Selling sex and seafarer wellbeing in ports, Sept 2026

 

Today (Saturday 5 Sept) is seemingly the final day of the USS aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Thailand’s main sex destination Pattaya. Then it's back to San Diego.

This is a ship visit remarkable only for all the media interest in what didn’t happen: a newsworthy explosion of fizzing by disaffected US Navy and Marines when uncorked from a floating ‘prison’ that has infamously been kept at sea for 264 days, largely by the US-Iran war.

There had been rumours about people on board being suicidal, loss of faith in the mission, and supplies running out  A break was indeed needed.

Onlookers’ interest was not in seafaring workers’ mental illhealth caused by unfairly long deployments, (which is a matter of huge concern in the maritime welfare world today, not least because it impacts safety and retention.)

Instead the question was whether this part of the military oversea would mutiny against the Trump regime.

TIGHT CONTROLS - DAMP SQUIB

An Abraham Lincoln rising hasn’t happened in Sin City so far, largely because US Navy restrictions on permissible recreation are so tight. Or so I gather from YouTube and social media, reading as someone who’s previously researched 20^th century usage of ports for seafarer sex.

Everyone on board the Abraham Lincoln was issued with a Liberty Brief, which told them that yes, there could be shopping in the air-conditioned mall; there could be cruising down Walking Street, a key site of salacious hyper-commercial neon display, but not in the dodgy red-light area, especially Soi 6. 

No, there was to be no buying of cannabis (legal in Thailand since 2022, but not in the US Navy). Nor could there even be a bit of jet-skiing (too dangerous). Ladyboy hookers have certainly not been mentioned in all the heteronormative footage. So much ‘liberty’ hasn’t been allowed.

ILLEGAL BUT...

If I was a sailor in Pattaya this week I’d be confused and frustrated. What’s with these puzzling fuzzy reminders that prostitution is illegal in Thailand – when actually it’s ubiquitous and blatant?

The Abraham Lincoln’s personnel seem to have got round this by digitally booking up massages, facials and pedicures, via parlours, clinics and spas.

This distanced approach is a substitute for the traditional, more direct sex-buying practices, such as engaging with the many solo street hookers who wait on Beach Road (essentially the promenade) rather as ‘Maggie May’ did in the song, ‘cruising up and down old Canning Place’ in Liverpool.

It’s not clear how much the buyers drink in bars then utilise hired rooms upstairs, as US sailors did in the classic foreign hooking novel “The World of Suzy Wong.”

Local traders in Pattaya, including the estimated 60,000 resident sex suppliers, must have expected a bonanza. A very large container full of customers from global north had appeared: 5,000 potentially desirous people with nine-months’ worth of wages stashed on their debit cards.

The average tourist spend was expected to be 30-90 dollars a day.  You can see what that means in practice if you understand that a sex session is 1,000 baht, or 30 dollars a time; the Hard Rock Hotel would have charged you 83 dollars for a room last night; if you want to buy a can of Coke at the 7-Eleven it’ll cost you just under a dollar.

OTHER PORTS, OTHER TIMES

One of the fascinating things about this situation, for people interested in maritime culture, is that it’s revealed the current state of a key aspect of ports: sex-related work. The subject is strongly linked to alcohol retailing, but also gender-based violence, sexual health and above all conservative attempts to control and deny what some see as disorderly, marginal and shameful.
Events in Pattaya this week – invisibilized and euphemized though they are – augment earlier information. In researching several countries I’ve found that four historical (and related) situations can be seen:
~ The 19th and 20th century waterfront communities where sex was sold, most famously in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Pattaya’s Soi 6 had its predecessors in the Reeperbahn and de Wallen respectively, but its 25k away from the dock. Suppliers sometimes had sex (as part of a kind of hospitality extended to men in the same occupation as their seafaring brothers and fathers. Participants in the exchange were ‘us’, accustomed to the international seafaring community’s rhythms.

~ Post-1920s very young women travelled in from the suburbs and partied on moored ships with seafarers. Less interested in money-earning than adventure, these ‘delinquents’ were temporarily attracted to ‘exotic’ mariners from afar and to liminal itinerant living. They sometimes made short voyages, especially round the Australia coast 1950s to 1960s, and often later settled into paid sex work.

~ In the late twentieth century UK there was now-forgotten diplomatic discussion about what happened to locals’ morals and to decent neighbourhoods when the US Navy was stationed there, not just visiting. Dunoon and Glasgow, in Polaris times, 1969-96, was the main example. So was that earlier ‘Sin City’, at Yokosuka, near Tokyo. Moral anxiety led to trying to binarily separate areas of ‘family life’ and military operations.

 ~ The most telling developments are the consciously created sex campuses in the global south, post-WW2. They were erected outside of town, to maintain a geographical as well as social distance from ‘vice’s pollution’. Women were trafficked there or trafficked themselves, sometimes from thousands of miles away. Like a no-frills holiday camp devoted entirely to sex and drinking, such alienated mass facilities were used mainly by seafarers, the military and posses of foreign sub-contractors. Camp Alegre on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and Olongapo,near Subic Bay in the Philippines, are the main ones.

DISCONNECTS.

Today women selling their bodies in places such as Pattaya are not doing so as part of an ‘all the nice girls love a sailor’ culture. 

They work with sex-seeking visitors simply because all service suppliers need customers, whatever the customer’s occupation. 

Not many port cities today are what you might call briny, when it comes to the sale of sexual services; docks are usually physically, as well as metaphorically, far from recreation areas. Healing? Well, this is commerce.

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!  

 

 

Jack Kerouac on this day: rugged sea brother?

 

 

On this day, 19 August, in 1942 Jack Kerouac, one of the world’s great rover-writers, stopped writing his voyage journal. He was en route to the US army base in Narsarsuaq, south Greenland. 

He’d only been keeping the journal for just 31 days, since 18 July, when he joined his first and only ship, which was delivering war supplies.

Did stopping writing that journal matter? Was it a  momentous moment for the writer of 'On the Road', a man who saw motility as a kind of freedom? 

Or was it significant for the martitime literary pantheon, like being deprived of Joseph Conrad's insights?

Who knows. Sometimes creativity flourishes in moments when writers DON'T make consistent linear records but instead explore responses - say to sea life - through poems, sketches and fragments instead. 

Jack Kerouac, aged 20 and already a prolific writer, certainly carried on noticing and reflecting all that was happening to him onboard US Merchant Marine freighter Dorchester, on which he stayed till October. 

Later he reworked the experience into a novel he didn't complete.Pengun published it only in 2011, as The Sea is My Brother; The Lost Novel. The compilation includes both extracts from the journal - unfortunatley not all - and the first 130 pages of  the novel 'Merchant Mariner'.

WHY?

Why was he sailing? Kerouac explained in his journal that he joined because ‘I need money for college, need adventure of a sort (the real adventure of rotting wharves and seagulls, winey water and ships, ports, cities, and faces & voices.’ (The Sea is My Brother,  p11) 

The usual reasons seafaring men of the time gave were sometimes consciously masculine: 'to make a man of myself, to master the oceans.' Most people wamted to see 'the world' and there was metaphyiscal yearning; 'the world was a metonym.' 

Some joined to escape un-nurturing homes, and to work somewhere glamorous. Early GBT+ men wanted to shift to a less homophobic milieu than on land. And in wartime many joined up to help the war effort.

Seafaring women are said to have sailed to follow their male sweethearts but this idea is not supported by any evidence I've ever seen. Women mainly chose to the career as a way to::

• escape domestic confinement including family care work and unsatisfactory marriages
• to slough off the feminine restraints imposed on them
• to get away from home without causing too many ructions: daughters were seen (by some naive parents) as safe if they were employees on a patrichal ship, rather than roaming free as Kerouac later did 
• to fund the travel that seemed impossible to achieve given women's lw earning power  

Unlike the new men who joined up, expereinced seawomen were urged to leave the sea and thier ships in wartime. 

RUGGED SEA DOG? 

What master of maritime motility, of hegemonic masculinity, do we find these uneven pages? Was Jack Kerouac a rugged sea dog? 

Hardly. He was employed as a scullion, an unkilled kitchen worker - possibly the most lowly and non-macho role on ships. The catering side of ships was regarded as an area where effeminate men worked, but in this volume we don't see this, or indeed same-sex relationships aboard. 

Not only was he doing 'women's work.' He was sailing with literary conscience:  this was regarded as deridably not masculine enough.  The bosun jeered at him for writing “ ’Truth brothers!’   … You doggone little pansy … with all your sissy books”.  and snarlingly sets him down to drudgery. It was, says Kerouac,  'a grim, dreary night for fratricide’ (The Sea, pp8-9) . And ships are indeed  chilling places that allow disliked people to be fatally jettisoned. 

He finds he is alienated from his once-longed-for brothers.. They ‘cannot understand me, and are thus enraged, bitter and full of hidden wonder.’ (The Sea, p6).

Was the SS Dorchester a macho space?  Of course. Ships were, although it was was far from being a warship. But there’s a stern captain (male, inevitably). And in the novel there’s an impressive gun. The crew pride themselves on eschewing namby-pamby boat drill and they enjoy public farting displays. It feels to me that Kerouac was writing as a boy, along with other boys manning a boy’s toy.

FROM SHIP TO LIT, OMITTING WAR 

Kerouac carried on at the sea, on the Dorchester (pictured) until the start of that October, 1942. Then he went back to Columbia University to do his literary studies, and play football.

 At Christmas (1942) he joined the US Navy Reserve, ready to serve in WW2 if necessary. The US had joined the war in Dec 1941, after Pearl Harbor. 

Kerouac had said he said he wanted to join the Reserve for the brotherhood with American and Russians: For their danger to be my danger; to speak to them quietly, perhaps at dawn, in Arctic mists; to know them, and for them to know myself.'  See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

But naval pychiatrists regarded his lack of desire to marry as dodgy. The Reserve may have wanted personnel but they didn't want queers - although many service personnel later had same-sex experience with each other. (See for example Allan Berube's Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two.)  Quickly the Reserve discharged him as unfit for service.

Kerouac never worked at sea after October 1942. Instead he went on to become a founder and 'reluctant icon' of the Beat Generation. See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

NEXT

I will be writing soon about the autobiographical (-ish) works some of the other seafarers including: 

• non-heterosexual US writers doing 'women's work' on ships, who were not necessarily, such as Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg
• heterosexual UK women who had a domestic role at sea and observed their male counterparts: Maida Nixson and Violet Jessop
• heterosexual stewards who got along with their GBT+ colleagues such as Ken Attiiwill and John J Mahon.