Both soldiers were arrested and the following morning they were tried by courts martial." "It was in that meadow that they were discovered together by a group of superior officers who were billeted in a nearby farmhouse. They wandered from the town on a summer stroll into a nearby field. "Hardy and another soldier had attended a local establishment for a couple of drinks." "Hardy's battalion had just returned from the front lines after a particularly intense round of fighting and the soldiers were enjoying a well-deserved rest period," the report says. While serving as a private in Abele, Belgium, in July 1916, Hardy was arrested for committing "an act of gross indecency with another male person," says Worthman's study, published at. As the war raged in Europe in 1915, he headed overseas at age 16 with the 8th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Hardy grew up in Brandon, Man., and left school to help on the family farm. "Part of the process was actually coping with that and working through those feelings." In addition, terms such as gay, bisexual, transgender and even homosexual are relatively modern identity markers, she notes.Īs a queer person, Worthman shed tears reading through the files, realizing what members of her community went through a century ago. Worthman chooses to use the term queer throughout her study in keeping with recent movements to reclaim the term, which has been used as a slur, as encompassing both gender and sexuality. "There was a lot of long hours just kind of sitting in my little office, staring at handwritten cursive and trying to interpret what it means." "The records, the way they're sorted, are just a complete mishmash," she said. Her efforts to detail the gross-indecency cases involved sifting through some 200 court files. Worthman is now a master's student and freelance researcher, as well as executive director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Queer Research Initiative. "And so I approached the Purge Fund with a project proposal." "And I knew that I owed it to my community to do whatever I could to get these stories out there," she said in an interview. When Worthman's Veterans Affairs contract ended in May 2022, she wasn't finished delving into the First World War era. The settlement with Ottawa was a key element of a sweeping federal apology delivered in November 2017 for decades of discrimination against members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. ![]() ![]() Her findings have just been published under the auspices of the LGBT Purge Fund, a non-profit organization established through a class-action settlement. The painful, often bleak, stories of these men were uncovered by Sarah Worthman while doing research at Veterans Affairs Canada. Hardy was one of at least 19 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force involved in consensual relationships who were arrested and tried for what was then known as gross indecency. Shortly before being killed in action, the teenager spent time in prison doing hard labour as a military punishment for his sexuality. ![]() Frederick Lea Hardy died fighting for Canada near Vimy Ridge in the First World War.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |