Quote:

Noah Riseman is a Professor of History at Australian Catholic University.

ABSTRACT:
Until November 1992 the Australian military had longstanding rules against the presence of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) service members. The policies and practices for dealing with LGB people varied across time and services, but one commonality is that rarely did cases go to court martial and were generally dealt with through administrative and other disciplinary processes. Yet, the rare cases which did go to court martial leave a hitherto overlooked archival trail that provides insight into how the Australian armed forces conceptualised and policed homosexuality within its ranks. This article examines data from courts martial in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), focusing especially on cases from the period after the Second World War. Exploring three case studies, it shows how courts martial were not so much about policing homosexuality, but rather prosecuting unsolicited advances and incidents which breached the unspoken bounds of discretion


Conclusion: Why the court martial?

As this article has shown, courts martial represent a hitherto overlooked site to explore the ways that the Australian military perceived and policed homosexuality, as well as the behaviours of gay and bisexual service members. Courts martial were sparse, in part because authorities often turned a blind eye to homosexuality and in part because they often dealt with cases through other disciplinary and administrative means. Yet what stands out about the cases that did go to court martial is how the accusations were often grounded in a confrontation, an independent witness, and/or, most importantly, lack of consent. All of the cases arose when a witness reported the incident and sparked an investigation. This is important because the era before 1974 was, for men at least, not a time of witch-hunts. Military police were not searching for gay and bisexual men, but rather they only investigated and prosecuted when they came to authorities’ attention.
Given this context and how rare courts martial were for homosexuality, it was surprising to see how infrequent the convictions were. In other words, one might expect that the threshold of evidence to go to court martial would be so high that a guilty verdict would be likely. Yet, across the period 1912 to 1970 only ten men out of twenty-two had guilty findings (six of which were guilty pleas). In the post-Second World War era only three out of fourteen men had guilty findings, and even one of them was later quashed. This suggests that on top of the high threshold to go to a court martial, there was a substantially high standard of evidence needed for conviction. The only guilty cases were those where there was an independent witness who could corroborate the incident and/or if there were other physical evidence of a man’s homosexuality. This suggests that the very act of court martial was not just to punish for homosexuality, but rather for breaching the unspoken bounds of discretion and consent when it came to homosexual acts.

It would be interesting to see how the Navy data compares with the Army and RAAF, particularly as the new digital search opportunities lead to more of those courts martial files being open for access. As Matthew Barrett’s analysis of one Canadian court martial showed, each case opens a window into a service member’s life. There are further historical possibilities through exploring those members’ service records, repatriation files (where available) and records of civilian courts and  newspapers. The micro-histories of each court martial thus have the possibility of revealing not just military histories of sexuality, but also civilian social norms and historical life experiences for gay and lesbian people.
Wilson-Buford found that in the United States military, prosecutions for homosexual acts through courts martial reduced from the 1970s. This was because so many men were winning on appeal over matters like unreasonable searches, entrapment, prejudicial evidence and command influence. Courts martial and appeals proved long and costly, so there was a decline in courts martial and the American military increasingly dealt with most cases of homosexuality administratively. Australia similarly adopted a more administrative approach to dealing with homosexuality from 1974, but for different reasons: namely, authorities believed that offering an administrative discharge at one’s own request would be more “sympathetic” than a disciplinary process and dishonourable discharge. The rarity of the court martial was therefore no longer a reflection of tolerance, but instead a signifier of new mechanisms to drive gay and bisexual men and women underground and out of the Australian armed forces.