The Gay Sailors at the Falkland Islands-Malvinas
Camping through the Falklands, hidden history of the war’s gay seafarers 30 years ago this month, steward Roy ‘Wendy’ Gibson was playing his usual pink piano on his usual ship, the ferry Norland. Like Liberace mixed with Barbra Streisand, his sing-along tunes like Keep the Home Fires Burning and We are Sailing delighted the passengers. But this time the passengers were troops and the destination wasn’t Rotterdam but the far-off South Atlantic. Paratroopers went on to make him their first gay ‘mascot’ and he became the most famous out gay man of the Falklands/Malvinas War. The 2 Para Battalion honoured him with their official red beret to put on his glitter-filled hair. The Sun even mounted a search for him so that he could attend the 25th anniversary celebrations at Aldershot. Wendy was one of as many as a thousand out gay men among the 7,000 seafarers on 52 merchant ships in that war, not to mention all the closeted others on the GBT spectrum. This is because passenger ships then had a strong gay, indeed camp culture. On some peacetime vessels up to 95 per cent of the stewarding crew were out homosexuals and trans people – which was a shock to macho troops. To those that are too young to remember the Folklands’ war, let me tell you that they are at the ass of the world on the Southern Hemisphere. The only Countries or places close to the Folklands' would be the South pole and Argentina. There are no Argentinian’s living in the Island which they call’ Las Malvinas' but being so close to them they claim to be theirs. There is nothing there except cold, snow,sheep, water and an array of sea creatures that Darwin found to be out of this world.
England is had the Folklands' since it was discovered. The only people that live there are a few families which are English citizens and that’s about it. But they have become a matter of honor for both the Argentinian’s who tried to take over them by force and the English who lost soldiers trying to stop the invasion.
At the time England not having a very strong navy, they commissioned all the big liners to carry soldiers and supplies. The liners were manned by gays. The Argentinians have always claim the islands as part of their territory. It would be like the US claiming Guantanamo bay because it's closeness to the mainland US. Actually to be fair, the United States assumed territorial control over the southern portion of GuantĂ¡namo Bay under the 1903 Cuban-American Treaty, which granted it a perpetual lease of the area. Guantanamo and also PuertoRico were tokens for the Us having kicked out Spain’s ass, which previously together with England and France owned the whole caribbean.
adamfoxie*
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