In the Navy, or,

"All We Want Is a Few Good Men"

"Homosexuality" also received a lot of representation at the beginning of the century. One specific example found its way into the hands of George Chauncey. His re-working of the 1920's naval inquiry into homosexual activity in Newport, Rhode Island, presents us with a beautiful introduction to co-existing, competing discourses of sexuality. An analysis of these discourses reveals several key terms that, not surprisingly, tie into modern representations of the gay male body. Indeed, the discourses that rocked Newport in the twenties continue to influence us today.

The distinguishing feature of Chauncey's survey of the trials is his finding that "a multiplicity of sexual discourses co-existed at a single moment in the civilian and naval seaport communities." (1993, 83. There is also a version of his text in Hidden From History, which contains more primary source material.) These discourses used very specific gender- and class-laden terms to position sexuality. To approach these discourses, Chauncey makes great use of the social categories employed by the participants in the trial and the community at large. I want to follow his approach, focusing on the way each of these categories is defined, and who is defining them.

The "gang" is perhaps the most colorful group in this history. Chauncey identifies them as sailors, members of the navy, who identified themselves as sexually different from the "straight" world. (74) They could be divided into two groups, differentiated sharply along gender and sexual lines. Sexually, the differentiation is somewhat similar to our current usage of top and bottom to refer to the penetrating and penetrated partners. The gender differentiation was mapped along this division of sexual roles, such that the top was masculine, and the bottom was feminine.

The core of the gang conformed to the feminized, sexualy receptive role of the dyad. These people labeled themselves, and were labeled by others as "'queer' on the basis of their effeminate gender behavior." Other names for this group refered to the sexual activities they engaged in: "fairies," "cocksuckers," "pogues," or people one could "brown," and "two-way artists." Another feature that distinguished this group along gender lines was drag. Many were known only by their "ladies' names." (77)

The remainder of the gang were "husbands"; these men did not label themselves as "queer," yet they had long-term sexual and romantic relationships with men. Chauncey notes this caused some ambiguities: "Despite the uncertain definition of their sexual identity, however, most observers recognized these men as regular - if relatively marginal - members of the gang." The ambiguity here is not about the husbands' (insertive) sexual action, but about their gender role. This can be seen by the fact that they were members of the gang on the basis of their relation to the other members. (78)

Within the gang, these gender and sexual divisions were strict. (They are, in effect, hegemonic terms, much like the structured and structuring gay male narrative of porn.) The story Chauncey relates of Hoage makes the point succinctly. He was identified as a fairy, and from this should have been expected to maintain the feminine receptive role. However, "he was also reported surreptitiously to have tried to "brown" another member of the gang." (79) That this story was reported "surreptitiously" speaks volumes; if the act were not against some expectation, there would be no reason for it to be communicated as gossip.

Turning now to the navy, we can see that their objection was to a specific part of the gang, those identified as "queer," and not the "husbands". The navy inquiry followed these lines of reason: "it was common knowledge that if a man was walking along the street in an effeminate manner, with his lips rouged, his face powdered, and his eye-brows pencilled, that in the majority of cases you could form a pretty good opinion of what kind of man he was . . . 'fairy.'" (77) The navy was after people who were not "real" men: "Perverts were men who behaved like women." (81) That is, male performance of feminine gender was not just the indicator of the objectionable sexual activity, it was also part of the crime. The only excuseable case was stage drag, where the stage framed and contained the performance as illusion. (76)

As a social category, the decoys sent out by the navy reinforce the sense that gender deviance was also the crime; one decoy explicitly looked for effeminacy as a cue for perversion. (77) The decoys were seen as straight, both by themselves and by the naval commission. (cf. 83-85) This assumption was grounded in the way that sexual roles were yoked to gender roles, and hence sexuality. That is to say, it was assumed that decoys would always take the role equivalent to "trade" - men the gang defined as not of the gang, but who would still accept sexual advances in any form, so long as they remained masculine and insertive. Interestingly, the straight identity of the decoys was subject to rupture in legal inquiry. Not only was it suggested that the decoys had personal, licentious reasons for volunteering, it was also pointed out that some decoys initiated sexual actions. (86)

The discourse of sexuality current in the navy - which contained the social categories of the decoys, the investigators, and the gang of queers and husbands - ran heavily on gender lines. The perversion in the navy's eyes was that a man should play the woman's part; as long as a man's sexual action was insertive, he maintained a straight identity. The social exhibition of gender deviance outside of sexual action was seen not only as the cue to the sexual perversion, but also became part of the crime itself once yoked to sexual action. The queers of the gang followed similar understandings of deviance as linked to gendered behavior, ranging from social drag to physical sexual roles.

Priests saw themselves in terms very different from the navy's. Their position is revealed by the defenses they chose to counter the navy's accusations. When presented with the charge of effeminate behavior and sexual perversion, one witness pointed out the crux of the disagreement between the priests and the navy: "I don't know whether you would call it abnormal. He was a minister." (88) The charge of effeminacy, of "abnormal" behavior, was thought to be refutable by the nature of the job. As comforters and healers, priests validated their bonds to men through ways that, in comparison to the martial and working-class masculinity of the navy, might seem feminine. Chauncey places their defense against the charge of effeminacy in their profession and their class status.

The priests defense against the attack of sexual perversion was denial of actual sexual contact. The clearest example of this defense was Kent's assertion that "he had broken off relationships . . . when he realized that the decoys wanted sexual contact." (91) He could justify his ministering (effeminate social behavior) by retracting it when his sexual purity might be infringed.

Thus the priests' discourse of sexuality made gender irrelevant in two ways. First they questioned the legitimacy of gendered behavior as an indicator of sexual perversion. Second, they classified all same-sex contact as a sin, in fact, as the sin. In their eyes, then, not only were the queers, the fairies, and the pogues scarred by their sexual sin (not, we note, for dressing in drag or taking fabulous names), but also scarred were the husbands, the decoys, and the trade. To the priests, homosexuality hinged on actual sexual behavior, not gender.

The terms of discourse shared between these two understandings of sexuality are gender and class. In many respects, Chauncey presents us with the formula of navy:working-class::priesthood:upper-class. (cf. 87-8) The gender corrolary to this formula is that upper-class masculinities, by drawing on different power structures to define their masculinity, are seen as feminized by those invested in working-class masculinities. (This argument of class-linked masculinities is available in many places. See Kwoleck-Folland (1991) and Mary Ann Clawson's Constructing Brotherhood for examples of how non-working-class men around the time of the Newport trials might have seen their masculinity.) Thus, by linking gender identities to both sexual and class-linked professional identities, these two discourses found themselves at odds over the representation of sexual identity and perversion. That is to say, the upper-class priesthood is a feminized profession, much as the working-class corps of sailors in the navy are in a masculinized profession. The naval inquest equated an immoral sexual identity to deviance from a working-class performance of masculinity, and inadvertently tagged an upper-class gender performance as sexual deviance.

Interestingly, these were not the only discourses available to understand sexuality at the time. Chauncey takes great pains to point out that a medical discourse had been available for forty years which placed homosexuality, not as a pushishable crime or as a sin to which all were susceptible, but as congenital to the person (a relatively more positive discourse, eventhough it recommends medical treatment as if for a birth defect). (94 ff.) The almost complete absence of the medical discourse from the trial documentation, by demonstrating that an available perspective was voluntarily neglected, points strongly towards the constructed nature of the arguments in play.

The cameo appearances of this discourse are more revealing than its absences, however. As a generalization, Chauncey points out that the medical discourse was limited to the medical and legal professions - intellectual, upper-class circles relatively insulated to the working-class. Even among the subjects of medical discourse, terms like "invert" did not carry specifically medical connotations, but seemed to be common cultural currency, readily exchangeable for "queer." (95) In other words, "queers" already had a language to describe themselves, and did not need to appropriate medical meanings; Chauncey hints at this by describing the medical discourse as "trying to describe, classify and explain a pre-existing sexual underground whose outlines they only vaguely perceived." (96) Further, when the medical discourse was tapped by the navy, it was consistently in terms of self-defense. Chauncey notes that Dr. Hudson, a doctor who was also supervised the decoys, engaged the medical material "only after he became concerned that the decoys might be held legally culpable for their homosexual activity." (95) It would seem the navy used the medical discourse to protect the decoys from the priests' attack on their sexual integrity. (What is intriguing here is that Chauncey makes no mention of the priesthood's position on the medical discourse of homosexuality. One might assume that positioning same-sex contact as the abomination would preclude using an argument which allows homosexual desire to be curable. Still, it would be interesting to know.)

Hence, by looking at who speaks about whom, and what they say, we can see that representing sexuality is no simple matter. Rather, it is spoken of through many different terms, in this case a complex of classed gender roles. In this history of discourse, two very different notions of what constituted sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, dominated in Newport, even when more discourses were available. In the next section, I carry this sense of the complexity of discourse back into a reading of the iconography of porn.


Return to Chapter One: Discourse and Image

Continue to Chapter Three: Reading the Gay Male Body

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This page last updated November 11, 1996.