Sailors in drag on S.S. Caronia. Photograph, 195-.

Part of James Gardiner Collection: photograph album labelled ‘Drag’.

They are wearing evening dress, mostly black dresses. One man is wearing a hat and a pale top with white heels. Unidentified merchant seamen in a drag party on board S.S. Caronia, 1950s. The Merchant Navy to some degree provided a bolt-hole for many 'obvious' homosexuals in the 1950s, when the laws prohibiting any kind of homosexual activity were rigidly enforced in the United Kingdom following the spy scandals of Burgess and MacLean, and the Montague/Wildeblood trial of 1954. Gay life, however, flourished on board large ocean-going liners such as the Caronia, where drag parties and pageants were a regular entertainment for the crew (and sometimes the passengers)

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Item Information:

Identifier: tq57nr270
Collection: James Gardiner 20th Century Drag Postcards
Institution: Wellcome Library
Date Issued: 1950 to 1959?
Genre: Photographs
Prints
Topic(s): Female impersonators
Resource Type: Still Image
Analog Format: 1 photograph : photoprint ;
Rights: Copyright undetermined
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