Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

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For a queer kid growing up under Section 28 and a new wave of Second World War mythologisation, history was a fraught country for self-exploration. Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War . A book that asks questions and starts you thinking about people involved in war in a way I had never before. Armed with the knowledge of a war aficionado, Turner cements his seat at the table alongside those who might resist his queer narrative of World War II.

Insightful and affecting account of the people whose lives and love lives have been forgotten since World War 2 - to the detriment of them and to us. He gives a different and very personal insight into the long established "national narrative" about World War 2. Men at War is a thoughtful, empathetic and necessary examination of the impact of the Second World War on British culture.

Despite the richness of British masculinity studies and the pervasiveness of queer First World War poetry in British school curricula, Emma Vickers’ 2013 Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45 remains one of the few academic monographs to consider queer men not just as a given in British histories of war, but as a distinct culture enabled by wartime mobilisation. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn. For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes. This book is full of stories that intriguingly, lustfully and hilariously complicates Britain's cosy and homogenous national myth about how people in that era acted, thought and felt.

With Turing, what began in the 1970s as activist attempts to reclaim queer figures in British history has, in recent years, been taken over by governmental use of his image in sanitised attempts to address historical wrongdoings against queer people. As the Second World War recedes from living memory, critical reflections like this – about what we do with our inheritance, both the one we are given and the one we choose – stand to become all the more important. By exploring a wartime experience that embraces sex, lust and the body as much as tactics and weaponry, Turner argues that the only way we can really understand the Second World War is to get to grips with the complexity of the lives and identities of those who fought and endured it.An intensely personal examination of manliness and sexuality in WW2 by a man who comes clean about his lingering Airfix habit. Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings to life its subjects in a really startling way. Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event.