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Start giftingUnruly Desires
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Learn moreIn its voracious hunger to fill its decks and spars with the bodies of strong young sailors, the nineteenth century US Navy and the commercial maritime industry welcomed eccentrics, criminals, outcasts, and misfits into a community of the marginalized, one that held very different values and expectations than the towns and villages from which the young men fled, a community that offered a tentative refuge to men who were sexually attracted to other men.
Drawing from biographies and autobiographies, diaries, newspapers, government reports, Congressional hearings, religious tracts, pornography, ships' logs, medical treatises, maritime fiction, court-martial reports, personal letters and business correspondence, Benemann provides an in-depth examination of nineteenth century LGBTQ culture as it developed at sea and in America's port cities.
William Benemann is the author of A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships, and Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade.
Rich Miller has been a storyteller since he was a kid. When he was around ten, he turned the tables on the parents that had instilled a love of books in him: He started reading to his family after dinner every night (his favorites were The Lemonade Trick and The Big Joke Game, by Scott Corbett, but Encyclopedia Brown stories were a big hit as well). Later in life, he found out that people liked having stories acted out for them. He's performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County, and starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat. And now he's acting out stories in front of a microphone. Except for when he's dodging Tucson drivers on his bicycle, or finding the next great Happy Hour locale.