Queer Seas talk, Liverpool on Feb 11.

LGBTQI+ lives in the Merchant and Royal Navy.That's the title of a talk I am giving on Saturday 11 February 2017: 2.30–3.15pm.

Where?
It's in Liverpool at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Albert Dock. http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/events/displayevent.aspx?EventId=32661

What's it about?
Camp men on 20th century passenger ships found seafaring queer heaven. Some even transitioned. But Royal Navy men faced the noose in the past. Many women and men were dismissed and their careers ruined until as late as 2000. Find out the contrasting LGBTQI+ history of the two navies.

Are there pictures?
You bet. Scores.

What does it cost?
It's free. No booking necessary.

Is the related Hello Sailor! Gay Life on the Ocean Wave exhibition still on at the Museum?
Yes, you can see it before or after the talk. It's displayed at the far end on the first floor. Museum is open till 5pm.

Maritime Masculinities: new energy for the field

One of the most important and exciting conferences ever in the exploration of maritime history took place this week: Maritime Masculinities, 1815 – 1940.
Two fascinating days at St Anne's College Oxford, 19-20 December gathered some of the liveliest people applying cultural studies lenses to maritime labourers and depictions of them.
In the past maritime history – a rather conventional discipline involving economic and social approaches to people working at sea - has not given much space to matelots' masculinity. So these proceedings not only showed the new energy being put into the field, but also created more energy as collective enthusiasm was shared.

I wrote about the planned conference in this blog on Wednesday, 19 October 2016. I won't repeat that material. This item today is my brief summary of what happened there.

What were the main topics?
Visual Culture; Bravery, Honour, and Heroism; Material Culture and Technology; Sexualities; Maritime Masculinity Ashore, Race and Empire; and Public Spectacle and Feelings.

What surprised me?
I have long known that the subject has many facets. But somehow, listening to all these people each tackling their research in very different ways, made me aware as never before of the immensity and significance of the subject.
Under scrutiny were the archetypal seamen of the past: males who were popularly represented as heroes with hearts of oak, saving the nation, ruggedly masculine. Yet part of that masculinity was that they were admirable, kind, fatherly, honourable. I was surprised that there was not more discussion of all the features that didn't fit the heroic stereotypes; realities such as they had same-sex relationships, handled alcohol addiction, and were xenophobic agents of Empire. What fascinates me is the way the socially acceptable features and the silenced aspects interacted, and had major social implications.

What did I like best?
1. Meeting people who have made a major contribution not just to maritime masculinity, but to applying cultural studies lenses to all the diverse men who sailed.
2. Finding out from so many from all over the world that my work on gender and sexuality in the maritime past had been useful to them.



What do I think was the most significant sessions?
There were two sorts: .
1. the most important sessions for me were those on transgressive sexuality, meaning Jack Tar as someone who had same-sex relationships. So Mary Conley's enticingly entitled keynote speech - 'Looking For Sex in the Naval Archives - really helped me grasp why there are silences about homosexuality at sea: to report an illicit sexual event would be to detract from the reputation of the ship.
Seth Stein LeJacq's 'Sodomy, Abuse of Authority, and Masculine Failure in the Royal Navy, 1797-1840' was a masterpiece of productive close study. He had analysed 500 sodomitical crimes between 1797 and 1840 and found that in different periods they were - more frequently or less - between unequal partners. In other words his findings indicate that what was considered a crime was sex between people who had unequal power to insist/reject, rather than same-sex sex itself.
2. the most visually interesting sessions with those that showed images of sailors as fathers.Mary O’Neill explored paintings of fishermen as models of dignified labour. They were domesticated members of a team, not brawling irresponsible outcasts.

Of course, there's huge diversity of people, times, countries, navies. What's interesting is the forces that produced the differing masculinities, and the contradictions.

How can you find out more?
Unfortunately, no summaries of the conference papers are available online. Nor is any book of the conference planned as yet. Certainly much productive networking will come out of this conference and many single-authored publications will be spawned.
However the conference was extensively tweeted and the tweets can be seen at https://twitter.com/MMasculinities.

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.

Alex Beecroft: fictionalising queer seafarers in the age of sail

Alex Beecroft: author.

Could maritime novelist Patrick O’Brian ever have expected that he would accidentally generate a new sub-genre: M/M (meaning male/ male) romances about the sea in the Age of Sail?
Ms Alex Beecroft’s five M/M novels show what can happens when men are on ships together. Homosocial situations turn to homoerotic ones. Men fall in love, and carry on sailing. And how much more enjoyable a voyage is for that!
Of course, queer seafaring in reality is still an occluded subject. There's only a handful of history books, and several paragraphs - all mainly based on criminal proceedings and hostile witnesses' accounts. See my bibliography at https://www.academia.edu/19982031/Queer_Seas_bibliography
Alex's fiction is part of the re-writing of history that corrects the false assumption that everyone was heterosexual. Joanna Chambers has similarly written M/M historical military romances, such as Unnatural. Jasper Barry created The Second Footman, about a 19C bisexual male servant.

M/M Age of Sail romances
Alex, who describes herself in an unlikely way as a stay-at-home mum from a Cambridgeshire village, has written five such books, and short stories. Mainly ebooks, they are:
Captain's Surrender, Linden Bay romance 2007, second edition by Samhain Publishing, 2010 (her first novel)
False Colors, Perseus (Running Press), 2009 (named among the top 100 gay books of the 21st Century)
His Heart's Obsession, Carina Press, 2009.
Blessed Isle, Riptide Publishing, 2012 (Voted “Best GBLT historical of 2012” by The Romance Reviews
By Honor Betrayed, Carina Press, 2011
Link: alexbeecroft.com

INTERVIEW
I find Alex’s novels about this world deeply enjoyable and satisfying. And I’m intrigued that they are written by woman who isn’t even a boatie; read by metropolitan men who certainly didn’t sail in the 18C; and relished by straight landswomen.
The bizarre nature of this phenomenon is why I have just interviewed Alex by email. Here are the replies she kindly sent:

Q. Why did you start writing queer Age of Sail books? Did you feel something should be explored about the hidden potential sexual extent of those close on-board relationships in history books and in novels such as those by Patrick O'Brian?

A. I started writing queer Age of Sail (AoS) books as a direct result of watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. There's a moment in the film, right at the start, where HMS Dauntless glides out of the fog with all her timbers and sails creaking.
It hit me right in the heart.
I fell in love instantly with the magic of tall ships. As a result of this new love for 18th century weapons of mass destruction, I started reading up on the 18th century Royal Navy, both in non-fiction and fiction.
I discovered Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian gave me another of those "OMG, how did I live before this moment?" feelings. He instantly went to the top of my favourite authors list.
I have recently discovered asexuality and realized that I was asexual. But all of this took place before that realization, during the time when I didn't know what I was.
I knew I wasn't a gay man, but I had been struggling with my gender all my life (I now identify as agender or non-binary). Certainly I did know that I wasn't very good at being straight.
As a result, I'd always identified with queer characters without really knowing why. I identified with that sense of being a misfit/outcast because of something you were born with and could do nothing to change. I identified with that disconnect from the surrounding society.
And thinking back on it, I don't think I've ever really written heterosexual main characters. My Main Characters, such as Captain John Cavendish on HMS Meteor in 1762 (False Colours), have always either been totally disinterested in sex and romance or they've been queer in some way - gay or bisexual or trans.
It was never really a question for me. Queer people have always existed. Queer people were who I wrote about. Why on earth wouldn't I have queer Main Characters?

Q. What sorts of market has there proved to be? Would your readers tend to be maritime or queer, or what combination of both?

A. As far as the market goes, I only really have anecdotal evidence to go on. My experience has been that I've had more fan mail from men.
Most of it is the 'OMG, I never thought I would see this kind of book with a protagonist like me. Thank you!' sort.
But in egroups and book groups the people who talk about the book tend to be women. My impression was that gay men tend to find False Colors in book shops. They don't necessarily know the m/m romance genre is out there.
By contrast, women of whatever orientation tend to be online more. I have had False Colors and Blessed Isle added to a couple of maritime fiction reading lists. But my feeling is that more people are looking at them as queer books about the Age of Sail than are looking at them as Age of Sail book with queer characters.
In the early years of the M/M romance community, when False Colors came out, the received wisdom tended to be that the readers were predominantly straight women. False Colors and its running mates were marketed as ‘By straight women for straight women’.
Such a description ignored the fact that the authors were in fact two bisexual women – Erastes and Lee Rowan, plus Donald Hardy, a gay man, and me (a person who didn’t yet realize at that point that they were an agender asexual).
This precipitated a real upheaval of the community. Readers started to speak up and say “No. Actually we’re queer, and we’re fed up of being spoken about as though we’re imaginary even in a genre that purports to be about us.”
Ever since then, I’ve tended to assume most of my readers were MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments and Intersex)in one way or another. Even if – like me in those days – they haven’t yet worked out exactly how.
Lee Rowan was publishing gay Age of Sail fiction well before I did. Her Ransom series was really the trailblazer for queer naval historicals. I owe my start in publishing to her suggestion that I should submit the manuscript of Captain’s Surrender to her publishers. http://www.historicnavalfiction.com/related-authors/1713-lee-rowan

Q. What pleasure was there in it for you? Are you sort of one of those queer sailor boys manqué?

A. I do love my war machines! I love stories that take place in small, tight knit military communities. I love military science fiction.
A story about the 18th century Age of Sail is like Star Trek, boldly going where no (Western) man has gone before. And it has the added charm of gorgeous clothes and an interesting and intriguingly weird world view.
I found the culture/power structure in the 18th century Royal Navy tremendously interesting. And it was a small enough subject that I could become reasonably well versed in it in a short time.
The expansion of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment gave, I felt, a glorious, optimistic world view. And the queer subculture of the time was stirringly vocal and unashamed and good to be around.
For example, there is a transcript of the trial at which possible trans man/possible gay drag queen Princess Seraphina took a man who had robbed her to court. She was supported by her female friends and neighbours from whom she used to borrow clothes. (http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/seraphin.htm)
Also I love learning. The opportunity to find out what all the masts were called, and how you clewed off a lee shore, or navigated by knots and bits of wax stuck on the end of a plumb line was fascinating.
I don't want to be a queer sailor. I'm a queer writer. What I enjoy is to find out new things and then tell stories about them.
I feel you'd have to have very little romance (with a big R) in your soul not to be a little captivated by the lure of a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Q. Why did you stop producing these books six years ago, and move onto other subjects?

A. Because I enjoy finding out new things. I got to the point where I felt if I wrote one more Age of Sail story, I would end up repeating things I'd already done.
I started to feel so familiar with the life on board ship that it stopped seeming strange and wondrous. It started to seem ordinary. I wanted to try something new.
There are many other things in history which are equally interesting which I fancy exploring -- such as the ancient Minoans, who I've been reading up on recently. What a fascinating world they lived in!
Also, by nature I've always been more of a fantasy and science fiction fan. Producing the Age of Sail books was a thoroughly enjoyable temporary blip. I may come back to it later. Or I may not.
Margaret Atwood popularised the adage “The proper study of Mankind is Everything” I quite agree. And if I'm going to write about everything I find interesting, I can't stay on any one thing too long.

Why do women write M/M fiction?
Alex’s discussion, ‘Why do women write m/m fiction? Answers for the men’, can be found at http://alex-beecroft.livejournal.com/72155.html.
She remarks ’Bear in mind that it’s a snapshot of what the debate was like in the m/m romance world in 2009. Both the debate and the community have moved on a lot since then.
‘For up to date discussion of the issues surrounding queer romance and literature, try subscribing to Riptide Publishing’s Tumblr http://riptidepublishing.tumblr.com. It’s a good jumping off point from which to listen in to the discussion as it is still going on.’

Changing identities at sea: camp gay seafarers

Maritime History and Identity: The sea and culture in the modern world has just come out with a chapter of mine in it. The book is edited by Duncan Redford and fourteen chapters discuss the identities of navies, seafarers and regional identities.
My chapter‘They thought they were normal - and queens too: gay seafarers on British liners 1945-1985’is on pp230-250, IB Tauris, London. It's in a section on individual seafarers which includes Cori Convertito's discussion of how tattoos were used to express individuality in the Victorian Navy

CRUCIAL QUESTION
I write that 'The question crucial to this essay [is] What was it about the sea that enabled members of a pilloried subculture to finally feel that they were ‘normal’? How did conventions become so inverted that members of the shipboard Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) culture saw heterosexuals and men without frothy petticoats as the odd ones out, even as inferior beings?

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?
The opening lines explain: 'This chapter is about a hidden history that challenges ideas of a ‘normal’ male seafarer. It enables a far more nuanced history of human beings if we see the un-problematically macho Jack Tar with his legendary girl in every port as just one possible identity, and maybe even a myth.
'Seafaring work aboard British passenger ships in the 40 years after WW2 offered remarkable opportunities for men to enjoy a post-modern transcendence of fixed sexual and gender identities.
'Shipping lines such as P&O, Cunard and Union Castle inadvertently enhanced the future of British men operating at various places on a whole spectrum of identities. This included those who were quietly homosexual masculine-acting men; those who were contingently bisexual; anyone who habitually put on a frock for fun; semi-professional female impersonators; drag queens (who do not necessarily seek to pass as women but utilise irony through campery); and intersex people born with intermediate or atypical biological characteristics.
'Previously labelled hermaphrodite or androgynous, some such men felt they had been born into the wrong body. Those who could afford surgical and chemical intervention would later have sex reassignment surgery (SRS) to assert their ‘proper’ identity – as did the iconic ex-seafarer April Ashley. The range of human activity and the labels that different people choose for themselves are myriad and fluid, deserving both attention and respect.
'A permissive culture on celebrated liners and cruise ships ... enabled thousands of members of this casual workforce ... to confidently establish satisfyingly solid identities. These identities went beyond that of hegemonic masculinity ....
'They thought themselves not only normal, because they were in the majority on some ships. Going further, [some queens] also asserted they were as elite as the Hollywood divas they emulated – but with varying degrees of irony and theatricality. This was play. This was fun.'

CONCLUDING WITH A WISH ...
The chapter's conclusion says 'By examining ships as institutions that allowed some values to become so deeply topsy-turvy, we can wonder all the more at the over-stated polarisations of land/sea (implicitly ‘constrained’ versus ‘free’).
'The exceptional potential for identity change that is possible at sea suggests that societies may well need offshore opportunities of this kind as a way to embrace the actual diversity of human identity. These hidden histories therefore also raise important questions about geographical mobility’s connections with psychic and social mobility.
'This examination of one brief period in maritime history has sought to be a contribution not only to what I hope will be many more explorations of real seafarers’ transcendence of the Jack Tar figure’s heterosexual fixity.
'It is also part of the academic move towards exploring how different situations produce different sexualities, and how such situations can enable every human being to self-actualise and become all the selves they desire to become.
'Implicitly it is written in furtherance of my wish for a world that outlaws stigma, where diversity, equal opportunities, tolerance and justice will be normal.'

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.

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==

Exploring the sea and identity.

It's a really interesting question. How/why does being at sea enable people to explore new identities - both passengers and crew?

I'll be giving a paper about how this worked for British merchant seafarers who explored sexual orientation and enjoyed an often outrageously gay life at sea, but were married or closeted at home. As they proclaimed with glee 'Nothing's "queer" once you've left that pier!"

This paper is They thought they were normal - and queens too: gay seafarers on British liners 1955-1985. The chance to hear it and think widely about identity - can be enjoyed at Who Did They Think They Were?:The Sea and the making of Identities, 44th Exeter Maritime History Conference, University of Exeter, 18-19 September, 2010.

Go to http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/cmhs/conferences/poster.pdf

The draft programme is now out. Provisionally I'll be speaking at 11.30 on Saturday Sept 18.

The blurb says it's 'A conference focusing on the relationship between the sea and identity in widest possible sense, naval or maritime; local,regional, national or international; gender and sexuality; fact, film or fiction.

'It will look beyond the usual nationalistic rhetoric to explore how identity has been moulded by attitude to and relationships with the sea. The conference will interrogate the idea of identity in its various manifestations in order to examine the importance of the sea to different audiences.'

Papers include:
• Identifying ‘seagoing races’: Britain’s colonial naval volunteers and the forging ofidentity during the Second World War.
• The Navy at Home: The creation of British identity in the domestic sphere 1793-1815.
• The identity of RN submarine commanders in the Second World War.
• Regional voices: national causes 1930-1945.
• Defying Conformity: Using tattoos to express individuality in the Victorian Navy.