In a public talk, Ward discussed a well-known and long-practiced hazing ritual known as The Elephant Walk, “where lines of males walk while grabbing the penis of the male behind them with one hand and use the other hand to grab the sphincter of the male in front of them.” Body buffetĬarol Burke, author of a book subtitled Gender, Folklore and Changing Military Culture, told of two food-based rituals: In one, “they sprayed whip cream on a freshman’s genitals and another freshman would have to lick the cream off him,” and, in the Colorado Air Force Academy, “one guy would tightly hold an apple in his rear end and another guy had to eat the apple out of his rear end.”īurke says the apple ritual was discontinued after the public caught wind of it.
Some also think that nudity removes one’s social armor and makes one utterly vulnerable, psychologically and socially bonding lower-ranking servicemembers through a shared experience of physical exposure and light humiliation. The thinking here is that only experienced officers deserve the dignity of clothes and the higher-ups can literally dress down inferiors, ogle them or make them undergo other indignities if they so choose. Basically initiates are made to strip down and then socialize as a way of demonstrating their sub-ordinance and sexual inferiority. The tamest ritual we’ve heard of involves forced nudity and drunkenness.
Jane Ward, author of Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, says that the thinking surrounding these rituals is, “If you endure together this kind of mortifying, humiliating and embarrassing homosexual act, then that not only toughens up your body, but it will also build and strengthen that bond around you.” That sounds like toxic heterocentrist masculine bullshit to us, but here’s five homoerotic military rituals we’ve heard of all the same: 1. Thus, homoerotic initiation rituals allow servicemembers to inflict the abuses they’ve endured and also test new members’ willingness to submit to tradition and group-think without succumbing to emotion or “destructive” homosexual desires. And yet, the military is also a rigidly masculine place that values strength and stoicism along with submission to the chain of command.