added to the impact of what was about to happen to him.

But of course, if you didn’t know very much of the history of that time and what happened to homosexuals who were caught in the jaws of the laws back then, you might just think it a sad little subplot in a movie about a young soldier enduring a slightly crazy drill sergeant and having his first time getting laid. If that story really was based on Neil Simon’s recollections of his time in the army then I am wondering if that character and was what happened to him was based on a real person and did they survive.

During World War II, U.S. military personnel suspected of homosexuality faced intensive interrogation, psychiatric evaluation, usually to implicate others in exchange for leniency. If found to have committed acts of sodomy, they were court-martialed, imprisoned in a federal penitentiary with terms of hard labor, and then given a dishonorable discharge. After the nightmare of what prison life was for a homosexual, that dishonorable discharge would keep him from getting any kind of a good job, and the conviction for sodomy attached to it would more than likely mean he’d lose his family, friends, and have to leave wherever he’d grown up for somewhere nobody knew him. It might have even been reported in their local hometown newspaper, and his entire family ostracised.

If he was a real person you wonder what happened to him, with a very dark pit of your stomach feeling that you know damn well what happened to him.

Yay for private Jerome losing his virginity! To a female prostitute, when we wasn’t old enough to drink or vote, which was a rite of passage and certainly no federal offense.