2 Sailors Urinating (?) by Charles Demuth circa 1930, watercolor

Xmas on the High Seas- Postcard early 20th century

“Like pears closely packed, the crowded crew mutually decay through close contact…Still more, from this same close confinement- so far as it affects the common sailors- arise other evils, so direful that they will hardly bear even so much as an allusion.  What too many seamen are when ashore is very well known; but what some them become when completely cut off from shore indulgences can hardly be imagined by landsmen.  The sins for which the cities of the plain were overthrown still linger in some of these wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.”-White Jacket, Herman Melville, 1850

Dancing Sailors by Charles Demuth circa 1918 watercolor

Don’t drop the soap…

Ivory soap ad circa 1910

Socrates and Alcibiades- illustration by Édouard-Henri Avril in De Figuris Veneris by Frederich Carl Forberg, first published in 1824.  This illustration is from the 1906 French edition.

Perhaps the spewing fountain in the background is a displacement of the ejaculation which is to come…

Remembrance of Things Handsome, A Sailor, photo postcard, early 20th century…and perhaps rough trade…

Three Sailors by Charles Demuth 1917

Postcard 1940’s.  The Ambiguity of the Sailor.

http://www.thegreatwithin.org/2009/11/queering-image-5-postcard-of-sailor.html

Sailor postcard circa 1940’s