Hello Sailor!

The hidden history of gay life at sea

Paul Baker, Jo Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317868699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans.

Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and the pride of the British fleet. Hello Sailor! uniquely shows what it was like to be queer at sea at a time when land meant straightness.

Chapter 1

When Queer was Covert

‘On the maiden voyage of the Canberra … there must have been 500 gay men on that ship. It was like heaven working there.’ Frank.

‘These abnormal practices have no place in a sea-going community.’ Mr Marshall, Tower Hill branch of the National Union of Seamen.

To understand just how and why some ships could be alleged (at least retrospectively) to be gay paradises in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, we need to know something about that counterpart of heaven: hell. Gay men describe ostracism, stigma, loneliness and misery in the homophobic world ashore.¹ These make clear how much a gay-friendly ship – a community where they could be out – could be so balmy in the years when Connie Francis, Barbra Streisand, Kathy Kirby and Dusty Springfield were top of the hit parade and stars like Judy Garland and Jayne Mansfield were camp icons.

This chapter begins with a description of the gay context over the twentieth century, focusing first on land, then at sea.

The gay context of the period

A gay man, like any human being, is not simply an individual acting alone but someone who interacts with his society. We are all products of our mentors, lovers, critics, family members, employers, enemies and friends. Queer theorists such as Ken Plummer have stressed the importance of interaction, of how people’s sexuality is affected by the ways that societies perceive and handle them.² So in considering gay people as subjects, we need to view them in their social contexts.

Non-heterosexual encounters have occurred throughout history in many contexts. In different countries and periods of time, two men having sex together could be quite unremarkable. Some of those encounters happened in all-male spaces, including in armies and on ships, in cultures where there were varying degrees of homophilia (love or affiliative connections between people of the same sex). A number of studies have found societies which had positive studies of gay men in cultures in the eleventh, twelfth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³ Most post-1980s histories of how sexuality is viewed in societies show that it is only since the nineteenth century that homosexuality has been set up as a condition and a sickness. Gay people were characterised as particular types, not simply human beings who engage in certain sexual acts. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, famously argued that the meaning of homosexuality moved from being about behaviour (the sexual act) to character type (the pathologised and excluded queer).

Robert on deck. Boarding school had prepared him. Photo courtesy of Robert.

In Britain’s history the key foundational law was an Act in 1533 which condemned all acts of buggery – whether it was with women, animals or men. The penalty was death. This law continued, at least nominally, until 1885. That is, significantly, it was a prohibition against an act not a type of person. Jeffrey Weeks believes that most men prosecuted under these laws were probably penalised for gay behaviour (sodomy).⁴ Behind that law lay two interesting ideas: that all people were potentially capable of such acts, and that reproductive sex in marriage must be protected. The áct was particularly seen in religious terms as a sin against nature, an abomination against ‘right-thinking’ folk.

One of the most serious prosecutions – on land or at sea – was that of the four sailors on HMS Africaine who were executed for buggery in February 1816.⁵ Buggery was seen to be as serious as desertion, mutiny and murder in the navy. It was not until 1861 that the death penalty was removed. The Offences Against the Person Act reduced the sentence to ten years-to-life. However, in 1885, the decade in which steamships began to rule the waves, section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (known as the Labouchère Amendment) made all male homosexual acts (vaguely described as ‘gross indecency’), whether committed in public or private, illegal. Unsurprisingly, the Labouchère Amendment was also known as the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’. A few years later the Vagrancy Act of 1898 punished people who ‘solicited or importuned for immoral purposes’, which included homosexual men.⁶ And for almost a century afterwards one of the main stated objections to having gay men in the armed forces was that they were open to blackmail and could thereby weaken a nation’s strength.

Until just before the First World War the Labouchère Amendment continued to be used in order to regulate and punish homosexual men. The 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act invented the term ‘importuning for immoral purposes’, which might today be phrased as cruising or chatting someone up and agreeing to go and have sex.

The twentieth century saw major changes in how homosexuality was perceived and handled.⁷ It moved from being a criminal state to a pathologised and clandestine state to an increasingly normal state and finally to a proud and resistant state. This shift was particularly notable in the 1940s during the Second World War. The war meant that service personnel, as never before, were together and out. Alan Bérubé, an historian who has examined homosexuality during this period, demonstrates the extent to which clubs and bars and meeting spots emerged.⁸

It was a troubled time for military officers who sought to manage or eliminate gay sexuality. But it was the start of an unstoppable tide. The Second World War caused attitudes towards homosexuality to be temporarily relaxed in some situations – for example, many homosexual men served in the army and described how same-sex relationships were often tolerated, if not made explicit,⁹ especially while serving in India. In London, the atmosphere of heightened emotion, coupled with the blackout and the presence of American and Canadian servicemen,¹⁰ meant that every kind of sex was available, including homosexual sex. Jack Robinson, who became a merchant seaman, described it as a time when ‘Under the trees of Leicester Square painted young men hung around the lavatories. Smart young men [wearing Cherry Blossom uniforms] in leather kneepads polished the shoes of the wealthy … diamond earrings flashed beneath the nightclub lights’ and the clerk at the YMCA immediately asked if Jack and his mate wanted to share a room.¹¹

Chris, a former steward, remembers being told by an older seafaring colleague about the great gay sex you could have even at a bus-stop, with a sailor or soldier standing there, because the black-out obscured all activity. However, as Bérubé points out, many found that they were fighting two wars: on the one hand for country, democracy and freedom and, on the other hand, for their survival as gay people,¹² sometimes facing ethical dilemmas about fighting for a country that was fighting against them.

In 1948 American zoologist Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) created the first path-breaking report on human sexuality. In it he challenged the ideas of gay men and lesbians as ‘queer’ because his surveys found that most humans had both heterosexual and homosexual feelings. However, this news and the legacy of wartime development, did not bring any easy progress towards accepting homosexuality as a legitimate choice in the opening years of this study. Instead there was a swing back to sexual regulation. Servicewomen and men returned home and were expected to get married and have children. In the UK, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon which called for Britons to reject ‘wartime morality’ and start living Christian lives.¹³ Marriage increased by 50 per cent in 1946, and family values were back in fashion. As the cross-dressing legend Quentin Crisp, who appreciated sailor’s uniforms,¹⁴ wrote, ‘the horrors of peace were many’.¹⁵

One of the worst aspects of this was the ignorance, as Alan, a future wireless officer, found. Class and location made all the difference to his ability to acquire knowledge. As a young man in the Midlands, far from London life, he knew that he was different, and had mutually masturbated other boys at school. But he didn’t know what the difference was. When he looked up the word ‘homosexual’, thinking that this word might be something useful to his understanding, the dictionary only offered the definition ‘same sex’. So he ended up without the explanation that would have helped him feel less isolated and puzzled. By contrast, Robert, a Junior Assistant Purser in the same period, had witnessed and taken part in a lot of gay sex at his boarding school. ‘At least half the beds were empty every night.’ He also had access to the nearest thing there was to gay pornography: ‘body-building’ magazines that he bought discretely from a small shop in St Martin’s Court, in the heart of London’s Theatreland. These magazines included Physique Pictorial, which showed photographs and drawings of muscular, semi-naked men in close proximity, with just posing pouches or airbrushed underpants disguising their genitals. A random survey of its 1951–60 issues shows that nautical or seaside scenes were among the most popular, along with stud farms, ranches, logging camps, garages and scenes from classical antiquity. That is, already a gay man with access to this material could see visual confirmation that the sea and sailors had a clear connection with gay sex, albeit American, as we have discussed in more detail in the Introduction.

Alan crossing the Indian Ocean on the British Kestrel, August 1962. Picture courtesy of Alan.

While homosexuality was perceived as a social problem, theatrical concert parties starring be-frocked men (initially ex-servicemen, often gay) were pulling in crowds from Warrington to London’s West End. ‘Visiting American megastar Lena Horne couldn’t fill the Theatre Royal in Leeds but … Men in Frocks played to capacity houses.’¹⁶ As Chapter 5 details, cross-dressing – whether ‘cod’ (not pretending to be female, wearing mops for wigs, etc.) or very successfully deceptive – was both a gay activity and a key way that straight people encountered gay men in the 1940s and 1950s.

But some politicians, legislators and church leaders in the 1950s saw homosexuality at worst as a form of moral degradation which could corrupt youth and at best ‘a fit subject for music hall humour’. As Cunard steward Chris remembered: ‘In those days … the culture then, was, in the outside world … so suppressed. Homosexuality was regarded as dirty old men in raincoats. And you really didn’t have anyone to turn to. You were literally in isolation in those days. It wasn’t until you [had what] … you commonly call cottages [public toilets], and you started finding other people like yourself…. Cottaging was almost like a self-support group, and that’s why I picked it up.’

During the years from 1921 to 1963, according to Hugh David, there was an almost exponential year-on-year increase in the number of reported indictable (male) homosexual offences. It peaked in 1963 at a level 24 times higher than it had been in the earlier years of that century.¹⁷ Blackmail was also becoming a lucrative business in the 1950s. One team of blackmailers were reported as making at least £100 a night and netted £15,000 within seven months, acquiring £26,000 from one of their victims.¹⁸

From 1950s scandals involving such prominent men as novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke and two sailors and Daily Mail diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood, we can see that gay seafarers were operating in a climate of risk but also of possibility: gay partners were available. And some had a taste for men in uniform, if cross-class sex was acceptable to them. These well-publicised trials and scandals brought homosexuality into the open, making it the subject of discussion in private homes and workplaces – including ships – as well as in the law courts. Such trials also brought gay men on to ships as a refuge, argue Kris Kirk and Ed Heath, writing about men in frocks:

The Merchant Navy had been known as a good bolt-hole for gay men who were the victims of clean-ups on land which always followed the breaking of a gay ‘scandal’. Some of the Sea Queens recall an influx of gay men in 1954, the year that the Montagu and Wildeblood affair made banner headlines.¹⁹

Parliament began considering the penal laws for homosexual offences in 1954. In 1957 the Wolfenden Committee recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private is no longer a criminal offence’. Parliament refused to pass the Report six times, and the Sexual Offences Act was only passed in July 1967. Nicknamed, even by some gay men, as ‘The Buggar’s Charter’, it legalised homosexual acts in private between consenting adult males over the age of 21 (it was 16 for heterosexuals). However, it did not apply to members of the armed forces, merchant seamen on ships, or residents of the Channel Isles or the Isle o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Sailor Jack: the Other Side
• Chapter 1 When Queer was Covert
• Chapter 2 A Place of Freedom
• Chapter 3 Speaking Gay Secrets
• Chapter 4 Sea Wives and Meat Racks
• Chapter 5 Sequins, Satin and Stilettos
• Chapter 6 Ho Land! Ho Freedom!
• Chapter 7 Part of a Team
• Chapter 8 Swallowing the Anchor
• Chapter 9 Taking Stock of Gay Heaven
• Appendix 1 Interviewees
• Appendix 2 Glossary of Maritime Terms
• Further Reading
• Index