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Chapter 5 — 1910–1919: War Makes New Rooms

Cold open

Picture: Trenches; troop trains; women’s factories; nursing stations; letters in transit; soldiers and workers on leave in London or Paris; a silent map of imperial routes.

Narration: “War did not liberate queer people. It disciplined bodies, separated lovers, and made secrecy dangerous. But mass mobilization also moved millions of people beyond the households and towns that had defined them. In barracks, hospitals, factories, trains, and port cities, people found new rooms in which to meet—and new ways to lose one another.”

Production note: Do not romanticize war or turn same-sex intimacy into a compensatory story of freedom. The episode asks how wartime movement created temporary possibilities for connection while intensifying discipline, violence, surveillance, separation, and grief.

Act I — Laws and military discipline

Explain that military institutions criminalized or disciplined same-sex acts, but enforcement was uneven. Rank, class, unit culture, scandal, evidence, local command, and the state’s wartime needs could shape whether an allegation led to silence, transfer, medical treatment, court-martial, imprisonment, or discharge. Avoid claiming a uniform experience across British, French, German, U.S., colonial, and other armed forces.

Use court-martial records with care. A court-martial is evidence that an institution investigated and punished an alleged offense; it is not a transparent record of a person’s identity, consent, or private life. The British National Archives holds records of courts-martial and provides guidance on their varied forms and survival. When a record is used, caption the service branch, date, charge, outcome, archive reference, and any known gaps.[1]

Do not sensationalize numbers. Research indicates that at least 230 British soldiers were court-martialed, convicted, and imprisoned for same-sex acts or behavior during World War I, but this figure cannot capture the much larger number of people who concealed relationships, avoided records, were disciplined informally, or disappeared from the archive altogether.[2]

Military discipline also intersected with medicine. Some men were treated as criminals; others were categorized as patients or as evidence of psychological disorder. These categories were not mutually exclusive. The same institutions could punish, classify, and claim to treat people while denying them autonomy.

Suggested narration: “A military file can preserve a name that a family tried to forget. But the file was created to enforce discipline. We read it not as a confession, but as evidence of power.”

On-screen documents: - A court-martial file used only with full contextual captioning - Military code or discipline manual, shown as institutional policy rather than proof of uniform enforcement - Wartime letter, diary, or trench journal, with permission and provenance - Recruitment poster and troop-movement map, juxtaposed with an archive note about what official records omit

Act II — City worlds: leave, work, and temporary households

Follow soldiers, sailors, nurses, drivers, factory workers, and civilian migrants on leave into London, Paris, Berlin, New York, New Orleans, Cairo, and other port cities. War made these places transit zones: people arrived with uniforms, wages, trauma, letters of introduction, and a temporary distance from family surveillance.

London and Paris can anchor the visual sequence. Show railway stations, leave passes, lodging houses, restaurants, theaters, parks, hospitals, and streets near barracks. The point is not to identify every venue as queer, but to show the infrastructure through which strangers met and communities could form around work, leisure, and mobility.

Women’s expanded wartime work created new forms of shared housing, uniform, income, and friendship. Nurses, ambulance drivers, factory workers, land workers, and clerical staff could live and travel with other women beyond the structure of a parental home. Do not infer sexual relationships from cohabitation, uniform, or friendship alone; instead, explain how these conditions widened social possibility and sometimes became the setting for documented intimacy.

Cairo and other imperial port cities require a colonial frame. Troop movements and military logistics intensified encounters among local residents, colonial subjects, European personnel, sailors, and migrant workers, but power was radically unequal. Avoid visual shorthand that turns colonial cities into exotic backdrops for European stories. Ask whose movement was voluntary, whose labor was compelled, and whose conduct was subject to imperial policing.

The war’s end did not return people to their prior worlds. Demobilization sent many back to families and towns, while others remained in or moved to the cities where they had found work, friendship, or a sense of possibility. This demographic shift is a bridge to the more visible urban cultures of the 1920s.

Act III — People and constellations

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen offer an entry into war, poetry, mentorship, and the difficulty of reading intimacy. They met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, where Sassoon became an important friend and literary mentor to Owen. Their surviving correspondence and later recollections document a close relationship and shared artistic purpose; they do not establish a romantic or sexual partnership. The script should call it a friendship and mentorship, while noting that later readers have found queer resonance in their writing and in the emotional intensity of their bond.[3]

This distinction makes the story stronger. Sassoon’s sexuality and his later relationships with men are historically significant. Owen’s sexuality has been interpreted in different ways, but the evidence does not justify turning their documented friendship into a confirmed love affair. Use their poems and letters to explore male vulnerability, grief, beauty, fear, and comradeship without forcing them into a claim the archive cannot prove.

Colette’s wartime presence connects the episode to French cultural life, nursing, performance, and the changing conditions of women’s work. Use her carefully: she is not a representative of all French women, and her celebrity gave her resources unavailable to most workers or nurses. Her role here is to link the episode’s gender and performance themes to the more fully developed Colette–Missy story of the preceding decade.

A young Federico García Lorca offers a Spanish perspective on art and generational change. He was a teenager and young adult during World War I, in a Spain that remained formally neutral but was not untouched by the political, economic, and cultural consequences of the conflict. Do not make him a wartime combatant or place his later queer relationships into this period without evidence. Use him as a future artist coming of age amid a transformed Europe.

Hirschfeld provides a bridge between prewar reform and the postwar opening. His Committee’s campaign against Paragraph 175 continued despite the war, and the collapse of the German Empire created conditions in which the Institute for Sexual Science could open in 1919. The final image of this act can be a door opening onto the Institute’s future—without implying that the wartime years were a simple march toward progress.

Suggested narration: “War made intimacy visible in letters, poems, and absence. It also made silence necessary. The historian’s task is not to fill every silence with romance, but to listen for what the record can honestly bear.”

Act IV — Media: writing under pressure

Trench journals, poems, letters, wartime propaganda, hospital records, and early Takarazuka material show how queer feeling can appear in genres not designed as “queer media.” These works may stage longing, intimacy, cross-gender performance, camaraderie, isolation, or chosen affiliation without naming an identity in today’s terms.

Featured media: Sassoon and Owen. Use poems, manuscript pages, and letters to show the making of a literary friendship. On-screen quotations should be checked against authoritative editions and contextualized by date, recipient, and wartime circumstances. Avoid soundtrack choices that turn trauma into sentimental romance.

Featured media: trench journals and letters. These documents can show soldier humor, boredom, complaint, longing, and the small routines of wartime life. They are not a substitute for personal testimony about sexuality. If a letter does not name a relationship, do not narrate one into existence.

Featured media: early Takarazuka Revue. The all-female Takarazuka Revue was founded in 1913 by Kobayashi Ichizō. Its early productions and later star system made gender performance, commercial entertainment, female audiences, and fan attachment important subjects for the series. Do not equate an all-female performance tradition with lesbian identity. Instead, introduce Takarazuka as a distinctive Japanese theater world in which gender roles, desire, performance, and fandom could intersect in ways that do not map directly onto Western identity categories.[4]

Suggested narration: “Not every archive names desire. A poem may name grief. A letter may name a friend. A theater role may name neither. But together, they show people trying to make feeling legible in a world organized by war.”

Reference atlas: visual, press, sound, and reading

Research and ethics note

Do not use wounded bodies, prison records, or private letters as visual spectacle. Where documents reveal fear, arrest, or loss, identify their institutional source and preserve the subject’s dignity. If composites are used, label them clearly as composites and build them from documented patterns rather than invented incidents.

Chapter notes

[1] The National Archives (United Kingdom), “Courts Martial and Desertion in the British Army, 17th–20th Centuries,” accessed August 12, 2026, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/courts-martial-desertion-british-army-17th-20th-centuries/.

[2] George Robb, “The Great War and Modern Homosexuality,” World War I Centennial Symposium paper, Michigan Technological University, 2018, https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=ww1cc-symposium.

[3] Imperial War Museums, “Siegfried Sassoon’s Influence on Wilfred Owen’s Poetry,” accessed August 12, 2026, https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/78962.

[4] Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Playbill, “The History of the All-Female Japanese Theatre Troupe That Is Bringing Chicago to NYC,” February 24, 2020, https://playbill.com/article/the-history-of-the-all-female-japanese-theatre-troupe-that-is-bringing-chicago-to-nyc.

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Media references

Direct media files are embedded when available; archive and discovery sources remain linked with item-level rights notes.