Alice Winn is talking to me about her debut novel, In Memoriam, a love story between two young officers set in the trenches of the First World War. “It’s not as if I could find primary sources for what gay sex was like at the front,” she says, “but it seems unlikely that it never happened.”
She has a point. The homosexual feelings, if not the actual encounters, of officers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are clearly recorded in their poems and letters. In more concrete terms, 270 British soldiers were court-martialled during the conflict for “gross indecency”, as illegal homosexual activities were known. So yes, of course there was gay sex at the front.
