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40 Insights into the Lives of Famous War Veterans

Khalid Elhassan July 13, 2019 26 min

13. Having lied to get into the Navy, Lenny Bruce lied to get out

Lenny Bruce’s handwritten gay letter to the Navy. The Smoking Gun

As the war drew to a close, Lenny grew bored with the Navy. A slapstick performance in which he dressed in drag upset his officers, and that gave him an idea: he checked into the Brooklyn’s sick bay to report that he was feeling gay. He described having been normal when he joined the Navy, but his shipmates gave him “abnormal attention”, including feeling his body and kissing him. As a result, 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“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.