What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?
It must here be observed that sailors have been a perennial touchstone for the gay erotic imagination. They have taken the main stage in the works of gay American artists, such as Charles Demuth, and George Platt-Lynes, amongst many others. For gay men, the idea of hundreds of young men, in peak physical condition, crowded together on a ship for months with no female company available, is a loaded and very appealing one. Add to that the historically-held view that sailors are not as particular as their landlubber counterparts as to where they find sexual ease and the legend is complete.
Charles Demuth, Sailors Urinating, 1930
Sailors were also popular subject matter for Paul Cadmus, and he made a number of sprawling, kitsch paintings on the theme. Invariably, Cadmus’ salty sea dogs are drunken, horny lummoxes.
fascinated by the sailors, and I used to sit on a bench and watch them all the time... The uniforms were so tight and form-fitting that they were an inspiration. I was young enough to be propositioned by the sailors, who would offer to take me back to the boat, but I never went. They were too unattractive, or maybe I was too timid. I don’t know.
Cadmus’ work presented a homoerotic vision of the world during a period when it was otherwise virtually invisible within the public sphere of American painting, and ‘all but unspeakable within the official discourses of art criticism’. His paintings Shore Leave and The Fleet’s In present this homosexual subtext whilst embedding it within an acceptable heterosexual narrative. In exactly the same way, the television franchise, Sex and the City ,validates a gay schema within its putatively heterosexual world view. But, in both instances, this ‘barely occluded gay sensibility’, is a grotesque parody of hetero-‘normality’ and a heightened implication of its very opposite. The enormously successful US television show Sex and the City was created by two gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King. In an early review of the show, for The New Republic, Lee Siegel wrote that it was ‘the biggest hoax perpetrated on straight single women in the history of entertainment’. The show markets itself as a tale of single heterosexual women in search of love and relationships in the big city, but its subtext is indisputably homosexual and the women are presented as grotesque, hollow caricatures of gay stereotypes. It presents its gay storylines and themes by dressing them in heterosexual drag, thereby making them palatable to a straight audience. In this regard the show functions as a kind of diluted, heteronormative Queer As Folk. But, in so becoming, it has necessarily, and despite itself, adopted conservatism. David Grevin speaks of the ‘barely occluded gay sensibility of the show’, and he identifies its innate conservatism when he writes:
Sex and the City can only give vent to its gay ideas through a performative reimagining of heterosexual sex as queer intercourse, in that Samantha, most explicitly of all the women, acts, speaks and cavorts like a stereotypical gay man, her femaleness a safeguard against both homophobic retaliation and an explicit admission of a gay agenda...The female characters end up seeming like terrified decoys for a homophobic audience....’
This same disguised homosexual directive can be seen in the paintings, Shore Leave (1933) and The Fleet’s In (1934), by the gay American artist, Paul Cadmus. It is instructive that despite the space of seventy years that separates Sex and the City and these paintings the same subterfuge has been necessitated. In both we are presented with versions of acceptable heterosexual ‘normality’ but, in both, the central instruction behind the imagery is unacceptable homosexuality. In both cases, the gay audience intuits the switch and transposes its own experiences back onto the straight stand-ins.
In Shore Leave, the tubular, lumpenly phallic, figures are crowded into the foreground in a display of Bacchanalian exuberance. The sailors are presented as barely functional, drunken lugs, while the female figures appear as rather grotesque, avaricious harpies: in this, they resemble the female characters in Sex and the City.
Cadmus’ rather unconvincing women have ‘stuck on’ Michelangelesque breasts and, like drag queens, they have ‘taken on’ an idea of ‘femaleness’ with their clothing, like a costume. Likewise, in the television show, the women spend a great deal of energy shopping for designer clothes and shoes, as if these costumes emphasise their ‘femaleness’, making them more than the substitute, cardboard, gay stereotypes that they actually are. In both instances the women’s sexuality is shown as devouring, vampiric and self-serving: a kind of male nightmare of female sexuality which is at heart misogynistic.
In the painting, the drunken sailors, one unconscious beneath a bench, loll and sprawl about the city park in a tangle of legs and prominently bulging crotches and buttocks: an implied pleasure ground of phallic/anal accessibility. The sailors’ function is suggested purely as an erotic need to be assuaged. The positioning of the figures compels the viewer to take in the sailors’ groins and buttocks, reinforces the (homo)sexual functionality and reducing the purpose of the men to basic male erogenous zones. Within this gay male vision, the women exist as an incidental requirement to the primary male-ness of the situation. The camaraderie of the situation emphasises the idea of male/male relationships aboard ship, which is the artist’s masqueraded truth. In the foreground an empty whisky bottle reveals the source of the debauchery: a discarded banana skin underscores the phallic imperative of the picture. In the middle distance of the painting, depicted almost incidentally, is a sailor negotiating with a young blonde, besuited, man. And this carries the secret narrative of the entire painting: that of male sexuality, as seen through the experience of the gay male.
In The Fleet’s In painted in the following year, Cadmus dealt again with this theme. At eye-level, across the entire central line of the painting we are presented with an array of buttocks and male crotches. The denuded, foremost, tree, on the other side of the wall, continues this theme of anal/phallic focus, having both a phallic, truncated, branch, which it directs towards the faces of two sailor buddies, and an anal-like aperture, high on its trunk. In a sense this tree stands as the codified, symbolic, adaptation of the homoerotic possibility implicit in the rest of the painting. As in Shore Leave, the women have rather a drag queen look about them: and, tellingly, the two women in the picture who are, along with the men, presenting their buttocks to the viewer, are faceless, thereby not disrupting too much the homosexual leitmotif.
The painting was removed from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, where it was to be exhibited after an outraged admiral took offence to the picture. He claimed that the painting of drunken, cavorting, sailors brought the navy into disrepute. But perhaps his ire had more to do with the image of a cauliflower-eared tar accepting a cigarette offered by a fey young man across the unconscious, crotch-forward body of his friend. The young man’s sexuality is clearly indicated by Cadmus by the rings on his fingers, his carefully coiffed hair, and his red tie, which was a fashion item often worn by gay men at the time as a coded reference of their homosexuality.
Four years later Cadmus painted a third painting with the same theme, Sailors and Floosies. This picture was also taken off the wall ‘in the interest of national unity’.
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