... having been breathed out

As such declarations indicate, state repression was productive of identity in complicated ways—women’s attempts to manage the antilesbian apparatus within the military frequently led them to articulate a lesbian identity in much sharper terms. “The patient declares that she has been a homosexual all her life,” one psychiatrist reported, but “did not realize [it] until… the investigation into this problem at Ft. Lee stimulated her interest.” Just as historian Landon Storrs argues that “it was the red scare that forced people to adopt tidy labels” regarding political identity, being officially labeled as a lesbian by the military could lead one to regard homosexuality not merely as an attribute, but in the words of sociologists Colin Williams and Martin Weinberg, as a “master status.” “Knowing about [homosexuality] now,” one woman informed authorities during an investigation at her base, “I look back into my childhood and feel that I have been gay all my life.”

Not surprisingly, then, many women centered the military experience in the confessional statements that they drafted for military authorities. […] One woman remembered that she had to look up the word homosexual in the dictionary when she first heard it used in her detachment, but soon after a more experienced soldier took her on as a project. The younger woman was taught the vernacular (“butch,” “fluff,” and “gay”), how to recognize “other homos” (by hair length, sock color, and fingernails), and finally, courtship. “I told her I was very, very fond of Lt. Vance,” this soldier recalled. “She told me that Lt. Vance was a ‘fluff,’ and that if I wanted to get her, I would have to be a 'butch.’” For that reason, the young private said, “I took all these lessons… to heart, and it didn’t take me too long to learn.

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (era under discussion is still the mid-1950s)

In addition to all the truly thought-provoking stuff about the complex relationships between state repression, individual identification, and the ongoing production and redefinition of identity labels (not only “homosexual” here but also “butch/fluff”)…

….and in addition to being incredibly impressed by the bravery of women who sat before intensely invasive, paternalistic military boards and found ways to stand up for their own truth, even as that truth was also being shaped by the experience of being investigated…

…in addition to all that, I’m now wondering exactly what color socks I ought to be wearing.