Phillis Abry Kaplan (June 16, 1920 - July 20, 1993) was born on July 16, 1920. When she was seventeen, she was expelled from her private high school in the midwest after a love letter she had written to another young woman was found by the woman's guardian. Unable to continue living in her father's home, she moved to New York city to live with her mother. In March 1943, moved by a patriotic desire to help the war effort and by a desire to "be with all those women" in the army, she left her job as a lab technician at the RCA research labs in Princeton, New Jersey, to enlist in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC).
During examination, one of the questions asked of female recruits was, “Do you have sex with men?” When Abry said that she did not, they asked her why not. “’Well, I was brought up to believe that one didn’t have sex until they were married,’ and that was a perfectly acceptable answer,” she said.
Abry started basic training in Des Moines, Iowa. She recalled enjoying wearing a uniform. In a 1995 interview for the documentary Coming Out under Fire, she said “It wasn’t very obvious if you were a little bit butchy. I mean, we were all a little butchy, I guess.” Being in the WAAC helped her meet other lesbians as well.
After training in Des Moines, Iowa, she went to Newark, New Jersey, to complete a radio repairman's course at the United Radio Television Institute. It was there that she met fellow WAAC, Mildred. “Over a period of maybe two or three weeks, we finally established that we were both gay and then started a romance,” she said. It was Mildred who arranged for the couple to be sent to South Plains Army Air Field in Lubbock, Texas in July 1943.
In August, the WAACs were sworn into the US Army and Phillis officially became a member of the Women's Army Corps (WAC). She worked as a recruiter for the WAC in the winter of 1944, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Indeed, she was pictured (inspecting a radio together with Mildred) in a WAC recruiting poster. From August 1945, through March 1946, she was stationed in Paris; when she returned home, she received an honorable discharge. She lived with Mildred for some years, until she went to college in Reno, Nevada.
While there, she met Abe Kaplan, the man she married after graduating in 1950. Abry continued graduate work at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., and later worked for the Esalen Institute and as a real estate agent.
In 1987, she was interviewed by
Allan Berube for his World War II Project. She and Kaplan had four children together, but Abry never forgot her experiences during the war. “I couldn’t ever forget who I really was,” she explained. She died in 1995.
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