The gloryhole queens' heroes: US maritime union activism 1930-1955

LGBT+ seafarers in UK really have no maritime union heroes. I've looked hard. 

By contrast, in the US the National Union of Cooks and Stewards (known as the  MCS for short) had a number of out activists who were 'queens.' The term was less rude than 'queer'.

The main two heroes, who remain legends, were Frank McCormick (1891-1980) (right) and 'Mickey' Blair (1917-1997). Mickey and Frank were life partners too. And they both loved dressing up and performing as women when informal theatrical opportunities were on offer.

Frank was an official and on the MCS executive. Mickey (Stephen) was a rank-and-file activist. Both were stewards, who lived in ship's gloryholes (cramped dormitories), worked 90-hour weeks, and believed in justice. 

Both had been dismised for 'homosexuality'. In Frank's case the US Navy dumped him in the 1920s. 

Among the ships Frank and Mickey worked on were Matson Line passenger vessels from California. such as the Lurline (pictured). Matson ships were known to be sites of camp subculture. 

Matson, like some UK companies, liked having gay stewards because of their perceived “feminine touch". Also companies didn't want to employ black stewards. As heterosexual white stewards wouldn't work for the low pay on offer, so willing white GBT men provided employers with a solution.

UK similarities 

• The nearest UK equivalent to Frank and Mickey is an unnamed member of NUMAST. In July 1994 this person tried to start the support group, Shore Leave. They appealed via the union's journal. Nothing seems to have got off the ground.
• The UK's main ex-seafaring activist was Mick Belsten (pictured far right, below) (1934-90). A former P&O steward, Mick became a Gay Liberation Front media worker after he'd left the sea. GLF was influenced by some of its founders' visits to the US. If Mick did ever try to encourage his union to be more progressive his efforts don't appear in any National Union of Seaman records. Mick Belsten NUS GLF

Why no progressive LGBT+ heroes?

That lack of inspiring figures seems counter-intuitive when some ships - like theatres - were the most camp workplaces in the world, c1950-1985. Floating "queer heavens" were key sites of proud informal solidarity and education.

But in those times trade unions were not so supportive of DEI as they are today. Men who were tough resisters of homophobic oppression at sea might well have recognised that shore-based formal trade union activity wouldn't have been effectve or as satisfying as workplace change-making.    

Attacks on activists in US

In the US the MCS was totally different to the usual pattern. The union had thrived in the 1930s and in WW2, precisely because it was  indeed inclusive. Membership jumped threefold to 15,000 from Frank's starting time. 

Then a post-war and Cold War backlash began. The rationale was that 'fruits' were a threat to national security. Race was not the issue; 'moral decay' and 'Communism' was.

As a result, the new Port Security Act said the Coast Guard must officially screen seafarers joining ships: one by one, every trip.

In Los Angeles on Monday November 6th 1950, Mickey, Frank and some comrades were hit by the anti-gay hysteria besetting the nation. They walked up the gangway of the Matson Liner Lurline (nicknamed the Queer-line), ready to work their way to Hawaii.

But in all eighteen cooks and stewards were turned back including Mickey, although oddly not Frank. That might have been 20% of the catering workers aboard. 

The ensuing fight-back focused on 'The Lurline Eighteen' case became a cause celebre. Scotty Ballard, a gay black steward, (pictured) led the multiracial Seamen's Defence Committee, which worked in conjunction with the longshoremen and the MCS. 

Scotty and his gay white friend Ted (Riff-Raff) Rolfs, created leaflets, sent letters, and picketed the Coast Guard offices. 

But by January 1951 almost every leff-wing steward from US West Coast ships had been removed. Three quarters of them were African American. An unknown number of the screened-off people were gay. All were progressives.

It was the start of the end for the MCS. Like other left-wing US unions, it was defeated, not least by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. 

UK: different focus

In the UK the progressive activism was against right-wing rectionary policies, rather than against homophobia, which was not mentioned. Race continued to be a thorny matter, during and after WWII. 

Preparing for the 1967 Sexual Offences Act meant that the NUS had to speak about homosexuality. It was not progressive.  

By then a new breed of gay activist was emerging: not apologist or apolitical, but confrontational, libertarian, and aware of gender politics. Mick Belsten in London was challenging homophobia but not with maritime workplaces in mind. 

Seafaring had taught him a transferrable skill: how to organise and enjoy solidarity. He wasn't involved in shipping now in any way but because he had travelled so much he was able to enjoy thinking as an internationalist.

In the wider UK, it took until the 1970s for unions to start backing LGBT+ rights, including unfair dismissals. This was a time of new anti-racism activism too. The developments were asymetrical. 

At the weekly Gay Liberation Front meetings that Mick Belsten attended 200-300 were there. Though the radicalism in LGBT+ politics declined in the 1980s, in the 1990s uneven action for minority rights really took off, especially in local government and teachers' unions.

Interweaving strands

Over in the US Frank and Mickey were aware of the changed climate created by the 1969 Stonewall riots, just as Mick was in newly-pink London. 

Frank died in 1980, just before AIDS changed gay seafarers' views of their sexual safety in foreign ports. 

Mick was by then a very effective radical journalist. In 1990 he fell victim to an AIDS-related illness, just four years before the attempt to initiate the Shore Leave support group in 1994. 

Mickey died in 1997. He surely never knew about Shore Leave, but would have been happy to advise on tactics. 

He was always pressurising Allan Berube, his union's historian, to make sure the full story of the MCS was told. Allan did so, many times, before he died in 2007. His records are crucial to the world knowing just how extraordinary this maritime activism was. 

FAQs

How come a union in any country could be supportive of LGBT+ in those early days? It was a time of general progressive support for justice for marginalised people, including black workers. We'd call it intersectionality today. 

What Frank and Mickey do? On their ships and in union headquarters they oranised, challenged, supported. The union even had its own hiring hall, to bypass shipowners.

Were Mickey and Frank acclaimed in their lifetime? They were appreciated. This was not a union that went in for hero worship, or for making activists union presidents.

What did Mickey and Frank do when the union was demolished? They settled in Seattle and were still involved in gay community theatre.

--

Are you looking for more information? Try:

Virtually: The Stephen R. Blair papers, including photo albums, can be seen at at the University of Washington Special Collections. This archive can be visited virtually, by appointment: Blair pics

On paper: see Allan Berube, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community,and Labour History, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2011, Chapter 16.

Browsing: 

US. Waterfront Workers History Project, Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Waterfront

UK. Roger Rosewell, The Seamen’s Struggle, Part II: The Fight for Reform, 1973, Minority_Movement

She put on his sailor gear: Hetty King, male impersonator.

It's the way she handles her pipe and acts like a jaunty Jack Tar - even when pregnant - that gets me.  And the fact that male seafarers loved it. 

Yes, female impersonator Hetty King could offer men that longed-for goodie: a glimpse into how others see us. She could also suggest that human beings have the potential to be far more than heteronormative. 

Hetty sang and posed back, doing what thousands of seafaring men had done: take on the appearance of someone belonging to a category from which they were  excluded.

In the RN and MN it was unremarkable for men to dress as  women, usually as glam stars, especially in ships' shows and in wartime. 

Les Girls, Men in Skirts, and The Kiwis are the main examples of iconic all-male touring shows in and after WW2. Usually the outrageousness (even illegaility) was sidestepped by humour.

 WHY DID SEAMEN CROSS-DRESS? 

 Putting on skirts - metaphorically over the workaday bell-bottoms - was a way for men to: 

• entertain shipmates
• express their 'feminine' aspects 
• explore heteronormativity 
• attract same-sex lovers 
• raise awareness that there was a gay community
•  implicitly make the point that gender is performed.   

Real women in the past had cross-dressed as the only way to get to sea, at a time when seafaring work was not open to women.  But for this woman, Hetty King, cross-dressing was a totally different matter again. Read on.

WHO WAS HETTY?

This music hall star born Winifred Emms (1883-1972) was a professional male impersonator who specialised in soldiers, swells and navvies as well as Royal Navy ratings and officers. 

She's most famous for being the first person to perform 'Ship Ahoy. All the Nice girls Love a Sailor' (in 1908).

For her career she travelled  a lot on ships e.g. in 1907 - to New York. It may have been on board merchant vessels that she observed MN seafaring men and thereby became adept at copying their style.

 Here are three ways that Hetty behaved differently to cross-dressing seafaring males: 

• She worked on stage on land, professionally. Not in a vessel-based workplace in the intervals of doing her proper job
• She wasn't - seemingly - exploring her sexuality and gender. Not a lesbian, she was married to men (Ernie Lotinga, 1901-1917) and Alexander Lamond (1918)-?); had at least one affair with a man (Jack Norworth); and was pregnant at least once (in 1913)
• She wasn't dressing for members of her own sex, in complex alliance  with them. She was doing it for the very men she was taking off. And they liked it.  

Many young women in WW1 posed in sailor clothes for the camera, especially if they had boyfriends who were seafarers. It appears to be an act of affinity and bold fun. It may also have expressed women's desire to live a sea life.  

SO WHY DID MEN LIKE THIS WOMAN 'BEING' THEM?

Men's enthusiasm for Hetty's shows hasn't been discussed yet, to my knowledge. 

But from my research into gender and seafaring, I believe the following reasons explain why sailors liked watching her 'be them':

• She was holding up a mirror, a flattering mirror
• It was an emotionally satisfying way of getting attention and being accompanied, known
• She wasn't trying to steal their power or be snide
• It was an ersatz way of being on stage yourself, a vicarious and safe thrill.

AFTERWARDS

Hetty carried on performing into her 90s, not necessarily as a sailor. Her songs included What Does A Sailor Care?

She sailed a lot as passenger, to New York, Cape Town and Fremantle.

in 2010 a blue plaque was erected to commemorate her at her last Wimbledon home.

In wartime her song, 'All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor' was popular, and sung in a non-camp way. The title had become a heterosexual slogan. 

Cross-dressing by men in the WW2 forces was extensive, not only on ships. Servicewoman did not crossdress for shows. 

If WW2 Wrens performed the song and cross-dressed as sailors for shows I haven't heard of that. But I wouldn't be surpised. 

Boats Crew Wrens were allowed to wear bellbottoms for their work from the early 1940s.  (See cartoon above. The watching sailors comment proudly on her neat ankles). I have not heard of any RN women who smoked pipes, as Hetty King affected to do.

Pictured left. Seafaring women pursers in the 1970s MN dress up to sing All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor in an on-board show on a cruise ship.

Women in the MN and RN today wear trousers. but sometimes skirts. Men do not have that option, except in off-duty play. 

LEARNING MORE

There's footage of Hetty King on YouTube, including an interview in 1970 where she makes up in a dressing room.

Amber Butchart has produced a fabulous anthology of women using 'sailor' fashions. See Nautical Chic, 2015.

You'll find much information about UK male seafarers dressing as women.

There's a lot on dragging up for musicals on P&O ships between the UK to Australia in the 1950s. Try our book, Hello Sailor!