num_pages: 320
description: In Sailors and Sexual Identity, author Steven Zeeland talks with young male sailors--both gay- and straight-identified--about ways in which their social and sexual lives have been shaped by their Navy careers.Despite massive media attention to the issue, there remains a gross disparity between the public perception of “gays in the military” and the sexual realities of military life. The conversations in this book reveal how known “gay” and “straight” men can and do get along in the sexually tense confines of barracks and shipboard life once they discover that the imagined boundary between them is not, in fact, a hard line.The stories recounted here in vivid detail call into question the imagined boundaries between gay and straight, homosexual and homosocial, and suggest a secret Pentagon motivation for the gay to protect homoerotic military rituals, buddy love, and covert military homosexuality from the taint of sexual suspicion.Zeeland’s interviews explore many aspects of contemporary life in the Navy 
language: English
title: Sailors and Sexual Identity: Crossing the Line Between "Straight" and "Gay" in the U.S. Navy
titlecomplete: Sailors and Sexual Identity: Crossing the Line Between "Straight" and "Gay" in the U.S. Navy (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies,)
genres: LGBT, Gay, Military Fiction, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 37
publisher: Harrington Park Press