Taschen to Release 'My Buddy,' a WWII Book Like No Other

LOS ANGELES—Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, one of the major turning points of World War II, and Taschen Books is set to honor our fighting soldiers with a book that deals with a side of that bygone era's military that's never gotten its due: Gays in the trenches. "Well, we worked hard not to make it a gay book," said Dian Hanson, the Taschen editor responsible for the creation of My Buddy: World War II Laid Bare. "It can't help but have gay appeal, but I really researched it, so we tried to make it an historical appeal—which just happens also to have homo-erotic appeal, but hey, the girls like it too! The guys have great bodies. You know, they were young men at the peak of their perfection. They're mostly 18, 19, 20 years old. For some reason, they all have just fabulous asses; whatever was the World War II workout program was very good for the buttocks. And we have a whole section, though, which is just guys showing off, where there's nothing else going on, either singly or in groups; they're standing facing the camera, showing their dicks." Indeed, there are plenty of photos of naked and half-naked soldiers and others, most captured by gay photographer Michael Stokes who, according to Hanson, "has a fascination with men in uniform," but there are also reproductions of paintings, magazine covers, WWII-era magazine ads—who knew how heavily, according to the ads, our combat troops smoked?—and the like to make My Buddy the well-rounded historical document Hanson wants it to be. "It's not due out until July here, but the presales on Amazon are phenomenal," Hanson noted. "It's been number one in erotic photography and number one in history, so I got my point across. "The cover is fabulous," she gushed. "You have to realize, we used an old military photo album from World War II as a template, and it was heavily embossed the way things were back then, like the high school yearbooks were, the way they did all that fabulous embossing? So we actually found a place in China that could do this for us, so it's a real beauty. We put money into this thing." But where did the title come from? "There's an interesting story behind that," she replied. "My Buddy was the name of a song that was very popular in World War II that sounded suspiciously romantic, and during World War II, everyone accepted that this song was about a war buddy who had lost his buddy, but it had lines like, 'I miss your voice, the touch of your hand/Just to know that you understand/My buddy, my buddy, your buddy misses you.' And when I researched the song, I found it was actually written in 1922 by a guy about his girlfriend who had died. So it was written by a man about a woman, so it was a romantic song, but it was repurposed during the war as a song from a man to a man. So I figured this would be the perfect title for this book." However, it was Michael Stokes' collection of over 500 photos taken during combat by people at the front lines of nearly every involved country that were the inspiration for and form the backbone of this volume—although Hanson made the editorial decision to use photos only of the American and Allied troops, and to "stay away from the Axis of Evil." "Most of them were taken in situations where men have to get naked; they have to bathe in communal groups, but they often are bathing outside, so they found a bucket and put it up in a tree and they're underneath in a group trying to get clean, or they're on the ship being sprayed down with water, or they have to go to the bathroom, and they sit side by side on these rustic toilets, so you have them all out pooping in public or pissing in public," she described. "Then you have the VD inspections: they would all have to line up with their dicks out and the guy pulls up a chair and examines each penis. There's something especially provocative about this. We have a couple of photos front and back where there's 50 guys lined up with their pants down, just standing, waiting while what they call the 'chancre mechanic' would walk down the line and they'd each milk their cock for him. And this was always in conjunction with going to a government whorehouse, which they had during World War II; they had them in places where people would go take rest, so they had them in Hawaii, they had them in Australia, and in New Caledonia." Also of interest will be the man supplying the book's Introduction section: ex-Marine Scotty Bowers. "Scotty Bowers wrote a book called 'Full Service' that was about his years as a hustler in Hollywood after World War II. He was a marine, was at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Bougainville, but before and after, he was a hustler, and he had sex with a lot of famous people in Hollywood even though he is 'straight-straight,' as he always said, so we had him write about the military." To be sure, Bowers pulls no punches, and his salty language is an accurate reflection of the speech patterns of that war's combat forces. For example: "So then you’re there in a little hole you dug in the sand, pissed off at the fucking Japs who’ve killed your buddies," he wrote. "You close your eyes for a little bit, but don’t really sleep. It’s raining. You’re wet and it rains, frankly, every day and every night. Some guys huddle together, some don’t, but this is when the buddy bonding starts. You need somebody you can depend on, and they can depend on you. You can tell the type of buddy that you’d want to be with in a foxhole: Someone who is on the ball. Someone who’s not going to get upset and nervous. "But the closeness there had absolutely nothing to do with the gay thing at all. Because if you were gay you were kicked out of the god-damned Marine Corps immediately. Even if they thought you were gay you were kicked out of the Marine Corps. Period. It wasn’t a common thing like it was in the fucking Navy." While AVN hasn't read the book in its entirety, we've seen enough of it to know that it will be a delight to anyone who's fantasized about naked men in uniform (as paradoxical as that may sound), and also to those who are interested in the history of that era—a history that's overlooked (or hidden) by the vast majority of historians. The book can be pre-ordered on Amazon.com here.