THE two were separated in 1976, when they joined the military at age 17, where close physical relationships became a matter of survival.

“In winter, when soldiers were given only two threadbare blankets each and little heat, it was common for us to find a partner and sleep hugging each other at night to keep warm,” Mr. Jang said. “We considered it part of what the party called ‘revolutionary comradeship.’ ”

Other North Korean defectors have reported homosexual behavior in the North Korean military, where soldiers serve mandatory 10-year tours with few chances of meeting the opposite sex. When four former female soldiers and police officers from the North held a news conference in Seoul in April to talk about the sexual abuse they had witnessed, one of them cited the case of a lesbian officer preying on new arrivals.

“There was a lot of sexual abuse, like groping at night,” a former North Korean military officer, Choe Jong-hun, told Chosun TV, a South Korean cable channel, in August. “But we later found ourselves having new recruits lying beside us.”

In Mr. Jang’s front-line unit, he said, officers and senior soldiers bribed him with apples and food to lure him into their blankets. After performing nighttime sentry duty in a snowstorm, he said, he would find comfort “in the bosom” of his favorite platoon leader. From across the border, propaganda broadcasts from South Korea enticed the cold lonesome Communist soldiers to defect, promising “meat, monthly leaves and pretty women.”

Mr. Jang was discharged from the military in 1982 after contracting tuberculosis. Back in Chongjin, he worked as a wireless communications official at the port. In 1987, he wed a mathematics teacher in an arranged marriage.

“Most gay men in the North end up marrying whether they like it or not, because that’s the only way they know,” Mr. Jang said. “On the first night of my marriage, I thought of Seon-cheol and could not lay a finger on my wife.”