Historian John D'Emilio has called World War II "a nationwide coming out experience." Men and women from all over the country moved from farms and small towns into sex-segregated environments in the military and war industries, away from the supervision of family and community, and into urban centers like New York and San Francisco. Gay and lesbian communities in these cities were booming. For some men and women, it was their first contact with gay men and lesbians and their first chance to explore their own homosexual feelings.

One gay veteran who settled in New York after the war described how many people's sense of their own identity was forever changed by their war-time experience. Some men, after having an experience in the service with another man would try to go home and get married and return to "normal" life, he said, but when it didn't work they'd keep returning to New York. He and his friends would tell them, "You can go back all you want, but it won't work. Because you're gay." Nearly 300,000 women joined the newly-formed women's branches of the military. For male and female veterans alike, the wartime experience created a sense of their rights to the freedoms that the United States claimed to be fighting for in the war. One officer from the Women's Army Corps wrote to the military magazine, Yank, describing the "bitterness" of the lesbian experience and arguing that gay men and lesbians should be able "to take their rightful places in the brotherhood of mankind." Unfortunately, this wartime visibility also led to a growing backlash.

Sources: Berube, D'Emilio, Meyer, Faderman 1991