Gays and the French Resistance

From Standpoint Magazine:

There is a common trope of writing about collaboration which links it to a homoerotic fascination with German uniforms — Sartre wrote an article linking collaboration to sexual passivity — but the story of homosexuality in the Resistance has never been written. It is very plausible that the strategies of compartmentalisation-the leading of double lives-imposed upon homosexuals in this period might have predisposed them to adapt to Resistance. They did not have families, either. In the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, the British SOE agent Denis Rake suggests that one of his motivations in undertaking such dangerous work was to prove that as a homosexual he was no less brave than anyone else.

The entire article – an extended review of one resistance fighter’s published memoir – is worth reading in full.