Gay navy sex
Some time ago I posted a piece [link not safe for work] on the wildly widespread eighteenth century erotic novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. In that novel, the author John Cleland wrote an explicit scene were Fanny and a usual sailor do the deed. There is a little moment of alarm on Fanny's part when he
was not going by the right door, and knocking desperately at the wrong one, I told him of it:—'Pooh!' says he, 'my dear, any port in a storm.'[1]By referencing the nearly accidental act of 'sodomy,' Cleland taps into the trendy impression that sailors engaged in homosexuality. This is one of the few main sources that directly addresses this impression.
Rictor Norton, at his website Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England, has collected an remarkable number of primary sources, though few reference sailors. Something that becomes dispel in Norton's work is that there was petty or no legal distinction at the time between those who engaged in a single same-sex behave , those who were exclusively homosexual, and anyone who fell in between.
Indeed, as many historians have pointed out, the sexual spectrum is difficult
No Longer Silent: A Story of LGBTQIA+ Service in the Navy
For centuries, LGBTQIA+ sailors served their country in silence. From the initial days of Continental Navy, through USS Constitution’s active sailing years, and into the 20th century, homosexuality was a crime subject to punishment by court martial, usually resulting in discharge. Origin in World War II, the military instituted an outright ban on lesbian service members.1 It wasn’t until 1993 that a recent law colloquially called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) took effect, theoretically lifting the ban by suspending questions and discussions among military personnel about sexual orientation.2
Brooklyn native Robert Santiago joined the U.S. Navy in 1988, during the military’s ban on LGBTQIA+ people serving openly in the armed forces. At the time, the question on 17-year-old Santiago’s mind was, “What’s going to happen while I’m in service, while I’m wearing the uniform?” Santiago, who is gay, resolved that he would do everything workable to finish at least one tour of duty. “I was very diligent the first couple of years, when I was onboard the USS Guam,” he recalled in an oral history interview with the USS Con
'I was dismissed from the Navy for being gay'
A review into the impact of a ban on LGBT people serving in the military is to be carried out, more than 20 years after the rule was changed.
One former Royal Navy medic who was dismissed from the military for being same-sex attracted in 1982 told BBC Radio's Great Morning Scotland that the experience left him suicidal.
Chris Ferguson, from Edinburgh, said LGBT servicemen and women were treated "disgracefully", and has called for them to accept reparations.
He said up until 1995, "we had lgbtq+ men in prison for being gay".
Chris, now 61, had been in the navy as a medic for three years, and was studying with the army as well, when he was told the special investigation branch "were coming to investigate me".
"I knew immediately what it was - it was terrifying," he said.
He said they searched his possessions and took him to a detention centre where he was "interrogated for several days, asked the most personal questions" about his sex life.
"I was only 22 at the time. I only joined at 19, when I didn't know what being gay was
“I did it for the uplift of humanity and the Navy”: FDR's Gay Sex-Entrapment Sting
Sherry Zane sheds light on a dim covert operation that targeted gay Navy men.
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On March 16, 1919, 14 Navy recruits met secretly at the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, anxiously awaiting instructions for their brand-new assignment. The senior operatives explained that the volunteers were free to leave if they objected to this special mission: a covert operation to entrap lesbian men under the authority of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
By the end of the sting, investigators had apprehended more than 20 accused sailors and imprisoned them aboard a broken-down ship in Newport harbor. Anxious and afraid, the suspects remained in solitary confinement for nearly four months before they were officially charged with sodomy and “scandalous conduct.” The incident also foreshadowed laws and policies that the future President Roosevelt would set in place.
In this episode of the MIT Press podcast, podcaster Chris Gondek talks to Sher