14. Before M*A*S*H and Corporal Klinger, There Was Real-Life Lenny Bruce
The US Navy’s psychiatric evaluation of Lenny Bruce noted that he was the kind of homosexual who could adjust to heterosexual relations if given the opportunity. However, the evaluators concluded that if he remained aboard a ship filled with men, Lenny would “eventually give way to the performance of homosexual acts“. The Brooklyn’s captain agreed, and wrote that Lenny might give in to his gay urges at any moment with an explosion of homosexuality that was “potentially dangerous socially” to his ship. He recommended that the young sailor should either be separated from the Navy, or be assigned to a shore installment with access to heterosexual relations.
The Brooklyn’s captain urged prompt action, before Lenny 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 M*A*S*H character desperate to get kicked out of the US Army for being gay.
