![]() He recalls being afraid to glue pilot figurines into his AirFix Spitfires out of a ‘moral anxiety’ that they might turn into flesh-and-blood men. In Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, Luke Turner lingers over moments from his own Second World War-obsessed adolescence. As an adult historian of war and queerness, I came to understand better the tension between popular war narratives and the ones I sensed below the surface as a teenager: they tell seemingly contradictory stories about what it means to be a man. More immediately, I was aware that the allure these characters had for many of the men in my life was due to the fact that they weren’t allowed to transgress the bounds of heterosexuality. I had a vague sense that I was drawn to an intimacy between men seemingly only available in wartime. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn. He went to bed early, bored by hours of sweaty submarine misery. Things came to a head when my brother and I borrowed Das Boot from our local library. My fascination with uncontroversial classics – The Great Escape, Band of Brothers, Master and Commander – began to feel illicit, itchy, for reasons that seemed far less noble than my emerging anti-war politics. ![]() ![]() I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. A British military map-reading class in Egypt, November 18th, 1941. ![]()
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