All the nice boys love a sailor, soldier, and so on

Happy Armed Forces Day!

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In the Navy

You couldn't make it up...

Forget Britain’s Trident, or Israel’s Iron Dome – peace-loving Sweden has come up with a much more innovative, and inclusive, system of defence.

The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) is to deal with encroaching Russian submarines in Swedish waters with a device emitting anti-homophobia Morse code.

The device – officially titled The Singing Sailor Underwater Defence System, but nicknamed the “gay sailor” – is a “subsurface sonar system”, which sends out the message: “This way if you are gay” in an attempt to deter apparently homophobic Russians.

Russia has come under fire since the Putin administration introduced homophobic laws in 2013 banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations”, in a climate of increasing intolerance towards its LGBT population.

The design of the device features a neon, flashing sign of a dancing sailor, naked but for a cap and small white briefs, surrounded by hearts.

“Welcome to Sweden: Gay since 1944” is written in English and Russian, in a reference to the year of decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Scandinavian nation.

Sweden has cut its military budget in recent years but announced in March it would increase spending, as a result of alleged Cold War-style Russian aggression.

An operation involving helicopters, minesweepers and 200 troops was launched last October to search for a suspected rogue Russian submarine in Swedish waters.

Sweden is currently not a member of Nato. And thanks to the gay sailor defence system, it may never have to be.

[Source: The Guardian]

Thought for the day

Meanwhile, below decks...

Who, me?!


You wanna do what?!"


OK - let's bounce!"

It's the weekend.

Go on.

Enjoy it!

Transvestites in the trenches with ball gowns in their backpacks

Esteemed author Philip Hoare, writing in today's Guardian, has uncovered some of the sleaze of Soho during the First World War, a time when decadence still prevailed despite the horrors of the slaughter:

...At the most infamous club, the Cave of the Golden Calf in Heddon Street (a back street that would later feature on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust cover), futurist poets in goatee beards recited avant garde verse, and guests were greeted by a phallic sculpture designed by Eric Gill, to which they bowed in mock idolatry. When Wilfred Owen was on leave in London, he noted that the upper floor of the Piccadilly café in which he sipped tea contained an opium den.

Nearby, in Half Moon Street, Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s first lover and his literary executor, painted his rooms gold in protest at the war. In the wake of Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency, the war itself presented a new challenge for gay men; Ronald Firbank called it “that awful persecution”. But as the first modern, industrial conflict overturned class and gender barriers, it also opened up the possibility for new sexual identities – even in the mud and mire of the western front.

By advertising in the international press after the war, asking people to send him accounts of their sexual experiences during the conflict, renowned German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld (who features in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin writing) discovered there were transvestites in the trenches with ball gowns in their backpacks. In the archives of the Imperial War Museum, I discovered other personal diaries that detailed same sex behaviour between serving soldiers. Hirschfeld also found accounts of drug clubs, and nudist clubs in London, Paris and Berlin. Even in suburban Clapham, a teenage Noel Coward and Esmee Wynne, his companion/muse, wore “futurist pyjamas”, and swapped clothes to run riot, in drag, in the West End.

How camp!

A whole new perspective on what is nostalgically perceived as a grim, stolidly patriotic and puritanical era, methinks.