Coming Out Under Fire

Streaming video - 1994

Features nine gay and lesbian veterans who recount how they joined the patriotic war against fascism in the 1940s only to find themselves fighting two battles: one for their country and another for their right to serve. They first remember warm and entertaining stories of finding each other in a compulsory heterosexual environment and reminisce over tales of first love and deep friendships. Their good times were short-lived, however, as they became targets of newly created anti-homosexual policies which called for witch hunts, dehumanizing interrogations, involuntary psychiatric treatments, and the incarceration of suspected homosexuals into “queer stockades.” The final humiliation was a dishonorable discharge which stripped a soldier o...f all veterans benefits as well as being officially branded a “sex pervert” for life. COMING OUT UNDER FIRE is based on the ground-breaking book by MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Allan Bérubé, and integrates compelling on-camera interviews with declassified military documents and archival footage on sex education, mental health, prison compounds, and court martial hearings. It probes the origins of the military’s anti-homosexual policy to document how pseudo-psychiatry, erroneous medical theory, and misplaced ethics masked a policy based on nothing short of prejudice. more