Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail

In its voracious hunger to fill its decks and spars with the bodies of strong young sailors, the nineteenth century US Navy and the commercial maritime industry welcomed eccentrics, criminals, outcasts and misfits into a community of the marginalized, one that held very different values and expectations than the towns and villages from which the young men fled, a community that offered a tentative refuge to men who were sexually attracted to other men.

Drawing from biographies and autobiographies, diaries, newspapers, government reports, Congressional hearings, religious tracts, pornography, ships’ logs, medical treatises, maritime fiction, court-martial reports, personal letters and business correspondence, Benemann provides an in-depth examination of nineteenth century homosexual culture as it developed at sea and in America’s port cities.