“Just grab-ass,” they’d say.Įven outside the service, men of that era probably saw each other naked more than we realize. As Bowers points out, practical jokes that many of us would now consider invasive - slipping a hand down someone’s pants to tweak his penis, say - were within the realm of just-boys-being-boys high jinks. If you served on the field of combat, you saw other men naked a lot more than you might today, even if you go to the gym after work. There’s no privacy in a foxhole showers were rare and often communal, and toilets were open-hole latrines. Moreover, we forget - and are reminded by an essay in the book by a World War II Marine named Scotty Bowers - about the physical closeness that these fighting men lived with. As for the candid nudity, there are too many of these pictures out there in the world for them to have been made on the sneak, and a World War II soldier who carried a camera (and quite a few did there’s a lot of downtime in a war zone, in between the scenes of mayhem) wouldn’t have been able to hide it easily. Some (like the pyramid pose below) were certainly set up for the picture. Well, chances are they weren’t creep shots. “At the time, I vaguely but quite worriedly thought that this might have the effect of killing me.Bathing at a spring on Guadalcanal, 1943. “We were allowed to ‘stay on’ but forbidden to speak to each other,” he writes, almost sweetly. Hitchens was nearly kicked out over the affair, but in the end his headmaster kept him on because it seemed he had a good shot at getting into Oxford (which he did, eventually). The senior boy who made the discovery was a thick-necked sportocrat with the unimprovable name of Peter Raper: he had had his own bulging eye on my Guy for some time and this was his revenge. However, when we were actually caught it must have looked bad, singe we had finally managed - no small achievement in a place where any sort of privacy was rendered near-unlawful - to find somewhere to be alone. I won’t deny that there was some fondling. The heated yet chaste embrace was exactly what marked us off from the grim and turgid and randy manipulations in which the common herd - not excluding ourselves in our lower moments with lesser beings - partook. Did we sleep together? Well, dear reader, the “straight answer” is no, we didn’t. Hitchens himself was the object of much affection because he was “a late developer physically” and was “quite girlish in pre-pubescent years” and was also later “not all that bad-looking once boyishness had, so to speak, ‘kicked in.’” (Actually, looking at the old picture above, we have to agree.) But fate was not on his and lovely young Guy’s side: Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everybody else) we actually earned to be back at school? Yes, yes and yes.
While the extent of these encounters, shared by seemingly everyone at these boys’ schools, is not fully plumbed (in British terms, it seems there was definitely “wanking” but maybe not so much “buggering”), Hitchens reveals that he did have a seemingly deep, romantic relationship with a boy named “Guy.” To this day, when he hears the name, he “sometimes twitch a little.” The latter, more exciting encounters occurred earlier, when he was a student at an all-male boarding school. Known ball-waxer Christopher Hitchens will admit, in the forthcoming memoir Hitch-22, that there were two periods of his life during which he engaged in sex acts with men, which ranged in vigor from “mildly enjoyable” to “white-hot.” The former was with (imagine!) some fellow Oxonians who were active members of the Tory party and a couple of whom would later go on to hold prominent positions with Margaret Thatcher’s government.