The heroic ideal of the sailor is indelible. In the collective imagination, sailors are larger than life. They’re crisp and vigorous. They fire torpedoes and sing as they slice through the water. Yet, when they’re off-duty—according to stereotype—they go wild. In Paul Cadmus’s bacchanalian paintings Shore Leave (1933) and The Fleet’s In! (1934), for example, heterosexual and homosexual passion is on display. After long days of discipline and being crammed in a cabin, Cadmus’s fictionalized sailors are clearly ready to cut loose.
From 1919 to 1920, just after World War I, the United States set about combatting perceived enemies within, and the Navy ran a sting operation targeting queer enlisted men and those in their circles in the port town of Newport, Rhode Island. In an incident that reflected a popular exclusionary mindset, more than three dozen sailors voluntarily honey trapped and seduced their peers and other civilians. In the same period, the Navy produced musicals with all-male casts where men dressed up to play women—a low-humor phenomenon in which men dressed as women were sometimes punch lines. This drag was not the drag of empowerment advocating for gender fluidity we know today. Though the early-twentieth-century drag offered some productive confusion, it likely also affirmed sexism and contributed to homophobia.
Enter Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida, Rhode Island artists and co-editors of Headmaster, a journal they describe as “the art magazine for man-lovers.” Their new hour-long three-channel video, Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza, screened on a loop this fall at one of its period filming locations in Newport. More provocation than essay film or documentary, the piece switches between evocations of the Newport sailor entrapments and recreations of the historical Navy-made musical The Strange Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk: A Fairy Extravaganza, which toured the area in 1919. Walking in at the middle of Scandalous Conduct, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled across Warhol screen tests from the 1960s intercut with scenes from W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comedic operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), but the film’s mood is ultimately more melancholy. It is a form of cultural restitution to unearth the Navy’s actions, bring the 1919 incident back for consideration, and mix artifacts of popular theater and police action. The theater scenes are better performed than the sailor reenactments, which at times feel stilted, but the piece raises ideas worth considering. Lawrence and Tranchida’s playful and speculative approach to history is a distinctly queer tactic, and although they don’t reference Cadmus’s paintings directly, the sexualized sailor is their focus.
In one scene, three sailors stare silently at the camera. They all wear the same purple bruise-colored lipstick. Later, a waiter suggestively polishes a coffee cup with a towel before two teams of sailors—almost interchangeable, like classmates, chorus lines, or chess pieces—engage in a slow, serious tug-of-war. Any of these handsome, youthful characters could be spies, composing damning reports in their heads, as emphasized by the soundtrack of clinical recountings. Sex acts and the tab for a shared meal are described with the same dispassionate precision. We hear about men meeting, going on dates, walking around the park, and ending up back at a YMCA room where they pull off each other’s clothes, negotiate the terms of the hook-up, and talk about going to see a show. Because of the soundtrack and the acting, these scenes are not erotic. In them, sex is a specimen under the microscope, bureaucratic evidence, part of a calculation, not an explicitly carnal or romantic experience. In order to criminalize sex, the Navy, in its reporting, and Lawrence and Tranchida in their recreation, stripped it of genuine passion. Yet, where arousal exists in the imagination, desexualized sex still leaves room for eroticism, unusual as it might be in this case. It is particularly thought-provoking to guess at the positionality of the spy who decided to “play gay” with an agenda.
Particularly looking to the past, as we do through Scandalous Conduct, we make uneasy equivalences between various drags—military drag, theatrical drag, historical drag. Over the course of the hour-long film, what becomes productive is puzzling out the equations, the math. Sailor equals sailor. The one who attempts to enforce an ideal and the one who cuts loose are two sides of the same coin, brothers or twins. The sailor icon is impossible. Like all brands, it requires the worst kind of protection. Like all identities, it is a fight. And underneath it, all around it, there’s fear, hypocrisy, duplicity, and uncertainty.
Because popular songs were often incorporated into early-twentieth-century musicals, the Billie Eilish song “bury a friend” (2019) is included as a surprise period costume drag number in the second half of Scandalous Conduct. The lyrics take on new meaning in the film. For Eilish, the song seems to be a conversation with her bad side, with the monster under her bed. But, for Lawrence and Tranchida, the conversation could be twisted pillow talk or the inner turmoil of betrayer and betrayed. Eilish’s questions become retrospective questions for 1919 and re-dramatized for us watching:
What do you want from me? Why don’t you run from me?
What are you wondering? What do you know?
Why aren’t you scared of me? Why do you care for me?
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?
Where do we locate the desire of the sailor spy? What can we say about that identity, about that pleasure? Did these sailors ever lose themselves and slide into caring for their targets? Or are they just following orders, sailors destroying other sailors like cannibals, taking shots at their queer mirror reflections? Who are the good sailors and who are the bad sailors? It depends on who’s asking and when. Perhaps like Olympic athletes under various flags, the iconic good sailor is a kind of public relations agent, a remarkable ambassador always more valued for how they balance and climb than who they might be and what they do on leave. In that sense, they are like politicians performing, and as such, maybe out of necessity, they have to stick to their script when they’re in the spotlight. But good is never far from bad. Good guys—like our entrapped sailors in this case—unfortunately are often well policed by bad guys, meddlers, and phonies, by their weak matches, their lesser twins who are actually the ones way out of line.
Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza is on view September 12–October 6, 2024, at Great Friends Meeting House in Newport, Rhode Island.
