A center is needed to bridge disciplinary divides and forge a scholarly audience, a network of researchers who can react to each other's work and keep each other informed about the state of the art in disciplines that inform this topic. Many scholars seek advice on how to begin research in the field and a centralized platform is needed to point such individuals to national and international archives, scholarly networks, interview subjects, web resources, and secondary literature. Finally, there is not a single pre-dissertation, dissertation, or postdoctoral fellowship in the world targeted specifically to the issue of sexual minorities in the armed forces and there are no awards for research or conference travel in the field. The Center intends to create, expand, and institutionalize resources for graduate students and junior and independent scholars who do not have access to resources that their more senior colleagues often enjoy. While different considerations motivate scholars who study sexual minorities in the armed forces, interest in the field does not reflect a temporary fad.
Military history is a treasure chest where untold narratives are stored.
Richard Hall's 1994 study of cross-dressing women warriors of the Civil War and Klaus Theweleit's 1989 account of homoerotic fantasies in the German Freikorps in the 1920s are two of many stories that could occupy historians for years. Because the distribution of tolerance and intolerance has been uneven in the American armed forces and elsewhere, military history is the repository for stories about sexual minorities who sometimes flourish, sometimes resist, and sometimes suffer. Indeed, many military specialists with little or no background in queer theory have come to realize that sexual orientation is an important subject that needs to be incorporated explicitly into the research agenda. Craig Cameron's 1994 study of the indoctrination of American soldiers during World War II, for example, includes a discussion of the relationship between homosexuality, gender, and combat effectiveness. Cameron shows how the institutional manipulation of polarized gender identities served as a tool by which men were manipulated to do battle.