Sexual fluidities still characterised queer communities and male identities before a more rigid sexual binary emerged later in the century. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and even language, in Australia.

Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict.