experienced in a very public manner. Americans were unable to ignore the LGBTQ minority any longer and had to recognize the discrimination that they faced. After the war, LGBTQ men and women who had found community and confidence because of the military went forth and pursued lives centered around their identity, forming a visible culture. Instead of returning back to their hometowns, LGBTQ veterans stayed together in citites. One GI wrote in a diary entry the following describing his desire to stay with the community he had found, “I can’t change, have no desire to do so, because it took me a long, long time to figure out how to enjoy life…I’m not going back to what I left”(1). In cities, physical places of meeting like bars started to show up (4). Bars provided places for LGBTQ people to socialize unlike they had been able to before. With the availability of community and also physical meeting places, LGBTQ veterans could live lives centered around their identity. A lesbian living in New York right after the war described the phenomenon, “..my experience was that it gave me an identity, a self-identity and for the first time a community identity” (4). People had large LGBTQ friend groups and engaged in and created different parts of LGBTQ culture including slang terms. This subculture became increasingly visible to the rest of American society (1). People recognized gay bars and interacted with gay subculture on a much more frequent basis than they had before the war because there was a much more distinct gay culture and identity. LGBTQ people had used the war as a way to explore their sexuality and come out and they had no intention of going back into the closet after the war. Before World War II, many LGBTQ people and people who were questioning their sexuality were PAGE 17 VOL. 2, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST with blue discharges (1). One lesbian woman named Pat described the fear she had surrounding her blue discharge, “I myself was discharged from the service because of being a homosexual. I was given a U.D. or what is known as a Gay discharge. I of course thought my life was ruined. I didn’t know how I was going to explain away my years on a job sheet” (6). Blue discharges proved extremely harmful to people's lives and prevented LGBTQ veterans from living their lives freely. In post-World War Two America, veterans with blue discharges joined together to fight against their unjust treatment, making themselves visible to Americans. Veterans that received discharges from the military returned home angry that they were denied the benefits that other veterans received (1). The discrimination against LGBTQ people further reinforced to LGBTQ veterans that being LGBTQ was a part of their identity that they could suffer for. They realized that they had large numbers and that being LGBTQ in America was something to fight for. The government had recognized them, though negatively, which affirmed to them that they were different, and that their homosexuality was important and real. To protest their blue discharges and exclusion from veteran benefits, they organized political groups, held protests, and wrote letters urging the government to revoke their blue discharges (1). All of this protesting was very public for the rest of America to see at the time (1). One reporter summarized the public nature of the protests as follows, “For a person to make such a complaint in his own case implies that he feels a sense of injustice so great that he is willing to risk publicizing the stigma of having been discharged from the Army under circumstances which savor disgrace” (1). LGBTQ veterans had overcome the shame they might have felt in their identity to band together and protest the discrimination they
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