Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuality by the United States Navy (Journal of Homosexuality Ser. No. 1)

Rating:
Summary: Important book in the history of military homophobia.
Review: Murphy recounts the Newport, R.I. "scandal" of World War I. The real scandal, of course, is not the fact that gay sailors were having sex but that the U.S. Navy entrapped military personnel and civilians with a series of investigatory abuses. Then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in this witchunt - - one of the earliest documented examples of organized Navy homophobia.