Lenny Bruce
Leonard Alfred Schneider, stage name 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 persecuted him with obscenity charges, of which he was convicted in 1964. But before his meteoric comic career, Lenny Bruce had served his country in WWII.
Born in Mineloa, NY, to Jewish parents, Lenny lived a chaotic childhood after his parents’ divorce. Raised in the homes of various relatives after the divorce, he 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 US Navy.
He was assigned to the light cruiser USS Brooklyn, aboard which Lenny saw combat in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as the Brooklyn was tasked with convoy escort and fire support for amphibious landings, including the Torch landings in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily, the Anzio landing, and Operation Dragoon, the Allied landings in southern France.
As the war drew to a close, Lenny grew bored with the Navy. Having lied to get in, he lied to get out. A slapstick performance in which he dressed in drag upset his officers, which got him thinking: after 30 months of service, he checked into Brooklyn’s sickbay to report that he was feeling gay. In a handwritten letter, he 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, such that after 15 months aboard ship he became attracted to some of his comrades.
The medical officer reported to the captain that 19-year-old Lenny was suppressing homosexual tendencies, but the desire and temptation kept getting stronger. The Navy sent him for a psychiatric evaluation because he had “a tremendous amount of homosexual drive“. Noting that Lenny was the kind of homosexual who could adjust to heterosexual relations if given the opportunity, evaluators concluded that if he remained aboard a ship filled with men, he would “eventually give way to the performance of homosexual acts“.
The Brooklyn’s captain concurred and wrote that Lenny might give in to his gay urges at any moment with an explosion of homosexuality, was “potentially dangerous socially” to his ship, and should either be separated from the Navy, or assigned to a shore installment with access to heterosexual relations. He urged prompt action, before Bruce engaged in “scandalous action [causing] discredit to the ship in particular and to the naval service in general“. The Navy quickly gave Bruce a dishonorable discharge, but he successfully appealed to have it altered to a discharge under honorable conditions for unsuitability to serve in the Navy. His 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.