Sailor gay
Hello, Sailor!
"You advance up on the poop deck often?"
It's a lonely existence in the Navy. Outside prison or single-gender schools, probably the most well-known version of Situational Sexuality is in the naval service. For centuries, men would be left alone together on ships for weeks on endnote women weren't allowed to help in the Navy until the after time 20th century, and at least in the US, weren't allowed to assist in every position as the men (like in submarines) until the 2010s. Sexual needs and desires were still present, and that meant a lot of men turned to one another for comfort. This has led to sailors (or seamen of any stripe) becoming sex symbols among gay men. Definitely Truth in Television on occasion, and in fiction, a common subtrope of the Manly Gay and Vertical Gay types. Adorable much Older Than Steam.
Since homosexuality was stigmatized (and even illegal) until
AskUs: What is the origin of the “gay sailor” stereotype?
So one of our readers asked us this question the other day: Out of the 4 branches of the military, why does Navy get portrayed as “Gay” in movies and just in general as a joke?
ANSWER
It pre-dates the United States and was present in the English Royal Navy as well. The actually reason is very basic . Sailors were sometimes, and more often reputed, to be prison gay. That is they were removed from an environment with large numbers of women for months, sometimes years, at a time and turned to alternative sexual practices. A captain or officer might have a wife aboard a ship but everyone else was pretty much on their own (you can detect these women by looking at the quartermasters records and seeing who was drawing double rations).
Sodomy if found out was generally punishable with flogging or death.
I don’t know too many books/articles on this topic exclusively but it is touched on in a number of books on the larger topic of sailors lives. Rediker touches on it in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Joe Flatman definitely addresses it in Cultural biographies, cognitive landscapes and dirty ol
Sweden: 'Gay sailor' sign to ward off foreign submarines
A Swedish peace group has come up with an unusual way of trying to repel Russian submarines.
The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) says it has installed an underwater "defence system" known as the Singing Sailor, external in the waters off Stockholm. Described as a subsurface sonar system, the installation features the words "Welcome to Sweden" in Russian, and emits the phrase "this way if you are gay" in Morse code. The animated neon sign features a man clad in pale underpants and a sailor hat, gyrating his hips as pink hearts flash behind him. It seems the group is playing on the rise in homophobia in Russia since the adoption of a law banning "gay propaganda" in 2013.
But the culture, which was formed in 1883, says the write is also a way to try to persuade the Swedish authorities to rethink using military means for national security. In October, Sweden launched a huge military operation to search its waters for a suspected Russian submarine, and the government recently announced a massive multiply in military spending, external. "If military actions
The male-presenting sailor occupies a unique place in the gender non-conforming visual art canon. Instantly recognisable in mass media, the romance or homoerotism of the mariner sits with us in pop identity today. We repeatedly see the figure of the male sailor, in all its idealised glamour in art history, linked to gender non-conforming identity. How has art contributed to the gay male mythology of the sailor? Is queering the male sailor empowering and thrilling, or increasingly a redundant stereotype?
Where does the queer link come from? Henry Marvell Carr at the National Maritime Museum models the archetype of the idealised male sailor for us. An Ordinary Telegraphist, painted in around 1944, taps into the essence of the sailor as iconic. The figure of the sitter Maurice Alan Easton radiates male glamour. Idealised, vigorous, masculine, noble, brave, disciplined, proficient , virtuous, protective, handsome, strong – Maurice embodies a litany of symbolic or fantasy qualities we project onto his physicality.
The combination of what the uniform represents and the male beauty here is palpable. Contrived to be as appealing as feasible, Maurice is transformed from the civilian life he formerly occupied as a rai