Gay mystery on liner, 50s-style fiction

PRIDE MONTH. Here’s some authentic fiction for those wanting to lite-ish holiday reading about queer maritime history in the 1950s. 

It’s about the time when passenger ships were increasingly becoming the main workplace where a working-class man could be out and camp; tourists were just starting to cruise; and emigration to Australia was waning. 

Try Stuart Lauder’s un-deservedly long-lost 1962 literary novel, Winger’s Landfall . The picture shows him six years earlier.  

Old copies of the book can be found in on-line bookshops. Mine’s foxed but still has this great dust-jacket.

 WHO WROTE IT?  I've done some genealogical sleuthing and found that Stuart (other name David Stuart Leslie) (1921-99), was the writer of at least 19 published novels. He was the British son of doctor. 

He grew up in Australia, went home to London with his widowed mum on P&O's Narkunda, then headed back to Oz to serve in the RAF in WW2. He was indeed a ship’s steward. 

Googling newspapers I've twice found reports of groups'  petty crime that someone of his name were tried for. But they don't seem to fit.

 

THE PLOT. Insightful and sensitive but puzzling, Winger’s Landfall is about a butch-ish gay steward’s voyage on the Cyclamen from Sydney to Tilbury. His ports of call include Colombo.

It’s seemingly set just after the seminal 1957 Wolfenden Report, which ten years later led to liberalizing consensual same-same sex: the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

The publication of a Panther paperback edition
in 1966 suggests the hardback sold well
 and that a gay market existed.

Hero Harry Spears, 29, is an experienced seafarer, no fan of queens’ frippery, and a determined avenger trying to track down what might be a queer paedophile crime against his vanished half-brother. 

We're unsure about his sexuality initially. But the on-board gaydar quickly spots him, and he also has furtive liaisons wth the young and secretive Prince.  

Below stairs on the Cyclamen is a bleak dog-eat-dog ‘community’. Afloat and ashore, women are objectified. They are life’s second most important consumable commodities, after booze and its numbing effects.

THE CAST. There’s a substantial gay cast, including elegant Diamond Lil/Derek, an officer’s beloved, and the vessel's uber-queen he dethroned, ‘Patience Strong’; Marilyn, an amorous bell-boy; and senior hotel staff, all of whom seem to enjoy immunity from any employer homophobia.

THE SHIPPING LINE. This permissiveness exists despite ‘homosexuality’ still being illegal then. I’ve got a hunch the employers were based on P&O. 

The giant transport operators were then one of the most- gay-tolerant companies (but not because it was ethically pro-Pride. It was just keen to keep some of its on-board domestic labour white.)

I don’t say this novel is fun. Stand by for racism about Goan and Lascar shipmates. This is a book that implicitly proves the long-standing need for DEI.

 Why is this book a rare classic?

Because other fiction and non-fiction books about hotel-side life in the merchant navy, by former stewards,  don’t mention the extensive and out queer culture among stewards 1950s-1980s. 

 •           The most famous is Coming Sir, The autobiography of a waiter (1937). Despite the cheeky title, writer Dave Marlowe (real name Arthur H Timmins) doesn’t refer to gay life. That's not least because his focus is the late 1920s and 30s, before that culture became so prevalent and performative.  He also wrote a novel, Gangway Down (1939) which I've yet to find.

•           The next most famous memoir,  Ken Attiwill’s Steward (1932) is also gay-free memoir of stewarding 

•           My late friend, steward Ron Whitworth, self-published  A Voyage Round My Oyster in 2008. But it’s not only long out of print, it’s also non-transparent. When he was writing it I repeatedly begged him to be frank but he kept insisting, ‘No, people will be able to read between the lines.’  

READING ON

1. However, you can read the fuller story and see the pictures in a social history Prof Paul Baker and I wrote, Hello Sailor! Gay life on the Ocean Wave (2003 and 2018). Hello Sailor!

This was based on many stories gay seafarers told us. That's why I know that Winger's Landfall is the most authentic queer maritime novel of all time.

2. See also the only queer discussion I've ever found, of Winger's Landfall .  It puts the book, and two other works by Lauder, in the context and queer spaces of the 1950s. 

Catch the fascinating online Leeds Ph.D thesis of Simon DR Ofield: An investigation of the resources available for interpreting visual cultural production related to male homosexuality in Britain; 1940 to the present.  (1998). Get it free at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43526.pdf

Celebrating iconic Falklands steward Roy Wendy Gibson.

 

Roy Wendy Gibson on the Norland at Falklands.

Camp men who sailed in the 1960s and 1970s have and some spectacular send-offs. Glitz was the byword in life and in death. 

Franco Fantini was maybe the star. Palamino horses with powder-pink ostrich feather plumes drew the fairytale glass carriage bearing his coffin in Southampton in 2009. See https://tinyurl.com/fantini-2009.

This time, 29 June, it was Hull’s turn, at Chanterlands crem.  Flamboyant Roy Wendy Gibson, formerly a  North Sea Ferries steward, got the Splendid Sendoff he deserved, under a Union Jack. It was an iconic event, probably the first camp LGBT+ Falklands Conflict veteran's funeral.

50 mourners were distanced inside. A further 80 were outside watching it on their mobile phones. Some mourners wore glittering eye shadow and Hawaiian shirts. 

It was, as they say in Polari, fantabulosa. The curtain number was Abba’s Dancing Queen.  And Pet Clark's Sailor, stop your roamin' gained a whole new meaning. 

Wendy at a piano on land, c 2000. Picture
courtesy of Wendy.

Wonderfully, there was no wary silence about Wendy's orientation. 

The word ‘gay’ was spoken repeatedly, and easily, many times during the service.  

Mourners enjoyed the hilarious story of how Wendy’s late mum coped with his coming out: by clocking him over the head with a frying pan. 

The dented pan was used to cook him a Full English breakfast anyway. Of course it  carried on being daily used in the family home that Wendy left, but  stayed connected to, back in the 1960s. 

Hull Daily Mail had already carried background articles on the death of someone acclaimed as a 'living legend'. For historic photos see https://tinyurl.com/Wendy-3-June; https://tinyurl.com/Wendy-11-June; and https://tinyurl.com/Wendy-29-June. 

For funeral pictures see Jason Shipley's remarkable images at https://www.instagram.com/jason_shipley_/ 

National hero and game-changer

Wendy with his precious Para tie

But this was not simply a party animal’s posthumous fling. Wendy (67) was  also one of the most important civilian men of the Falklands Conflict. He was honoured for that at this funeral just as he has been honoured for over three decades. 

In a climate that was still homophobic in 1982 he changed military attitudes because of the indefatigable cheer he constantly offered to 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment on board the Norland.

It wasn't just the hours of morale-boosting tunes he belted out nightly on his pink piano to and from the South Atlantic. 

It was also the banter too  that  'Our Wendy' offered 'his boys' who were champing at the bit on the boring, entertainment-less seas. His wit cracked people up, even at breakfast, with quips like 'Could you fancy an extra sausage, dear?'  

Several out gay men were working on the ship. But Wendy, with his self-taught musical skills and willingness to play on,  led the field as the morale booster.

He was so appreciated that the Paras have given him an unprecedented accolade. They've put up a plaque to him at their Aldershot headquarters. 

In July 2021, after the funeral, a Wendy memorial plaque was placed on the Goose Green bench at Aldershot 's Military Cemetery, near the former home of British Airborne Forces.Pics courtesy of Ron Webster.

It’s no accident that uniformed men bearing serious official standards marked the momentous day. 'One standard is good at a funeral. But five!!!" marvelled one Para I spoke to. Wendy was always one for sequins. However the gold and tassels  on show here were of a different sort. They were for this civilian as esteemed veteran.

At the funeral parlour: Norland 1982 veterans
prepare for Wendy's final trip.

And it’s no accident that Danny, the kilted bagpiper who led the cortege, has a day job in diversity. 

This is a city where people take homosexuality in their stride, and support gay rights as proud activists. The previous Lord Mayor, Steven Wilson, is himself gay, and knew Wendy

Wendy had been part of creating that climate, in ships and then ashore. Just days before he suddenly died he’d still been raising morale by entertaining on the joanna. 

A People’s Liberace, Wendy was a man who was never afraid to say he loved men.

Yes, he was a larger-than-life character. 

But I know from my interviews with him that he was also more than a star. He was a truly admirable human being.  

As Colonel Chris Keeble DSO, 2 Para Acting Commander, said in his tribute: 'What a generous big-hearted hero, a talent who brought out the best, especially through music, good humour and fellowship ... We shall always remember Wendy'  

To Marseille and beyond: avec amour and murder plans

 

L to R: The steward, the adulterous wife, and her husband, the
mariner's orphan whom they murdered

Sex, sea, stabbing, scented baths and ruthless day dreams. The 1922 Thompson-Bywaters murder trial at London's Old Bailey offers a new angle on the sea life, involving a ship’s steward and the daughter-in-law of a maritime family. 

The case also reveals the most scandalous exchange of letters in the gendered history of relationships between people far away at sea and those ashore who’ve barely travelled. 

In this blog I: 

• bring out the maritime aspects of the participants' lives, which has never been done before
• show that knowledge of a ship's timetable was nearly as central as knowledge of a railway timetables in an Agatha Christie whodunnit. 

COMMUNICATIONS MATTER

Letters were crucial when emails and social media didn’t exist. And they’re a historian’s delight. Modern landlubbers can learn about past life on the seas partly through wives’ letters to officers, such as Fanny’s to her husband Edward, Admiral Boscawen. Migrant voyagers’ epistles to families  tell gendered tales too.

But the famously infamous correspondence - between glamourous vamp Edith Thompson and stylish Frederick Bywaters, a P&O steward, a hundred years ago this year - make very different reading. 

The couple were hanged for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy Thompson, in 1923. Freddy premeditatedly leapt from bushes and stabbed Percy on the way home from the Criterion. 

Why? To enable the adulterous affair to bloom, as Edith wanted. Or did she really?  

Edith, fifth from left, at the wholesale milliners where 
she worked, Carlton &Weiss

DARLING OR DREADFUL?

Four portfolios of Edith’s hyperbolic letters – now typed up and five inches thick - were used in court. They were perused as evidence of ‘one of the most extraordinary personalities’ that courts had encountered in the history of female accomplices.  

Well, what can you expect of an adultress so shockingly unconventional that she continues to work after her marriage; of an almost-vamp who later stars under the chandelier in the ‘worlds’ most famous courtroom’ sporting ‘a black velvety hat with black quills curving forward from the left side in a scythe-like sweeping drop’. 

A vulgar older woman ensnaring an innocent mariner? An intelligent arty day-dreamer whose young lover gallantly helps her divest herself of a mismatched husband: a Presbyterian non-dancer who, ergo, had it coming to him?   

1922. Helpful sailor delivers teas to long queues
waiting outside the Old Bailey for the verdict  

No wonder that seafarers were part of the Old Bailey queues in the exciting ‘show’. 

Those heading for the public gallery members queued long before dawn in Newgate Street include two seamen.

 They told the Evening News that they had a ‘professional interest in the case’. Presumably they were P&O shipmates who’d take the gossip back on board.

BONUS

Delightful melodramatic spectacle aside, there’s a bonus. People interested in the sea’s history can also use the letters to gain insight into the subjective history of seafaring labour and the emotions in relationships shaped by geographical distance. 

The milliner's letters were written alone in her rented downstairs flat at The Retreat, 41 Kensington Gardens, Ilford. They went to all points on P&O’s trek between the British Empire and the Antipodes. 

Her recipient was a lowly but cocky rating in a floating 24-7 community of thousands. He was on prestigious, not emigrant-laden, liners at a time when travel was seen as making voyagers prestigious.

It’s not just that, counter-intuitively,  these effusive, uneven torrents were so interlarded with discussions of doing away with a human hindrance: the limited Mr Thompson. (Tina Turner’s words, ‘What’s love got to with it’, could be the soundtrack for this melodrama.) 

But also it’s very interesting to see the side-story: how this woman on land knew precisely where her lover’s floating workplace would be, because accurate timetables were available, just like Bradshaw’s Railway Handbooks. 

Arrivals and departures on sea route had become a precise matter. You could set your wristwatch by them.

Courtesy of P&O Heritage.

Arithmetically adept, Edith understood exactly when his ships were due into Marseille and Gibraltar, Port Said and Plymouth, Colombo and Aden, Bombay and Melbourne, Sydney and Fremantle. 

Although she'd never sailed, this landlubber knew the very hour that faraway Freddy could be expected to dash off replies to catch a homeward-bound mail ship.

Also, here in the UK, to avoid her husband knowing about her adultery with their young ex-lodger, Edith physically collected the ship’s mail from the London sorting office.  

Freddy’s ship, RMS Morea, Leaving Royal Docks,London, 1911. (Courtesy P&O Heritage)

In this way we also learn about how a seafarer’s partner gains unusual knowledge of maritime mail handling. Edith explained how the system works in this letter to Freddy in Fremantle in July 1922: 

‘Darlingest Boy ... I went to the G.P.O for the Port Said Mail and encountered the first man that I saw before – he handed me a registered envelope from you 

'... and told me if I had an address in London I couldn’t have letters addressed to the G.P.O. – I told him I hadn’t – but I don’t think he believed me anyway he didn’t give me your Port Said letter and I hadn’t the patience to overcome (or try to) his bad temper.’

REVEALING LETTERS

Professor René Weis, the author of Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, (Penguin, 2001) has made all the information, including transcribed letters, freely available on line. https://tinyurl.com/Letters-Edith. (I am very grateful to him for all his kind support).

The correspondence begins just short of a hundred years ago, on 11 August 1921. It continues while the two were in Holloway and Pentonville. Only the noose ends it.

Unfortunately, what remains is mainly one-sided. Most of Edith’s letters are available because Freddy kept them safe in his ditty box, the locked wooden box in which each seafarer placed their most precious objects, and which no honourable shipmate would broach. 

Replica ditty box. http://maritime-universal.org/ship
-store/sailors-ditty-box

When her mother later ask Edith why she has written ‘such letters’ she replied ‘No one knows what kind of letters he was writing to me.’

 Few letters by Freddy exist because Edith had to destroy them to keep her affair secret.  

I’m familiar with the idea that early 20C ship’s stewards could be rather flashy ne’er-do-wells. 

Freddy’s beautiful handwriting, impeccable phrasing, and use of Italian and French phrases in the several extant letters reveal that this purser’s writer (a kind of ship’s secretary) and later laundry steward, was strikingly adept at giving a stylish impression. 

After all, this handsome man of ‘smouldering masculinity’ and ‘studied arrogance’ had been picking up lessons from other Merchant Navy seafarers since he was 15. 

He’d been on the Nellore during WW1, when it was under torpedo and gunfire attack.‘Seasoned’ and ‘heroic’ might be words he’d use to describe himself. 

Plus he’d taken dancing lessons. This was a man who calculates how to perform, as some stewards did.  

(Courtesy P&O Heritage)

For six years Freddy had been working for one of the most prestigious companies in the world: on the Malwa in 1920, the Orvieto to Brisbane from Feb to June 1921, then the Morea.  And white ships’ servants often adopted the swagger of elite passengers, as well as regarding themselves as immensely superior to the ‘Lascars’. 

Although his record of service was stamped VG (Very Good) Freddy had, in fact, blotted his copy book by precipitately leaving the Malwa’s tender, off Tilbury in January 1921. 

Percy Thompson’s intervention (he was friends with the Orvieto’s purser) had led to the company taking Freddy back. But the faux pas may explain Freddy’s demotion from writer: he couldn’t quite be trusted.

In Freddy's letters he is nothing like as passionate, nor as grammatically challenged, as his 28-year old lover. 

The much-questioned tale of their shared role in killing Percy is well-known, not least because of all Edith ‘over-wrought’ letters. These were read out at the Old Bailey trial, to her family’s shame.  Several were censored because they mention such scandalous subjects as orgasm and her abortion, though very obliquely.

Mainly her letters are like those of any lover made anxious by the long separations and uneven silences.  ‘Why are you so late this time – oh I hate this journey, I hate Australia and everything connected with it – it will be 109 days since I’ve seen you – and you didn’t answer my question about China and Japan next time.’ 

She mithers about whether he still loves her, and how she’s performing: ‘Darlingest boy, when you get my letters and have read them are you satisfied? Do you feel that I come up to all your expectations? Do I write enough? Just don’t forget to answer this.’

Edith also passes on the East Ham gossip, including describing her day out at the local Seamen’s Orphanage Fete. 

The Merchant Seamen’s Orphanage. Courtesy of
childrenshomes.org.uk and Peter Higginbotham

She was probably attending because the Thompsons knew maritime life and may have been helped by charities since 1901 when Percy’s mariner father, Robert Conen Thompson, died leaving three orphans.  

Percy himself worked as a clerk for Commercial Road timber shipping agents Messrs Parker & Co. His sister Eliza worked for tea merchants. Brother Richard did accounts at a City paper merchants. 

(The under-funded Snaresbrook-based institution housed many child victims of P&O and British India Line shipping disasters, just as the Liverpool and Southampton seafarers’ orphanages were evidence of the shipping lines based there, such as Cunard and White Star respectively.  

Most of all Edith discusses novels with Freddy including Bella Donna, about a woman who slow-poisons her husband. (Edith had tried smashed lightbulb glass in Percy’s mashed potato – or was that just her fantasy?).

The 1911 film Bella Donna, based on the book that Edith 
discussed, as a model murder method, with Freddy far
away across the seas

Like so many millions of relatives of seafarers thinking ‘There but for the grace of God goes my man’ Edith feels alarm at the maritime fatalities that might befall him:‘Darlint I had a terrible shock when the Egypt went down Imagine what I felt can you?’

 (The Egypt was another P&O liner, but on the Tilbury-India route. It had sunk in just 20 minutes after fog caused a collision, causing some Asian and European crew to be lost).

TRACK N’TRACE

The extracts that follow show that the structure of Edith and Freddy’s lives was created by the ship’s predictable schedule in 1922. By then steam ship voyages were so reliable that you could set your clock by them. 

Hopeful emigrants went out. Refrigerated cargoes, such as meat, came back, along with emigrants who'd made good. 

On 28 January Edith writes ‘Darlingest boy, its Wednesday now, the last for posting to Marseilles.I’ll be thinking & thinking, wishing such a lot of things tomorrow – late – when I shall know you have arrived.

‘Darlint is my letter to Bombay awaiting you on arrival, or do you have to wait a week for it, I believe you do,’ she enquired on 15 February. 

Marseille docks, P&O vessel and mail sacks.
Courtesy of P&O Heritage

To Freddy in Marseilles on 6  March she rejoices : ‘I was pleased to get letters from you last Monday I hadn’t expected any – as I got that note – after the Port Said letter & thought it must have been posted at Aden. Darlint if you were 1 ½ hour out from Port Said how did you post it?’

 ‘Will you tell me how many letters you have got at Marseilles. Wed. the last day for posting was fearful here – gales and now storms, and I believe the next day no Channel boats ran at all. I hope nothing went astray. I wrote three letters and one greeting, posted separately ... Altho’ it’s Monday darlint, the mail from Marseilles is not yet in, I’m expecting it every moment, I wish it would hurry up and come.’ 

NEITHER FAST NOR FREE COMMUNICATIONS

Today’s e-correspondence is so virtually cost-free and instant that people contacting seafarers don’t usually have to think about communication methods in the way Edith did. 

For example, usually she put on five penny-worth of stamps.  But in Exhibit 17 she’s concerned: ‘I believe I insufficiently stamped the first Marseilles letter I sent. If I did darlint I [am] ever so sorry, I hate doing anything like that. You know don’t you.’

Long delivery delays brought worrying gaps, but also accumulations (which could impose oppressive duties on recipients).  You can see this in Edith’s letter to the Morea in Marseille in May:

‘By now darlint you will have heard from me several times. Yesterday [Sunday 14 May] you passed Suez and got my Port Said letters. I’m so sorry it’s a long time from Marseilles to Bombay, when you hear from me, but I can’t do anything to help it can I darlint? 

'You’ll be able to talk to me a long time this week to post at Marseilles because you’ll have all my letters to answer.’ 

(Courtesy P&O Heritage)

Infrequently cables are used instead of letters. She writes: About the Marconigram – do you mean one saying Yes or No, [that I have killed him?] because I shan’t send it darlint. I’m not going to try any more until you come back.’ 

Edith’s letter of 20 June reveals the classic obstacle to communication in the period: money. 

‘I have been looking at the mailcard and see you do not arrive in Australia until July 22nd – I’m so sorry – I wish I could afford to cable you a long long letter to somewhere before Sydney, or better still, to be able to phone to you and hear you say “Is that Peidi?”'

And the problem that besets seafarers’ digital communications today – signal range – beset Edith too. 

On Freddy’s 20th birthday she sends birthday greetings to Melbourne via Marconigram: ‘I sent you greetings by cable this time it was the only way I could celebrate darlint I wanted you to receive it on the exact day but I’m afraid you won’t it’s not my fault darlint its the fault of that ship of yours not being within radio range of either Aden or Bombay on the 27th [June].’

When autumn begins and Captain Garwood’s team is homeward bound again, on 21 September, Edith writes yet another date-aware letter:

 ‘I’ve not sent a wire to Plymouth to you ... I see you left Gibraltar on the 19th and perhaps you will get in Saturday morning – then I shall send you a wire to Tilbury to meet me in the afternoon – if it’s at all possible for you.’

DREAM ACHIEVED BUT...

Within ten days of landing back in England, on 3 October Freddy commits the murder of Percy Thompson that Edith had – sort of – longed for.  (People still argue that she had only been fantasising.) 

 The couple would exchange no more letters across the seas.  On 9 January 1923 Edith and Freddy were hanged, and then placed in separate graves. 

The cause celebre is the focus of books and films, including Another Life (2001) with Natasha Little playing an un-sultry Edith. Should the lovers have been hanged? Was justice miscarried?

Pola Negri, marketed as Hollywood’s most smouldering and exotic vamp, starred in Bella Donna three months later. Lookalike Edith would have been writing Freddy rapturous letters about it.

Until scrapped in 1930 the Morea kept ploughing from Tilbury to Australia, regular as clockwork.

 Outbound, Freddy’s former colleagues were busy with holidaying passengers using the summer season to explore beyond P&O’s mail routes. Increasingly P&O was marketing tours or broken journeys to passengers, while still sticking to the Mail schedules.

Stewards must have found passengers’ curiosity wearing: ‘Bywaters, your shipmate. What was he like, eh?’ 

But surely the jute sacks full of love letters to and from P&O crew were never again laden with murder plans. 

From ship’s steward to LGBT+ media activist: Mick Belsten

 

Mick Belsten (pictured far right) was a rare seafarer. Leaving the camp-ified liners, for two decades he helped shape the emerging out and proud LGBT+ culture on land.

If you watched episode 2 of It’s A Sin, Russell T Davies’ new TV series about gay culture and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, then you’ll have noticed the way gay magazines were crucial sources of alternative information. (See pic).Mick shaped that world. Indeed he could have been part of the production team that brought out the very magazines you saw on screen in this week’s programme.

In the 1950s, 60s, 70s and early 80s many seafarers, particularly stewards, enjoyed the exceptional ‘camp heavens’ on ships. Their history is recorded in Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor! https://tinyurl.com/Hello-Sailor-book. I know a closeted officer who lost his maritime job after a friend sent him Gay Times, which effectively outed him.

Mick probably gained his first experiences of unofficial queer solidarity, 24:7 fun, and relative freedom by being part of that maritime counter-culture. 

Such were merchant seamen's privileges that, when discussing the Gay Liberation Front and its informal successors, one seaman crowed to me ‘At sea we didn’t need liberation movements. We already were liberated.’

But Bristol-born activist Mick Belsten (1934-1990) wanted liberation to reach far wider, and permanently, everywhere.  

After being a steward on a gay-friendly P&O liner he came back from Honolulu, a 'graduate' of these queer universities afloat. And he metamorphosed into an LGBT+ activist, for example demonstrating against the notoriously hypocritical 1971 Festival of Light. (See pic at Trafalgar Square: Mick, right, seated, with arm upraised.)

From the 1970s Mick helped produce the Gay Liberation Front's influential journal Come Together. He managed Hammersmith’s path-breaking Incognito gay bookstore, at a time when police raids and censorious clampdowns were fruitlessly attempting to impede the free flow of LGBT+ cultural products.

Among the LGBT+ culture ‘architects’ Mick worked with were Alan Purnell and Alex McKenna. His multi-tasking helped create the emerging gay magazines such as Zipper, HIM Exclusive, Gay Times, Him Monthly, Mister, Vulcan, and Out.  

Expert on the gay pornography of the period, Paul R Deslandes (pictured) has summarised the significance of these innovative types of publication. With their pictures and experimental layouts they emphasised 

‘erotic pleasure, the articulation of a specifically gay identity and a public kind of “coming out”, entirely in keeping with the prevailing political ethos of the day... that [included] the provision of no-nonsense sexual education with a new kind of sex-positive and informed gay identity.’

Gay Times, 1983. Mick is far left, back row

Mick’s many ad hoc roles in these magazines - with their varying degrees of pornographic content - included compiling news from overseas and handling the small ads. 

Lonely-hearts-style classified ads may have been individuals' tiny expressions of privately-held desire. But, when published, these ads were also crucial building blocks that helped create a world where people could be honest about needs that had previously been stifled. 

For many isolated gays in remote places such adverts were evidences of the new openness, and of all that available to questors. The lines were, virtually, as liberating as shipboard life had been.

Mick typed up copy that countered the old homophobic  articles in mainstream papers.

Working – often precariously– in such media Mick was a key gatekeeper in what Dr Harry Cocks sees described as the radical focusing role of such as small ads. See https://www.amazon.co.uk/Classified-Secret-History-Personal-Column-ebook/dp/B0034FJGF8 

As a small-ad supremo - handling postal orders and trays of filing cards in meticulous sequence - Mick was in the position of ethnographer, as well as enabler in those analogue times. 

He didn’t leave records of his own subjective experiences shaping this brave new world. But from the bits I’ve pieced together I can see that Mick Belsten is an unsung hero of queer mobilities and of maritime history's impactful diversity. 

He’s the bridge between the hundreds of seafarers enjoying personal pleasure in exceptional places, as pioneers, and the millions on land who went on to shape an affirming new counter-culture for all.  

I found out about Mick too late to put him in our book and exhibition, Hello Sailor. But now, thanks to the collaboration of his friends and colleagues, I’m writing about him and giving talks about him. 

See Outing the Past’s list of available talks, Feb to Sept, 2021. (https://www.outingthepast.com/otp-2021-festival-gazette.) From March 2021 films of all talks will be available on YouTube. So keep looking at https://lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/

Footnote

Much gratitude to Mick's old friends and colleagues. This quest would not have been possible without them. 

Paul R Deslandes, ‘The cultural politics of gay pornography in the 1970s Britain, in Brian Lewis, ed, British queer history: New approaches and perspectives, Manchester University Press, 2013. https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1959166