Specific Overtures

03/20/2026

What do you do with a drunken sailor?

The first rule of Gay Navy S*x Club is: Don’t talk about Gay Navy S*x Club. Sailor Thomas Brunelle talked about it, and the guy he told narked, and then there was a seamen investigation that turned into a national scandal that would sully the reputation of a future president.

--On This Day in History S**t Went Down: March 19, 1919--

In early 1919, Brunelle was a patient in a navy hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. While there his gaydar failed. He told fellow patient Ervin Arnold, a machinist’s mate, that the local Army and Navy YMCA as well as the Newport Art Club were great places to hook up for some hot gay action. Arnold checked these places out to see for himself and oh my Christian stars men dressed as women and having s*x with each other and drinking booze and also doing co***ne. Arnold was a good little stooge and wrote up a report and it found its way to Admiral Wood, who got some serious wood for exposing the heinous crime of consensual coupling between people of the same s*x.

The report went before a court of inquiry and on March 19, 1919, a thorough investigation was ordered. And that’s when s**t got weird. Arnold, the guy who narked, was a state police detective in a former life. The navy said f**k it, he’s already got an in, let’s put him in charge of the investigation. Arnold’s approach was, shall we say, unorthodox.

He chose 13 men to help him in the investigation. The men were chosen based on two things: being young, and hot. He sent them on infiltration missions, and they infiltrated all right. They submitted daily reports about all the gay s*x they participated in at these clubs. There was little in the way of “I didn’t want to but I had to in order to further the investigation” in these reports.

Two weeks later the arrests began. Seventeen sailors were charged, and during their trials the investigators who took the infiltration way too seriously testified in graphic detail that oh yeah that was the guy who stuck his dick in my bum in the course of my totally legit investigation. Most of the accused were sent to prison for so**my and “scandalous conduct.”

It became a media s**tnado and the religious community was all what the f**k how could the navy condone these kinds of investigative methods? At the time, future president Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he caught heat. But then he quit in 1920 to run as veep candidate for James Cox’s run for president. They got obliterated by Warren Harding.

But the scandal wasn’t over for Roosevelt. The following year a Senate Committee on Naval Affairs denounced both him and his former boss Josephus Daniels who was Secretary of the Navy. The New York Times said that most of the details were “unprintable” and accused Roosevelt and Daniels of knowing full well how the investigation had been conducted.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bulls**t "ai" plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “f**k” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY S**T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.

03/12/2026

Wild that such a thing could happen.

In 1919, the U.S. Navy decided it needed to root out gay men in its ranks. Instead, it documented an entire q***r subculture and sparked a national scandal.

The chain of events became known as the Newport s*x scandal. Naval investigators in Newport, Rhode Island, believed sailors were having s*x with each other. So they launched a sting operation. Young enlisted men were ordered to go undercover, flirt with suspected gay sailors, have s*x with them, and then report back.

The investigators expected a handful of arrests. What they uncovered instead was a whole social world that most Americans had no idea existed.

Sailors described parties, private rooms in boarding houses, coded language, and a network of men who knew exactly where to find each other. One investigator wrote that certain men were known as “fairies.” Another report described men who preferred to be courted like women.

The Navy was shocked. They had stumbled into a culture with its own rules, signals, and social structure. Not just a few isolated acts, but an entire community.

The sting went far beyond normal policing. Sailors were ordered to have s*x with suspects to gather evidence. And they did. That detail did not sit well with Congress.

When news of the operation leaked, a Senate investigation followed in 1921. Lawmakers were less concerned about the existence of gay sailors than about the Navy ordering enlisted men to seduce other men as part of an official investigation.

One senator called the tactics “disgusting.” Another said the Navy had created the very behavior it claimed to be stopping.

The transcripts of that investigation accidentally preserved one of the earliest detailed records of gay life in the United States. They show men socializing, flirting, forming relationships, and building a shared identity long before the modern gay rights movement.

The Navy wanted to stamp it out. Instead, it wrote it down.

The Newport investigation was meant to prove that homos*xuality was rare and deviant. What it actually proved was something else entirely: that even in 1919, the q***r community was thriving.

12/08/2025

True story. It's where "Specific Overtures" came from.

UPDATE: We had been preparing for a February show when our current theater suffered water damage and the performance space we had leased is closed. We're looking for a new home, hopefully will announce after the holidays!

San Francisco is often celebrated as the gay capital of the world, but have you ever wondered how this came to be?

It all began on December 7, 1941.

As the U.S. prepared for war following the outbreak in Europe, the government expanded naval operations, including the establishment of the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. In 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act required men aged 21 to 36 to register for the draft. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the age range widened to include men 18 to 45, resulting in 36 million Americans registering for service and 16 million being drafted.

While the military sought to expand its forces, it also aimed to systematically identify and exclude homos*xuals from military service—even if they were drafted. Men who identified as gay were barred from service or discharged if discovered later. Thousands were classified as homos*xual during pre-service screenings, and those who evaded detection faced harsher consequences within the military. A significant number received a “blue discharge,” so named for the blue paper used to document it.

These discharges, marked with a prominent “H” for homos*xuality, effectively rendered recipients outcasts. Stigmatized during a period of intense patriotism, many found returning home impossible due to the social shame and probing questions their status would provoke. Instead, many chose to remain in San Francisco, where they had been physically displaced by the military.

With their blue discharge papers marking them as openly gay, there was little incentive to hide. Unlike in other cities, where underground gay communities faced suppression, these men began to form a visible and openly gay culture in San Francisco. The city’s relatively liberal attitudes allowed this community to flourish, shaping the vibrant LGBTQ+ culture we know today.

While q***r spaces like the le***an bar Mona’s existed before the war, the influx of openly gay men during and after the war solidified San Francisco’s reputation as a haven for the LGBTQ+ community. The resilience and openness of these individuals set the foundation for a culture that continues to thrive and inspire.

06/23/2025

It's Alan Turing's Birthday.

The story of Alan Turing, father of modern computing. His journey as a young man and how he achieved what was thought at the time impossible, the decryption of the most complex German enigma machine.

06/08/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/19sowCBoqa/?mibextid=wwXIfr

This is the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950: https://bbc.in/43Hx7hY

03/23/2025

A life well lived, indeed!

Born into an old, wealthy Boston family. Prescott Townsend (1894-1973) came out as a teenager, and his parents were accepting but told him to be cautious. After serving in World War I, Prescott lived in Paris for a time, becoming immersed in the bohemian culture of the era. He then "sought to establish an outpost of that culture" in his hometown of Boston. He opened a bar and an avant-garde theater in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, using his family money to produce plays. He also spent time in Provincetown, where he became friendly with playwright Eugene O'Neill and other theater artists. Prescott was very happy to bankroll them and they were very happy to take his money... the Great Depression ended all that. By the 1930s, Prescott Townsend repeatedly addressed the Massachusetts legislature as an acknowledged homos*xual man advocating for the repeal of so**my legislation, urging the lawmakers "to legalize love". He was indulged due to his family's wealth and status, but ignored by lawmakers. While working at the shipyard during World War II, Townsend was arrested in 1943, for participating in an "unnatural and lascivious act". He did not deny it, and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Massachusetts House of Corrections. Shortly after, Prescott was officially stricken from both the New York and Boston Social Registers. In the 1950s, he held meetings at his home/bookstore, which he described as "the first social discussion of homos*xuality in Boston. He embraced a more in-your-face generation of activists in the late 1960s, marked by the uprising at New York City's Stonewall Inn in 1969 and at age 76, he attended the first Pride parade in New York on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Always advocating for the outsider, the hippies and vagabonds and runaway homeless q***r youth his was a legacy of love, money and uplift. Townsend died at age 78 after failing health due to Parkinson's disease while he was living in a friend's apartment, having become homeless himself after a series of fires and dwindling family wealth due to his outreach and generosity. His family declined to accept responsibility for his body. A life well lived.

03/22/2025

Not LGBT, but another WW II hero who doesn't deserve to have his incredible service record erased by these white supremacists in the White House.

When he walked into a San Francisco barbershop after the war, he was told by the owner, “We don’t serve J**s here.”

The owner of the barbershop obviously didn't know who the one-armed J*panese-American was - his name was Daniel Inouye. And, according to one website that honors heroes, he was one tough "badass".

This is the man who led a one-man assault against a German machine-gun nest, got shot in the stomach, had his arm torn off by a 30mm Schiessbecher antipersonnel rifle gr***de, and still kept going. When his fellow soldiers tried to help him, he gruffly commanded them to get back to their positions, saying, "Nobody called off the war!"

He was born on September 7, 1924. A Nisei J*panese American, Inouye was the son of a J*panese immigrant father and a mother whose parents had migrated from J*pan.

Inouye would become a war hero, who lost his arm fighting for his country, the United States. He would become a U.S. Senator from 1963 to his death, Dec. 17, 2012, when he was the second longest serving U.S. Senator in history and the highest-ranking Asian American politician in U.S. history. At the time of his death, at the age of 88, Inouye was third in line to the presidency.

Inouye, who was studying to be a doctor in Hawaii, was a medical volunteer at Pearl Harbor when the J*panese attacked in 1941. He immediately tried to enlist in the U.S. Army at age 17, but he was classified 4-C, meaning "Enemy Alien", undraftable, unable to serve.

He volunteered in whatever capacity he could to help the war effort until the United States Army lifted its ban on J*panese-Americans, allowing Inouye to join the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the first all-Nisei volunteer unit.

It would become one of the most decorated units in American military history.

"The 442nd, including the 100th Battalion, was honored with seven Distinguished Unit Citations, more than 4,000 Purple Hearts, and a large number of individual decorations for bravery, including 21 Medals of Honor, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars," according to the National Veteran Network.

Inouye's heroism is legendary (see the Wikipedia account of his heroics), but because of his race he only received a Distinguished Service Cross. He finally received the Medal of Honor (albeit belatedly) in 2000.

After the war, while in his uniform "with three rows of ribbons and a captains bars on my shoulder," he still had to face racism in his home country. When he went to get a haircut, one barber asked him, "Are you a J*p?" Inouye responded, "I'm an American." The barber responded, "We don't cut J*p hair."

Inouye would later say, "I thought to myself, here I am in uniform. It should be obvious to him that I'm an American soldier, a captain at that. And that fellow very likely never went to war. And he's telling me we don't cut J*p hair. I was so tempted to strike him. But then I thought if I had done that, all the work that we had done would be for nil. So I just looked at him and I said, 'Well, I'm sorry you feel that way.' And I walked out."

One of the senators he served with recalled a story about Inouye's son asking him why he had volunteered to fight in War World II, even though the U.S. had declared J*panese Americans "enemy aliens" and had placed them in internment camps. Inouye's response was that he "did it for the children."

That integrity would follow him through his career. Because of the loss of his arm, he was unable to become the doctor he dreamed of, but he found another way to help others, representing his home state of Hawaii in the House and the Senate.

He was so admired as a senator that he would be selected as a member of the Senate Watergate committee, which investigated illegal activities in President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. He won wide admiration for patient but persistent questioning of the former attorney general John N. Mitchell and the White House aides H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman and John Dean to the point when one of the attorneys defending Nixon's advisers would call him a “little J*p.”

In a poll, Americans rated Inouye first among the members of the Senate Watergate committee. Inouye was also involved in the Iran-Contra investigations of the 1980s.

According to writer John Nichols, Inouye "never stopped confronting power on behalf of the rights of people of color, people with disabilities, women, le***ans and g**s and political dissenters to equal justice and equal opportunity."

The American Civil Liberties Union hailed Inouye as “a champion of civil rights and civil liberties”.

"The last sitting senator who joined the epic struggles to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he led the fight for the Americans with Disabilities Act and was a key sponsor of the constitutional amendment to extend voting rights to 18-to-20-year-olds," wrote Nichols.

Inouye also battled for reparations for J*panese-Americans who were interned in government compounds during World War II.

When he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and discussions of Vietnam were brought up, he made it clear that he objected to the terminology, "“Oriental human beings.”

According to Nichols, "Inouye was one of the handful of senators who rejected the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s and he emerged as one of the earliest and most determined backers of marriage equality in the Senate, asking: 'How can we call ourselves the land of the free, if we do not permit people who love one another to get married?'

"When the debate over whether g**s and le***ans serving in the military arose, Inouye declared as a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient: “In every war we have had men and women of different s*xual orientation who have stood in harm’s way and given their lives for their country. I fought alongside gay men during World War II, many of them were killed in combat. Are we to suggest that because of their s*xual orientation they are not heroes?”

Inouye continued to represent all Americans, fighting for their rights. When he saw that the loyalties of Arab Americans were being questioned, he would say:

"I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon J*panese-Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab-Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question. History is an excellent teacher, provided we heed its lessons, otherwise, we are likely to repeat them."

A fellow Hawaiian senator would say of Inouye:

“He served as a defender of the people of this country, championing historic changes for civil rights, including the equal rights of women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Native Hawaiians."

Among his many awards and honors, Inouye received the Medal of Honor in 2000. He was inducted as an honorary member of the Navajo Nation and titled "The Leader Who Has Returned With a Plan." In 2013, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2017, Honolulu International Airport was officially renamed Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in his honor. And, in June of this year, 2019, a naval destroyer was named the USS Daniel Inouye.

According to The Nation, "No senator fought longer and harder for the rights of people of color, people with disabilities, women and the LGBT community."

And, he was one tough badass.

03/20/2025

This is why "Specific Overtures" tackles this important issue. We're set in WW II (coincidentally in the Navy). The characters are fictitious, but all the struggles are real.

The first rule of Gay Navy S*x Club is: Don’t talk about Gay Navy S*x Club. Sailor Thomas Brunelle talked about it, and the guy he told narked, and then there was a seamen investigation that turned into a national scandal that would sully the reputation of a future president.

--On This Day in History S**t Went Down: March 19, 1919--

In early 1919, Brunelle was a patient in a navy hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. While there his gaydar failed. He told fellow patient Ervin Arnold, a machinist’s mate, that the local Army and Navy YMCA as well as the Newport Art Club were great places to hook up for some hot gay action. Arnold checked these places out to see for himself and oh my Christian stars men dressed as women and having s*x with each other and drinking booze and also doing co***ne. Arnold was a good little stooge and wrote up a report and it found its way to Admiral Wood, who got some serious wood for exposing the heinous crime of consensual coupling between people of the same s*x.

The report went before a court of inquiry and on March 19, 1919, a thorough investigation was ordered. And that’s when s**t got weird. Arnold, the guy who narked, was a state police detective in a former life. The navy said f**k it, he’s already got an in, let’s put him in charge of the investigation. Arnold’s approach was, shall we say, unorthodox.

He chose 13 men to help him in the investigation. The men were chosen based on two things: being young, and hot. He sent them on infiltration missions, and they infiltrated all right. They submitted daily reports about all the gay s*x they participated in at these clubs. There was little in the way of “I didn’t want to but I had to in order to further the investigation” in these reports.

Two weeks later the arrests began. Seventeen sailors were charged, and during their trials the investigators who took the infiltration way too seriously testified in graphic detail that oh yeah that was the guy who stuck his dick in my bum in the course of my totally legit investigation. Most of the accused were sent to prison for so**my and “scandalous conduct.”

It became a media s**tnado and the religious community was all what the f**k how could the navy condone these kinds of investigative methods? At the time, future president Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he caught heat. But then he quit in 1920 to run as veep candidate for James Cox’s run for president. They got obliterated by Warren Harding.

But the scandal wasn’t over for Roosevelt. The following year a Senate Committee on Naval Affairs denounced both him and his former boss Josephus Daniels who was Secretary of the Navy. The New York Times said that most of the details were “unprintable” and accused Roosevelt and Daniels of knowing full well how the investigation had been conducted.

Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY S**T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.

03/19/2025