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

Norland Crew celebrate Falklands anniversary in Hull

Friday June 15 2012. It was raining, on Hull’s furiously busy Hessle Road. It was teaming down like a wintry day in the Falklands. And Frankie’s Vauxhall Tavern was crowded and jolly with the previous week’s jubilee bunting. You could almost fail to spot the inflatable phalluses, scarlet furry willies, and cutely grinning silicone mega-dicks under all the Union Jacks still festooning its raunchy walls.

But this was a special day with serious intent – to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Falkland’s conflict and in particular the role of the Norland, the former Hull-Rotterdam ferry that took part in it. Indeed some of the photos of drag queens and favoured divas and - surely not – Her Maj were temporarily covered over with photocopied snaps and battered newspaper cuttings about the Norland’s extraordinary voyages to the South Atlantic in late Spring 1982.

Frankie, the pub’s co-landlord, had been the Captain’s Tiger on the Norland. And now he was hosting this event that would bring not only his old shipmates through the doors of the campest pub in the East Riding. It would also bring, from all over Britain, the former Paratroopers whom the ship had carried. They’d be stepping into this cross between an Anne Summers sex shop en fete and a BDSM dungeon that seems to float on ignoring that heterosexuality exists.

Shipmates: Frankie Green (Captain's Tiger) and Jean Woodcock (Stewardess)

It was to start at 12 midday. The prelude was quiet and the former crew kept to their own little group. Now mainly retired, their long tousled hair and droopy moustaches were long gone and replaced by blue blazers. The biggest absence was the beloved captain, Don Ellerby, who has passed away.

Everyone was waiting for Wendy. Wendy the most famous gay men in the Falklands War. Roy ‘Wendy’ Gibson for whom they’d hired the joanna. (It wasn’t his favourite piano shade, pink, but heigh-ho, it had resilient keys and an impressive loud pedal.) Wendy, who would, in his glitzy waistcoat, do his Liberace numbers as always and bring morale up higher than Dusty’ Springfield’s beehive hairdo.

When he arrived at two, frazzled from a morning’s tedious domestic tasks but in a suit so immaculate he could have been a Premier league football manager, he greeted everyone. At last, it could start, properly.

His old shipmates thought the rest of us nutters for being avid for the Gibson touch on the waiting keys. No man is a hero to his valet and no queen is a hero to his/her shipmates. They’d become over-sanguine about his abilities to entertain. But the Paras, it seemed, wanted that old sound that had accompanied them to war.

And oh boy could he belt it out. Wendy played con brio and in brief sessions. The crowd noise grew louder as men downed their ale, and the rain outside grew more torrential. People passed round albums gone sticky with age and started to tell stories about their connection with the Norland. At the tops of their voices, standing, happy, buffeting by others weaving their way through the melee selling raffle tickets for the South Atlantic fund, they told each other their chunk of the story.

Happy to connect. Happy to remember. Happy to be almost-back-there, revelling in the preferred version without the deaths, the Argies, the privation, the mixed feelings about the war’s rightness and the unvoiceable doubts about Mrs T’s gung-ho defence of these ‘somewhere-off-Scotland-surely?’ islands.

Each time Wendy stopped playing (yes, roll-out-the-barrel-you-are-my-sunshine-my-old-man-said- follow-the-blue birds-over) some brawny young man would come up to him, often in a Para t-shirt, with an album extended and say ‘My dad sailed with you. He’s always talking about you. Still. You made his war.’ And Wendy would get excited and honoured and think he remembered. It was his day. But not only his.

Wendy (left) and shipmate.

I’d planned to film it for posterity. At the last minute the crew weren’t able to come but I still felt obliged to get to know what I could. I sidled round the pub wondering who I could ask about what, and would that be alright.

What was impressive for me, an outsider, was the irrelevance of my question, ‘But how come you could accept all the pouffery?’ I asked the military guys ‘How is it, given the armed forces’ homophobia then, that you could tolerate someone camping it up on your way to war?’. They said I’d got it wrong. They weren’t anti-gay. They were just against furtive closeted types who wouldn’t stand up like men and brandish their happiness at being more Martha than Arthur.

I asked the members of his former crew how they copied with the queens on board - as queens were on most late twentieth century ships, war or not, creating gay mini-heavens. They too said I’d got it wrong. On ship everyone accepts everyone else. ‘See, you’ve got to get on, in that enclosed space. You’ve got to accept people whatever they are. And you do.’

So … It was bonhomerie all round. And yet I knew that armed forces guys had gay-bashed one camp ship’s steward. And I knew, because I’d lived through the 1980s, that homophobia ashore could be vicious and that therefore no ship could be entirely exempt from that. From my interviews with other gay seafarers I knew that camp man had deliberately toned themselves down so as not to antagonise their military passengers. A ship is never an entirely heterotopic space. It’s never that Other, especially when it’s a vessel that’s home several times a week , unlike the deep-sea gypsies touring the globe for weeks and months.

When at 5 I left the party was in full swing. In fact the swing was getting fuller and louder. The Norland crew seemed to be pretty much still gathered in their own small groups and not mixing with the other revellers. But certainly they were doing plenty of their own collective revelling.

Wendy was the one who wove in between, linking them all. And certainly his nieces were happy to look at the albums shown them by a proud Para’s son. Certainly there was no ostensible secrecy about his or Frank’s sexual orientation. Not a hair was turned about the exuberantly cheeky décor in this knees-up. The hundred-strong crowd were as glorying in their way as revellers at VE day celebrations in Trafalgar Square’s fountain.

It was a party, and a re-remembering. And of course the spectacles we like to wear are the rosiest ones possible. And for once it’s a shade of pink that every man was wearing happily in that changed ex-maritime heart of the entire east coast. It was the good old days, again, for at least a day, and not unlike the party they'd just had for that other queen, Elizabeth R.

Frankie and colleagues behind the bar in the Vauxhall Tavern, Hull.

Gay marine reveals fight for rights

Being in North America last week I heard lots of stories about LGBT seafarers that are not necessarily so well known here in the UK. One of the most talked about is the new (ish) book by gay US Marine Justin Crockett Elzie, the first Marine to be discharged under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (which was repealed in Dec 2010).

“PLAYING BY THE RULES” A Marine’s True Story was published by Queer Mojo (A Rebel Satori Imprint),2010. It's acclaimed as a crucial expose of homophobia and the fight for LGBT rights.

Elzie didn't want to be an activist. But he wanted to stay in the Marines and so he challenged his discharge. He won, was re-instated and served four more years, openly gay, before retiring in 1997.

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==