Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce (1925 -1966), was an edgy standup comedian whose comic routines combined satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity. He became a poster boy for freedom of speech after prosecutors went after him with obscenity charges, of which he was convicted in 1964. But before his comic career, Lenny Bruce had joined the US Navy as a teenager and fought in WWII.
Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in New York to Jewish parents, Lenny had a difficult childhood following his parents’ divorce. After the divorce, Lenny was raised in the homes of various relatives and saw little of his father, but was strongly influenced by his mother, a stage performer. Early in 1942, soon after the US entered WWII, a 16-year-old Lenny lied about his age to join the Navy.
The teenager was assigned to the light cruiser USS Brooklyn, aboard which he saw combat in both the Mediterranean and Atlantic. The Brooklyn’s assignments included convoy escort and fire support for amphibious operations such as the Torch landings in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily, and the Anzio landing. It also served during Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France in August of 1944.
As the war wound down, Lenny got bored with the Navy, and having lied to get in, he lied to get out. A slapstick skit in which he donned drag upset Lenny’s officers and gave him an idea for a way out: he went to the Brooklyn’s sickbay to report that he was feeling gay. In a handwritten letter, Lenny wrote that he had been normal when he joined the Navy, but his shipmates gave him “abnormal attention”, including feeling his body and kissing him. After months of such attentions, he started to find other sailors attractive.
The medical officer reported to the captain that Lenny was valiantly suppressing homosexual tendencies, but the desires and temptations were steadily increasing. He was then sent to a psychiatrist because he had “a tremendous amount of homosexual drive“. Psychiatric evaluators noted that Lenny was the kind of gay who could adjust to heterosexual relations if given the opportunity. However, they concluded, if he remained aboard a ship filled with men, Lenny would “eventually give way to the performance of homosexual acts“.
The Brooklyn’s captain concurred, and wrote that Lenny might give in to his homosexual urges at any moment with an eruption of gayness that was “potentially dangerous socially” to his ship. He recommended that Lenny be discharged from the Navy, or assigned to a shore installment with access to girls to get his desires back on the right track. The captain urged immediate action, before Lenny engaged in “scandalous action [causing] discredit to the ship in particular and to the naval service in general“.
The Navy quickly gave the teenager a dishonorable discharge, but he successfully appealed to have it altered to a discharge under honorable conditions for unsuitability to serve in the Navy. Lenny’s ruse to get out of the Navy became the inspiration for TV’s Corporal Klinger, the cross-dressing MASH character desperate to get kicked out of the Army for being gay.