THE ONLY GAY ON THE SHIP By Derrick Gerety
Playboy magazine was certainly part of my liberation and I’m definitely one of those who can say that they read it just for the articles! And there was the occasional short story by Sean O’Faolain. My first trip was from Dublin to New York, which was pretty cool for a first tripper and walking the streets of New York in late summer was intoxicating. Eating pizza slices from street vendors and just smelling the atmosphere, and even though the Stonewall Riots and Woodstock were only a few months away in 1969, it was like there was electricity in the air. Also in those days there was somewhat of a debate around what percentage of the population was actually gay. I had heard of a book “One In Twenty” by Bryan Magee, published in 1966 and he suggested that 5% of the population was gay, one in twenty. I was always good at maths so I reckoned, if there are 40 men on this ship and I’m one gay, there just might be another. I was thrilled until I realised it might just be the gnarly old bosun and I wasn’t particularly into gnarly old bosuns!
Irish Shipping Ltd and other Irish shipping companies operate mainly under British maritime rules. In 1967 homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, but specifically excluded the Armed Forces and the Merchant Navy. The reason was to protect junior ranks from being taken advantage of by senior ranks. So homosexuality aboard ship was illegal. I was 18 years old in 1968 when I joined my first ship in the Alexander Basin in Dublin. It was the Irish Spruce, a steam turbine ship and one of the most beautiful ships I’d ever seen. It was a bit like love at first sight. I was a marine engineer cadet and had already spent 3 years in the Crawford Tech in Cork as part of my training and joining my first ship was a great adventure.
I’d known I was gay since I was a small child so I had no issues around sexual identity. I liked boys, knew it, but had no idea how to go about doing anything about it. It was the 60’s and learning about myself consisted mainly of going to the ‘h’ for homosexuality in the index of a book in a bookshop and on finding a reference probably going bright red because I felt everyone was looking over my shoulder. And if you did find the occasional nugget, it was frequently negative and depressing. Most information around homosexuality was formal, academic and not at all engaging. And fear played a huge part, the fear of being found out. It took over 10 years after the publication of The Wolfenden Report in 1957 for the UK to decriminalise homosexuality. If you heard or read anything about homosexuality, it was invariably about a scandal. It wasn’t cool to be gay. And so to arrive into the environs of a ship and find lots of magazines with articles about sex and sexuality in general was an eye opener and it became part of my education as a young gay man.
So getting used to living on a ship was quite interesting, a bit like monasticism, except wearing a uniform instead of a habit, drinking beer instead of praying. Working 4 hours on and 8 off. Just getting to know other guys and getting to know myself. And so for a week or two we steamed along the east coast of the US discharging and loading cargo. Down from New York, to Philadelphia, Baltimore and on down to Charleston and discovering fire flies in Savannah. And then 7 days steaming back across the North Atlantic to Liverpool, Manchester and Dublin, the exhilaration of seeing the light from the Mizen, experiencing what old timers call ‘the channels’ that stomach churning thrill of coming home. I spent the next 8 months on the Spruce. It was a wonderful time and a great first trip to sea. I can definitely say I fell in love with the Irish Spruce, but I can never be entirely sure if I was the only gay on the ship.
I never did find that other one.
www.corkpride.com
#CorkPride2021
98
99
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker