All the Queen's Men

Rating:
Summary: Synopsis
Review: "A revealing account of fourteen years as an openly gay man in the British Army. There were no threats and rarely any hostility, and the young Trumpet Major found himself protected by peers, senior ranks and the system itself." - From Gay Men's Press-Millivres

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I didn't like this book very much when I read it the first time a year ago so I sold it, but when I found it here again I realized how many things I vividly remembered from it, which must be a good thing. A book you forget about can't be worth much.

It is an interesting book in many ways. It is the true story of an openly gay man in the British army, who rose quite high in the ranks, and his love-hate relationship with the military. I don't know if the British army still works the way depicted in the book, but I have gotten the impression that it does. It is still very much spit & polish, and the officers seem to work according to the principle that the louder you scream at recruits, the quicker they learn. One memorable sequence is the "short arms" inspection which is partly included in the sample pages above. The recruits line up and are examined for veneral disease while the officers loudly comment on what they see in order to humilate the recruits in front of their buddies.

After finishing his training as a lowly recruit, Elwood rises in the ranks as a military musician. He is fairly open as gay, but since he is in a tolerant section of the army he has plenty of company and doesn't get into any sort of trouble because of it. Other people he meet are more cautious and closeted, among them a Green Beret.

Since the gay part isn't very problematic, the main part of the book is about how it is to be in the army. Some things was very familiar to me, like the passage in the sample about boot shining, or making the beret fit perfectly, or how a lot of life in the military is just the boredom of waiting and killing time until the next order comes. Some was very unfamiliar to me, many traditions of the British army feels very old-fashioned and unnecessary to me. I was treated a lot more like an intelligent adult when I did my military service than the people in this book. (Not that there aren't a lot of idiots in the Swedish army too...)

Essentially the book is mostly a collection of tales from the army from a man that happens to be gay. Amusing, but not too remarkable. I think the reason I didn't like it when I first read it was that a lot of these anecdotes are fairly disgusting and depressing. I don't think it reflects very well on the British army if this is the kind of people who work there - people with a football hooligan attitude who seem to delight in being ignorant, vulgar and destructive. Part of it is of course rebellion against the upper class officers and their stifling rules, but still, they don't give the impression of being very bright. Also sad is the way some of Elwoods buddies, who accepted him being gay when they were young and oppressed together, become respectable upper class snobs who want nothing to do with him when they rise in the ranks and reach middle age. In the foreword he describes how some of them tried to talk him into not writing the book.

So, if you want a warts-and-all look at how life in the army can be without joining yourself, plus a little bit of gay titillation, this is a good book.