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 Staff at the Library were deeply saddened today by news of the passing of pioneering scholar, and LGBT Committee Ambassador, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s breakthrough studies, like Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet, transformed LGBT scholarship across the humanities. She taught us to read in a whole new way—not to read homosexuality as much as the productive power of its invisibility. She also radically widened the possibilities of scholarship with deeply personal, vulnerable, autobiographical thinking, like her essay “White Glasses.” An entire generation of scholars are deeply in her debt. 

A 1914 letter from a Navy man who received an “undesirable discharge” for what appears to be a suspicion of homosexuality was recently donated to the Library by David Jarrett, a co-chair of the Advisory Committee of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. 

In the letter, which was written by an M.C. Cowles to another sailor named Cal Chord, the discharged Navy man says “I don’t know…what the real cause is, although I have a suspicion.” Cowles was called down to sick bay and examined by a physician, after which he was asked “Has any man stayed with you?” Cowles told the doctor “‘No and that I considered it an insult to ask me such a question.” The examining doctor called Cowles a liar; he was taken to the brig, and three days later was discharged without a hearing or trial. Cowles then recounts a story of taking “strolls” with the ship’s bugler when the ship was in Mexico a few days earlier. The bugler apparently came down with “a dose of the clap” after he “had connections with a Mexican girl.” Cowles believed that the bugler feared a court-martial if he told the full story, so simply said that he’d been “out with” Cowles while ashore.

This may be one of the earliest instances of armed forces discharges for the suspicion of homosexual behavior. Historian George Chauncey, Jr. wrote about a controversial Navy investigation of homosexuality in 1919 and 1920, but this letter makes clear that the armed forces were purging gay people (or people that were thought to be gay) even earlier.

When this acquisition is fully digitized and cataloged, it will become part of the International Gay Information Center Archives, which is in the Library’s Manuscript and Archives Collection.