Hello Sailor!: The hidden history of gay life at sea

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans.

Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and the pride of the British fleet. Hello Sailor! uniquely shows what it was like to be queer at sea at a time when land meant straightness.

ISBN-13: 9780582772144

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Publication Date: 03-07-2003

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

Felicia Gordon is at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and technology. Paul Baker is at Lancaster Univeristy. He is the world's leading writer on Polari, a secret form of language used by gay men, particularly gay sea-farers, in the 1950s and a 1960s. Jo Stanley is known world wide as one of the leading writers on women/gender and the sea, She writes fiction and non-fiction and is most famous for her acclaimed " Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages " (Rivers Oram Publishing 1999).

Table of Contents

intro1 Sailor Jack: the Other Side; Chapter 1 When Queer was Covert; Chapter 2 A Place of Freedom; Chapter 3 Speaking Gay Secrets; Chapter 4 Sea Wives and Meat Racks; Chapter 5 Sequins, Satin and Stilettos; Chapter 6 Ho Land! Ho Freedom!; Chapter 7 Part of a Team; Chapter 8 Swallowing the Anchor; Chapter 9 Taking Stock of Gay Heaven;