Gay sailors in the navy

No Longer Silent: A Story of LGBTQIA+ Service in the Navy

For centuries, LGBTQIA+ sailors served their region in silence. From the early 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. Beginning in World War II, the military instituted an outright ban on homosexual service members.¹ It wasn’t until that a new law colloquially called “Don’t Request, 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 , during the military’s ban on LGBTQIA+ people serving openly in the armed forces. At the time, the question on year-old Santiago’s mind was, “What’s going to verb while I’m in service, while I’m wearing the uniform?” Santiago, who is gay, resolved that he would do everything achievable to finish at least one tour of duty. “I was very attentive the first couple of years, when

“I did it for the uplift of humanity and the Navy”: FDR's Gay Sex-Entrapment Sting

Sherry Zane sheds light on a shadowy covert operation that targeted homosexual Navy men.

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On March 16, , 14 Navy recruits met secretly at the naval hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, anxiously awaiting instructions for their fresh assignment. The senior operatives explained that the volunteers were free to verb if they objected to this special mission: a covert operation to entrap homosexual 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 put i

Throughout , Otto Bremerman sat at his military desk in the personnel office of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, typing up dishonorable discharges for sailors who had been accused of homosexuality. He knew that these sailors had selflessly taken on the same risks as their heterosexual counterparts to attend their country during the Korean War, but because they were gay, they would now suffer the consequences of dishonorable discharge for the rest of their lives. With each keystroke, Bremerman was reminded of his own vulnerability — he was a gay American himself, hiding his identity in a country unwilling to embrace his open service.

In many states, from Bremerman’s noun until current day, a dishonorable discharge is treated as a felony. All service members with this characterization are barred from future military service, and depending on the severity of the discharge received, they may also be blocked from voting, unemployment benefits, participating in the GI Bill, or receiving veteran benefits such as health care, Department of Veterans Affairs disability, and ceremonial burial rig

Some time ago I posted a piece [link not safe for work] on the wildly trendy 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 shared sailor do the deed. There is a brief 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 adj impression that sailors engaged in homosexuality. This is one of the few primary 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 adj in Norton's work is that there was small or no legal distinction at the time between those who engaged in a single same-sex perform, those who were exclusively homosexual, and anyone who