Hello sailor!: the hidden history of gay life at sea.

Martin relates an anecdote that could have acted as a precursor to the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. His ship had docked in an unfamiliar Welsh port, not the most cosmopolitan of places. He and his friend, Gerty G-String, took a look around, realised that there was only one bar in the village, and decided to make the best of it. first of all, they spent some time getting ready for their night out. ‘Gerty used to wear a crushed velvet blue jacket and King Charles shirts, plus a full face of make-up. She also had masses of bleached blue hair. I was darker and smaller, and I’d got my eyes blue with eye shadow and back-combed hair.’
The two seafarers may have been the height of 1960s camp fashion, but small-town Wales had never seen the like before. As he tells it, it was a confrontation of butch versus femme, backward versus sophisticated. They sauntered into a pub which was full of big, butch Welsh miners – and were greeted with a stunned silence. ‘It looked as if we’d just come off a space ship. Everything just stopped.’ Martin went up to the bar and said to his friend, ‘What are you having, girl.’ The barmaid was so shocked that she was shaking as she poured their drinks. However, the pair simply stood their ground and gradually people’s conversations continued as normal. ‘You’d have thought the aliens had arrived in Wales that day,’ Martin laughs. ‘It was quite a hoot really.’

Source: Hello sailor!: the hidden history of gay life at sea by Paul Baker & Jo Stanley. Routledge, 2003

1960

A letter to The Spectator:

HOMOSEXUAL PROSECUTIONS

SIR, —Your correspondent, Mr. R. D. Reid, says that the Homosexual Law Reform Society ‘seems to have Persuaded many authorities . . . that it is not only cruel, but ridiculous to lock up homosexuals together in close confinement.’ This excellent body does not seem to have persuaded the authorities in -Glamorganshire, where two youths were convicted earlier this year of homosexual offences committed in a prison cell.

Source: The Spectator, 27 May 1960

1961

Caradog Prichard publishes his story, Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night), a tale of a young man’s growing-up and education in the slate fields of Bethesda, Caernarfonshire. The author mixes up “Laurie Lee type nostalgia with sexual and other violences, to describe mundane characters alongside Gwynedd transexuals, who also live in the village, and like their frocks.”

Em was always scrubbing the doorstep when the passed Mount Pleasant on our way to School in the morning, and then he’d go into the house with the bucket and small the door.
Why does he talk like a woman, d’you think? I said to Huw as we went by.
I don’t know, said Huw.
Nor me, neither.
Perhaps he really is a woman, said Moi.
Shut up, you fool, said Huw. He’d be a she, then.
They say he dresses up like a woman when he’s in the house on his own, said Moi, and puts curling pins in his hair and paints his face red and things like that.
No, who told you that? we both said together.
I heard Uncle Owen telling Man the night Em got sent home from the Quarry for crying and not being able to do his work. But Jesus, you’d never think he was a woman if you heard him swearing at his Mam.

1962

A letter to the South Wales Echo:

His courage.

I must admire Mr. Leo Abse (MP for Pontypool) for his courage in presenting a Bill to amend the laws relating to homosexuality. The victims of blackmail are their own executioners; they ruin not only their own lives but the lives of innocent people. A. Margaret Patten, Melrose Avenue, Penylan, Cardiff.

Source: South Wales Echo, 27 February 1962

1963

Men who relax in frillies.
Western Daily Press Reporter.
Tired businessmen may feel better after a hard day at the office if they go home and dress up in women’s clothes, said a psychiatrist yesterday.
The practice has a tranquilising effect on some men, it was not a sexual perversion said Dr. James Pearce. He told a conference of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association in London. Dr. Pearce, of Maudsley Hospital, London, related the case of a successful businessman who took work home, dressed up in women’s clothes and coped with the work more efficiently.
Such men were not homosexuals and could be cured of their transvestism, he said. They were given injections of the drug apomorphine and invited to continue the ritual they practised in their privacy of their homes. As the treatment progressed, they became nauseated by wearing women’s clothing.

Source: Western Daily Press, 1 May 1963

1965

A Canadian, LGBTQ+ romantic drama film, Winter Kept Us Warm debuted as the opening film of the Commonwealth Film Festival in Cardiff, Wales on September 27, 1965. The film’s gay subtext was carefully coded by David Secter, who wrote the film based on his own experience falling in love with a male fellow student, but feared that a more explicitly gay film would not attract an audience. Even some of the film’s cast have claimed in interviews that they did not know at the time that the film was actually about homosexuality.

Sarah Waters, a Welsh novelist is born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, on 21 July. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.

1967

Scottish-American actor & singer, John Barrowman is born. He played bisexual character Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood, filmed in Cardiff.