Homosexuality in the Royal Navy

[Mark Arbour]

In 1976, Arthur Gilbert published a paper titled"Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861." Gilbert spent much time focusing on how the attitude toward homosexuality both ashore and at sea softened and hardened over the years, depending on the various challenges Britain faced. Putting that aside, Gilbert showed that besides desertion, buggery was the crime that was most often punished by execution. Gilbert would argue indirectly that it was a rare event (buggery), and when discovered, it was punished severely. From his article:

 

It is impossible to judge the incidence of buggery in the military in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No doubt some military officers simply

looked the other way when evidence of sodomy was presented to them, and it is

certain that the rank and file in some army units and on shipboard, knowing that

conviction might mean death for the offenders, never reported known cases. We

know that on occasion, the captain of a ship, faced with "suspicious behavior"

on the part of a member of his crew, might simply put the man ashore at a

convenient port of call. In other words, he got rid of the problem by the

eighteenth century equivalent of an administrative discharge.

It is also clear that many morals" crimes"w ere arbitrarily punished by ship's

captains without a formal trial. In the Logbook of the Surveillance in the spring

of 1806, Commander John Bligh notes that he punished James Jones "with 18

lashes for uncleanliness" on March 17 and on April 21 again "punished James

Jones (seaman) with 24 lashes "for the same offence. Since "uncleanliness "was

never precisely defined, it is evident that captains, if they desired to avoid the

more severe punishments meted out by general courts martial, had informal

alternatives when dealing with homosexuality.

As in later times, homosexuality was not discussed openly in naval circles. It

was and remains the "underground" crime par excellence. In one of the few

written references in the navy, unfortunately from a later period, a British

officer reported:

 

I have been stationed, as you know, in two or three ships and I think they have been

thoroughly representative of the best sort of British Seamen. On the D-, homosexuality

was rife, and one could see with his own eyes how it was going on between

officers. I have been told that in some services (the Austrian and French, for

instance), nobody ever remarks about it, taking such a thing as a natural proceeding:

that may be so or not; but in any case, nobody was "shocked" on board either the

A- or the B-. There were half a dozen ties that we knew about.

On buggery in particular he wrote, "To my knowledge, sodomy is a regular thing

on ships that go on long cruises. In the warships, I would say that the sailor

preferred it."

I'm not sure his data support that conclusion. I'm not sure there is data to support that conclusion. Cecil Adams wrote a derivative article on the topic, which is interesting.

 

I'm wondering if buggery wasn't much more widespread than we would otherwise believe. It seems to me that with social crimes like this, the punishments often get severe when things get out of hand. It would be possible that when it became a "problem", the Admiralty would crack down hard, just to make an example pour encourager les autres.

[Tiger]

Mark, it's kind of like in prison, only more extreme. In prison, it is possible (and this is rare) to get pussy from a CO or a prison nurse or whatever. On a naval ship back then there wasn't any pussy at all unless they were transporting women. Still even then, it's unlikely that much of the crew (if at all) was getting a piece. Also, I think that the navy was enticing to gay/bi men back then just as it is now.

Edited May 3, 2011 by Tiger

[sandboy]

I notice the topic starter using the word homosexuality whereas the quote says buggery. The words are not synonymous.

 

Buggery is purely an act, a proscribed one. They had no idea what homosexuality was in those days.

[West Coast Dude]

I am just reading your story Bridgemont, I really like it. I just wanted to suggest that maybe you should put it in a thing about unsafe sex, since there's a lot of it in there. Obviously they didn't have condoms back then...but now we do

[Mark Arbour]

I am just reading your story Bridgemont, I really like it. I just wanted to suggest that maybe you should put it in a thing about unsafe sex, since there's a lot of it in there. Obviously they didn't have condoms back then...but now we do

 

I think that would be completely anachronistic. They actually did have condoms back in those days, they just weren't very popular and weren't widely used. They didn't worry about "safe sex" because they had no idea what that meant. The big diseases were gonorrhea and syphilis. Many men thought that if you got those, you could get rid of it by having sex with a "clean" person. They didn't even understand the concept of germs and infections back then, and thought of them as "evil humors." I think it's interesting to note how different things were mere 200 years ago from a medical perspective.

 

Personally, I don't think that safe sex comments need to be everywhere, but that's because I think the problems people who read this story will face are not a lack of knowledge about the dangers of unprotected sex, but a behavioral problem in that they know they shouldn't but they do it anyway. I'm no one's moral police (and if the thought of that doesn't make you laugh your ass off...me as the moral police..I don't know what will).

 

I notice the topic starter using the word homosexuality whereas the quote says buggery. The words are not synonymous.

 

Buggery is purely an act, a proscribed one. They had no idea what homosexuality was in those days.

 

Good point.