Hello sailor!

An extraordinary, piquant and fun story...until now a lost moment in historyAmazing original photographs of the 'queens and butches' of the seaA vital addition to the understanding of gay and sea historyFor anyone interested in the secret and hidden groups of the pastFull of new material from interviews to anecdotes which opens up a new and rich world of toleranceWhen 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. Felicia Gordonis at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and technology.Paul Bakeris 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 Stanleyis 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 acclaimedBold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages(Rivers Oram Publishing 1999).