Rainbow Seas in Maritime Museums: group summary

There's no doubt about it. Most maritime museums  could do with representing aspects of seafaring life that have hitherto been marginalised. That includes the ways LGBT+ seafarers used voyages as a exceptional opportunities to explore new identities and relationships. 

On some ships you could go beyond heteronormatvity. However, it took a while before seafarers could be seen brandishing rainbow flags at Pride (see above). Now there's modern visibility and inclusion, but the history is still under-visible. 

Since 2005 a number of museums in Euope, and two in Canada have put on special temporary exhibitions focused entirely on gay life at sea. See the main images of Victoria, BC, exhibition, right.) 

Other museums arrange events for LGBT+ History Month every February.

Curators and community outreach staff who work in this area are often trailblazers. They seek hard-to-find artefacts, struggle to be diplomatic, and sometimes face homophobic responses by visitors. 

Having experienced and supportive mates helps. Friendly peers share advice, explore, get inspired by others' ideas and endlessly seek to do better. 

The Rainbow Seas in Maritime Museums group has shared expertise remotely zoom for nearly two years. This blog is my attempt, as chair, to summarise it as I see it. And I do so in the hope that others with join in.

Describing a group that is evolving all the time is not easy. But these common FAQ's will help put you in the picture.

1.What does it do? Works informally via 90-minute meetings over Zoom to ensure the diverse history of LGBT+ life on ships and in ports is better represented in museums.

2. Who's in it? A small group of people in Europe, but with speakers from other time zones when possible.  Members are employed by museums, or work with them as expert consultants or interns. Some identify as queer, and some are queer allies. 

3. When do you meet?  About every two months over Zoom, usually on a Friday  morning (agreed at the previous meeting). The meetings are recorded so if you miss one you can still see the video of what happened, and make comments etc by email afterwards.

4. What happens in a typical meeting?  We check in briefly with news about what we are doing. Then the agreed speaker describes their current exhibition work (for example in Bergen 2023, see main image, left.) Or the guest speaker contributes for 30 mins on  a particular area. About 20 mins  chat follows, which usually involves a lot of sharing and recommending. 

5, How are meetings recorded? On the agreed platform, e.g. Teams. We do so because we see ourselves as creating something useful we can offer to the future.  

Sometimes I write a reflective diary,. I hope others do too. I circulate mine by email but am not sure anyone reads it!

6. What has the group done?  In 2022, when we began, three members were putting on displays about queer seafarers. Two others had already done so. 

Veterans offered a hand to the newcomers: this was both formal and informal consultancy. A key question was ‘How do we get hold of evidence?’ The answer: 'By appealing to older seafarers to come forward with artefacts and oral testimony and see themselves educators of newcomers.' 

Community participation is seen as invaluable. (Pictured, former steward Charles Traa and friend in foreign port. Charles was proud to help Amsterdam's National Maritime Museum by sharing his photo albums and being videod.)

7. Who are your guest speakers?  Sometimes we invite in speakers from the maritime industry today. That way, historical displays can be made relevant to present times and the future.  

8. What’s next?  It’s hard to know. It seems likely that some members will fall away because, having put on a exhibition focused on gay life, they now have to move on to mounting their next exhibition. It’s likely that they will be less frequent partiicipants, there in spirit but not in person. 

I certainly hope that people working with other maritime museums keen to represent the subject will join in. A dynamic organisation will be shaped by newcomers and new moves, such as rainbow capitalism. 

9. What future speakers do you have lined up? Professor Seth Stein LeJaq will speak at our next meeting, about using early Royal Navy archives. Our group members are always keen to work with local LGBT+ organisations including archives and universities. Luckily most museums offer talks programmes now, and even podcasts,  which continue to expand the positive effects of an exhibition long after it's over.   

And it seems possible that we may work with people in ports about queer seafarers’ use of ‘cottages’, gay brothels, Turkish baths, Seamen’s Homes. 

Antwerp, Australia and the Far East seem to be emerging as possible partners. We will be drawing in historians of queer life who are not necessarily interested in seafarers. Together we can make connections.

10. What are the side benefits of joining this peer support group with all its potential to help research? 

• maritime museums are supported in being more inclusive (and thereby attracting new audiences)
• museum workers don’t 'reinvent wheels'. It’s likely that increased international agency and consultancy will evolve
•  there’s a domino effect: other museums will consider what they can do, even of it’s only expand their archives, not put on a whole exhibition.

11. How to join? Contact me by email in the first instance. Then I will put you on mailing list. 

Reading more 

Start here. For an introduction and recommeded reading see the LGBT+ Sea page on my website: http://jostanley.biz/the_sea_and_lgbt_plus.html

To read the latest on gay sea exhibitions see my articles:

• 'Rainbow Seas Swelling:', Lloyd's Register Foundation Heritage and Education Centre, 20 June 2022, https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/whats-on/stories/rainbow-sea-swelling 
• 'Museum musings: a cultural update from the world's maritime museums', Nautilus Telegraph,  26 August 2022, https://www.nautilusint.org/en/news-insight/telegraph/museum-musings-a-cultural-update-from-the-worlds-maritime-museums/

Filmed talks by me. 

2023. “Revealing queer maritime history: international museums’ LGBT+ sea exhibitions,” Blaydes Maritime Centre webinar, University of Hull, May 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqJ-8tRXeA&t=74s

2023. “Entertaining 4 Sanity@sea: Hull's glitzy ship’s steward Roy ‘Wendy’ Gibson and the history of shipboard entertainment,“ University of Hull, Blaydes Maritime Centre webinar, Feb 2023.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGg9seH4tgg&t=646s

2023. “A Whirlwind Tour of a Jigsaw 1600-2020. 400 packed years of LGBTQI+ maritime history, “ Maritime UK, Pride in Diversity network webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nslyxO679Po

2008.  Homotopia. “Hello Sailor,” filmed interview with me touring an interviewer round the Merseyside Maritime Museum version of the Hello Sailor exhibition, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFhyEGdEAJA

Gendered sea-blindness

Sea-blindness is a term usually used by people who deplore landlubbers' ignorance of how much we depend upon the sea and ships.
Women in our society are especially made sea-blind as girls are seldom given ships to play with, offered seafaring as a career, or meet successful maritime women as role models.
But in a blog posted in April this year, http://maritime-executive.com/blog/women-at-sea-is-sea-blindness-gendered, Dr Lisa Otto (pictured), a Research Associate in Maritime Security, Coventry University, UK and expert on West African maritime crime took a slightly different turn.

In her post Women at Sea: Is Sea-Blindness Gendered? 1 April 2016 she discusses the discrimination against women at sea and argues 'The sea space appears to have fallen largely outside of conversations around gender equality and representation. Sea-blindness apparently extends to social and gender issues also.'


We are blind to women at sea
As I understand it, her point is that the wider world does not know that women are at sea. And there is blindness to the value and rights of those women that are on ships.
That situation is both a product and a cause of women only being at sea in tiny numbers. Women mariners are less than 1 per cent globally, according to the latest figures, which is a decline from the 2 per cent figure common in 2003.


Captain Zetta Gous-Conradie
Dr Otto cites the very interesting case in April 2016 of:
'a South African female captain of a container ship, Zetta Gous-Conradie, helped to foil an attack by sea criminals in Nigerian waters. Gous-Conradie’s employee records show that she has been at work as a seafarer for more than thirteen years. Her record and actions defy the idea that female seafarers are condemned to ferries and cruise liners. Is it time to revise our ideas on the role of women at sea?'

Captain Gous-Conradie's encounter with pirates story can be read at www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/.../SA-heroine-captain-foils-Nigerian-pirate-mob

Responses
The diverse responses to Dr Otto's post are interesting: a woman seafaring veteran of forty years, Jill Friedman, writes 'Yes, there most definitely is discrimination at sea. It starts in the office ashore. Many companies refuse to hire women. I have heard all kinds of excuses, from "we don't have facilities for women" (I can bring my own lock for the bathroom door), to 'the captains wife won't like it" (I AM a captain!), to "women aren't capable of doing the work" (BULLSHIT!)'

While some employers are blind to women as potential seafarers, this is not for want of educative efforts by recruiters, unions and organisations such as the Merchant Navy Training Board. The MNTB impressively offers touring speakers as Careers at Sea Ambassadors as part of its Inspiring Women campaign. http://mntb.org.uk/careers-at-sea-ambassadors

Maybe the problem is also that some females choose to be seablind because life at sea still seems not worth looking at, especially for women who want to combine a career with children.

To me it seems the issue is 'How can women be helped to see that a blind eye should not be turned to the sea as a career? How can employers make it worth women looking -- and even going towards -- maritime life?'

US sailor gives surprise birth an aircraft carrier

This breaking news story is heading straight for that boring category from ten years or more ago: 'OMG,! See what happens when you put lady sailors on warships! The stork comes along and upsets operations. Whatever next! Layette-knitting sessions by the torpedo launchers? Regulation issue baby-milk expressing pumps on the bridge? Told you women would only lead to trouble!'

This is the story as CNN tells it: 'Surprise! US Navy sailor unexpectedly gives birth on aircraft carrier', by Barbara Starr and Tom Kludt, September 14, 2016. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/13/politics/us-sailor-birth-at-sea-persian-gulf/

"A sailor who hadn't previously disclosed her pregnancy gave birth recently aboard an aircraft carrier currently involved in military operations against ISIS, the Navy has confirmed."

'Just Tummy pain?'
"A Navy spokesman said the sailor had complained of abdominal pains and was checked into the medical department on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was there where she later gave birth to a seven-pound girl.

.
"Both the baby girl and her mother "are healthy and are doing well," according to Cmdr. Bill Urban of the US Naval Forces Central Command.
"As the baby was born at sea aboard an operational unit, the main focus for the US Navy, the ship and its crew is the safety and well-being of the baby and the mother," Urban said.
The woman and child were flown to Bahrain by helicopter with a medical escort, where they are receiving follow-up care at a shore-based hospital."

In the middle of fight against ISIS
"The unexpected birth came at a tense time aboard the ship. The Eisenhower was in the Persian Gulf in support of US-led air campaign against the ISIS.
Urban said that Navy policy allows expectant mothers to "remain onboard a ship up to the 20th week of pregnancy and only if the time for medical evacuation to an emergency treatment facility is less than six hours." But the Navy was unaware of this particular pregnancy, he added.
"While it would have been preferred to send her to her homeport earlier, per policy, we are now focused on caring for the health and welfare of our sailor and the newest member of our Navy family," Urban said. "We are working a plan to move them to a shore-based hospital as soon as possible.""

Diapers by chopper
Other US sources reporting the event say the Navy flew out nappies, formula (processed milk) and an incubator for the baby before the petty officer and her daughter were taken by chopper to a Bahrain hospital.

Operation Inherent Resolve, which the Eisenhower has been supporting, has been making air strikes from the Arabian Gulf since 22 July. In all 3,200 people are aboard this elderly nuclear-powered carrier, which carries 90 aircraft.

The stork's been before
Three other US women have relatively recently given birth on naval premises at sea:
~ 2003: A Marine on USS Boxer,Persian Gulf
~ 1994: a sailor on USS Yellowstone (see pic) in Gaeta, Italy
~ 1989: a sailor on USS Yellowstone at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.

My comment:
The story, of course, indicates something tragic: that education systems have truly failed women if they don't know when they are pregnant. And if they do know, but have to hide that knowledge - perhaps even for themselves - then changes are needed in naval ways of operating in regards to that should-be simple and important matter: women's reproductivity.

War, Oral History and LGBT lives in the Merchant and Royal Navies

Queer, Proud AND in the armed forces or Merchant Navy? Yes, it happened – and happens.


Imperial War Museum North is concerned that this queer military history should be out in the open. And one of the best ways to do it is by talking to the queered people who’ve been in that position, and recording their stories on audio and video for posterity
So on Thursday 25 Feb the museum and Schools Out jointly hosted a Manchester day on oral history: LGBT lives in the British Armed forces and Merchant Navy.
As part of the LGBT History Festival, which took place in 6 cities this year, the speakers (see pic) were me, Dr Emma Vickers, Prof Charles Upchurch and Jonathan Snipe.

Emma’s path-breaking account built on the interviews with the trans people she did for her book Queen & Country: Same–sex desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45.

Charles' summary appears here: http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/professor-charles-upchurch-on-military-masculinity-and-same-sex-desire-in-early-nineteenth-century-britain. He is known for his book Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform University of California Press. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520258532.

Merchant Navy

I spoke about the particular challenges and benefits of doing oral history with LGBT men in the Merchant Navy and to a lesser extent in the Royal Navy.
The struggles include:
~ people find it hard to speak out freely if they were earlier demonised and shamed
~ finding the occluded non-camp stories of homophobia
~ that some informants retract. Going public is just too painful.

The boons include that interviews often produce vital evidence, including photos and objects museums can use.

~
The MN and RN had very different queer cultures: camp MN people, especially stewards, were welcomed on ships, unlike the non-camp deck and engineering officers who had to be much more covert – in fact, rather as their colleagues in the forces did.
being out in the MN was easier if you were camp.

Beforehand I’d had my doubts about whether we should even be talking about MN and RN in the same space. But actually I ended up seeing a lot of relevance, including the tragedy of young people in both services committing suicide or losing their careers, just because of their orientation.

LGBT Veterans speak

For me the highlight of the day was the brief autobiographical summaries by three veteran activists: Elaine M Chambers, Caroline Paige and Ed Hall (L to R in pic).
Caroline afterwards made the important port that ‘military LGBT history is being glossed over, even driven underground, by the MOD itself … [in] for a desire to show off a good PR model of the military of today … it isn't portraying the historical truth.
‘A few of today's generation are being 'shown off' and credited with making the military inclusive’ she said. By contrast, she declared, the change was mainly due to ‘the inspirational efforts of a previous generation of role models and doers. ‘
Her article appears in the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/caroline-paige/lgbt-history-month-a-military-snapshot_b_9348388.html
Ed made a vivid point that will long stand out for me: that only in military could such opposed orders be carried out with such alacrity. One day ‘homosexuals’ should be rooted out. The next day homophobes should be rooted out. And it was done.
Afterwards I went away and read his book in one all-night sitting: an important asset to queer history that should not have gone out of print.

Future steps

For me the day was a very moving and inspiring one. It revealed a much more complex, long and nuanced version of queer armed forces history than is currently evident.
And it showed how vital it is that survivors of this past tell their story and have it fully represented in all our museums. Some military veterans deplore this past as insufficiently masculine and brave.
But being out under all sorts of fire is an impressively courageous way of living.

Dates for your diary 2015-16: my talks and papers

I will be speaking about maritime history in its broadest sense at the following events in late 2015-2016.

9 Nov 2015, Marsden, West Yorkshire.
Ayahs who travelled: Indian nannies’ voyages to Britain 1850s-1920s.
Marsden History Society, Mechanics Institute, Peel Street, Marsden. 7.30 pm. Cost £2.


14 Dec 2015, Turn, Italy.
When the ‘ladies’ took to loading: a preliminary survey of gendered stevedoring practices in history
and
Pioneering sea women: what helped them break through – and climb to the top.
At the maritime section of the first Conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN), afternoon session.

Jan 11 2016, Hull. Women on the bridge: 150 years of patchy progress in equal opportunities in maritime work, 1855-2015.
Maritime Historical Studies Centre, Blaydes House, High Street, Hull, 6pm. Cost free.

4 Feb 2016, London. Hilarious Seasickness: Comic Postcards' Take on Travel's Costs, 1900-1950.
At King's Maritime History Seminar, at 17:15 in Room K6.07, Dept of War Studies, Kings College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS (6th Floor, King’s Building). Cost free.

26-27 Feb 2016. Manchester. Cabin ‘boys’: cross-dressed women seafarers and their sexualities
and
a master class jointly with Emma Vickers:Doing Oral history with LGBT interviewees at Imperial War Museum North.
LGBT History Festival. Exact slots tbc. http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/

Pirates of the Caribbean and feminist academics

The new Pirates of the Caribbean movie being made is Dead Men Tell No Tales. And Carina Smyth, the female lead, is to be a feminist bluestocking.
Kaya Scodelario (pictured below), who plays that role, says Carina 'is an astronomer, and she is an academic. She's fighting for the right to study at university, because women couldn't at that time.'
It's very good to hear that a mainstream movie is addressing injustice in education and showing that women were anyway pioneer scholars.
Read more: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/movies/movie-news/kaya-scodelario-says-pirates-5-more-like-first-movie-874421.html#ixzz3lbvp08nK

Yes, women could be astronomers
If Pirates of the Caribbean is set in c1700 then in fact it was only 180 years later that the first women pioneers took STEM subjects at universities, and over 240 years before they were awarded degrees.

But some technically-minded women, such as Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), (pictured on right) pursued their interests in such matters even without access to universities. In 1786 Caroline became history's first woman to identify a comet. http://www.womanastronomer.com/women_astronomers.htm

Blogging and talking about the process

This blog is - I'm honoured to say - one of those the British Library has chosen to archive. I like that because it means material on the gendered sea that is not saved in any one place elsewhere will have a long, useful and certain life - and will be easily available to all the people who don't have physical access to specialist libaries.

Today the BL has just uploaded my articles about having my blog archived:
~ UK Web Archiving: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2012/02/index.html
~ BL readers stories: http:// www.bl.uk/yourstories/Readers-stories.aspx?s=5a35389e-67fb-4edf-ad0d-80eb76f06695

In the UKWA article I say:
'In 2011 when staff from the UK Web Archive at BL emailed the news that my blog was one of those selected to be archived for posterity that really gave me a boost.

'And it changed my blogging practices. I write more frequently and more carefully, because of a greater sense of its significance. My entries are now made at least twice a month. I spend hours, no longer minutes, writing each entry as vividly and elegantly as I can; I make more effort to explain significances and acronyms.

'Having your blog harvested feels an oddly alienated experience. It’s like being a rose that knows the gardener is plucking it, but never feels the secateurs nor sees itself finally arranged in the vase with all the other blooms.

'So it really helped when the Head of Web Archiving Helen Hockx-Yu took the time to show me how the process worked. In her office papered with Chinese poems on the Underground I saw the crawler in operation, scuttling round and scooping up other’s blogs and websites like some diligent crab from a William Gibson sci-fi story.

'Finding out the program’s name, Heritrix, seemed to make the process feel more comprehensible. OK, it’s just another clever piece of software, like Photoshop.

'Hearing that I was one of the 10,000 websites owners and bloggers helped me see my in/significance within the UK Web Archive; it’s a bit like looking your house via Google Earth.

'And understanding that my ‘donation’ was collected every six months helped me get a sense that there was someone listening.'

Sylvia Pankhurst, suffrage campaigners' mobility, and the sea

This year's Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Lecture is by me, and called Suffrage campaigners on the ocean wave

The lecture takes place at Wortley Hall, Sheffield, on Friday August 12 at 7pm.This is what I'll be saying in my very illustrated talk:

Fighting for women’s rights brought an inadvertent side-effect: it encouraged thousands of suffragists and suffragettes to seize the freedom of the seas, roads, and railway lines.

Women who had never before left their home town went campaigning and networking across the Atlantic and Pacific. They ventured thousands of miles, alone or with sisters from movement, to give attend key conferences, make lecture tours and investigate conditions. It was a revolution in international connecting as profound as the internet revolution of our times.

Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the many women to seize her rights to mobility by sailing on ships, be it cross-channel steamer to Paris, little ferries from Dublin, or deep sea liners.

In WW1 a tiny number of suffragettes such as her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel sailed with impunity for reactionary ends, whereas suffragists were effectively banned from the seas.

However Sylvia was a key fighter against the ban on peace campaigners’ rights to attend the 1915 Hague International Conference of Women for a Permanent Peace; it could have ended the war. More than any other organisation, her ELF supported sailors’ (and soldiers’) wives.

This lecture tells the stories of both gallant sailings and frustrations at quaysides. It celebrates the geographical mobility that accompanied women’s new freedoms as they pressed impressively forward to build justice worldwide.

Bookings: http://www.wortleyhall.org.uk/2011/03/sylvia-pankhurst-memorial-lecture.html
Information about the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee: http://sylviapankhurst.gn.apc.org/sylvia.htm

Protesting about a homophobic article on Hello Sailor!

I've just heard that Scottish Daily Mail has retracted on a nasty slur it made about the Hello Sailor! Exhibition, when it was up in Glasgow in 2009.

The museum's director Dr Christopher Mason protested to the Press Complaints Commission: 'that the newspaper had published an article that inaccurately suggested the Tall Ship Museum in Glasgow had encouraged school children to attend an exhibition on gay merchant seamen in order to receive lessons in gay sex.'

The PCC says 'The complaint was resolved when the newspaper published the following statement:

On 28 August 2009 we published an article under the headline,"Hello sailor! Now children get lessons on the history of gays at sea". Our article reported that schools had been invited to send pupils to an exhibition on the history of gay merchant seamen at The Tall Ship maritime museum in Glasgow. We would like to make it clear that, whilst the museum does encourage school visits, it did not specifically invite any school parties to this particular exhibition; nor did any attend during the time it was being shown.' (06/05/2010)

You can see the PCC announcement at
http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/index.html?article=NjM5OQ==

Talk: women on the wartime seas. Manchester.

Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas
Date: 13th March 2011
Time: 2.15pm
Location: Imperial War Museum North - Learning Studio
Cost: Free

As part of the programme of events marking International Women’s Day, writer on gender and the sea, Dr Jo Stanley will reveal the women’s side of seafaring in the First and Second World Wars. Women’s crucial kit included thimbles and baby’s feeding bottles, not guns and compasses. Their concerns were where to dry those nappies and how to deal with amorous shipmates, rather than how to attack that enemy vessel or what course to steer to that foreign port.

Queer spaces

Spaces and places reflect and reproduce the hegemonic heterosexuality of the world we live in. But among the many people exploring challenges to this dominance of 'Straight rules' (Not Ok.) are the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society.
See their site at http://ssqwg.blogspot.com.

I am particularly interested in the sea as an exceptional space, and big ships as highly sexualised places where people feel free to transcend their usual sexual orientation.

'Why is it so different to land?' That's my preoccupation.

And it's one of the reasons why I'm on the SSQRG's committee. Next week (Fri 26 Feb 2010) the group is meeting to plan a new future, now that it is a Research Group, not just a Working Group, of the RGS.

There are at least two other interesting websites on queer geography:
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/3683.queer_geography
and
http://www.queergeography.blogspot.com

And as for good books, try:
- Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire by Aaron Betsky
- Geographies of Sexualities by Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown
- A Queer Geography by Frank Browning
- Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the making of the gay male world by George Chauncey
- Txt, Space as a Key word by David Harvey
- Space of Hope by David Harvey
- Queer Sites – gay urban histories since 1600 by David Higgs
-Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities (Why of Where) by Lynda Johnston & Robyn Longhurst
…. And the forthcoming Queer Spiritual Spaces by Kath Browne, Sally R Munt and Andrew KT Yip.