Hello Sailor! How maritime museums are addressing the experience of gay seafarers

Traditionally, maritime historians and maritime museums have adopted a very narrow view of seafarers’ lives and issues of social diversity have been little explored. Whilst some research has been undertaken on women and ethnic minorities in recent years, the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered seafarers has received virtually no attention. This paper will consider how museums have begun to address this issue and will look in detail at the special exhibition, Hello Sailor!, organised by National Museums Liverpool in 2006. Hello Sailor! was based on ground-breaking research about gay seafarers on board British cruise liners in the mid-twentieth century, mainly gathered from oral testimony. The paper will examine the content, development and impact of the exhibition and will place it in a context of how maritime museums are beginning to address questions of social diversity and to make themselves accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. In particular, it explores the difficulties faced by curators, including the paucity of documentary sources and secondary literature, the limitations of existing museum networks and the almost total absence of objects and other visual material with which to tell the story.