War and the Objector

This chapter considers how the statement of conscientious objection with which Keith Vaughan opens his first ever journal entry in August 1939 develops from a political stance into a declaration of personal crisis centred around his homosexuality and feelings of being an outcast. Following the thread of Vaughan’s anti-war writing, it explores how Vaughan constructed his identity as an objector not only to war but to conventional expectations of masculinity and to the political establishment that upheld them. The first section of this chapter considers why the imminence of the Second World War was the catalyst for Vaughan’s journal-writing – a practice that would become a life-long project. The second section reveals how Vaughan’s anti-war writing developed his unwavering belief in the sanctity of the human body and his resistance to its distortion or destruction for the sake of warring ideologies. The third section argues that the uncompromising stance taken by Vaughan in his journal allowed him to position himself as an outsider through identification with neo-classicism and its ideals, conflating beauty with morality to advocate for an alternative vision of a peaceful and (homo)sexually permissive society.