Barbary Lane Dispatches Podcast

About Barbary Lane Dispatches Podcast

Pull up a chair on the porch of 28 Barbary Lane—tales, truth, and tea from Armistead Maupin. armisteadmaupin.substack.com (https://armisteadmaupin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Armistead Maupin

Category

fiction · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

18 Aug 2025

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

48 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Vietnam: The War I Went Looking For

   I encourage you to watch the video, as there are many more photos and archival footage. Plus, it’s always wonderful to hear Armistead tell his stories in his own voice. For those of you who prefer the written version, here’s a transcript of the video. (Note: This is a long post and may be truncated by some email providers.)When I ended my first tour of duty, came home from Naples and Malta, I finally lost my virginity. It’s such a quaint, old-fashioned way to put it, but I had sex with a man for the first time, or something approaching sex. It happened on the Battery in Charleston, on the spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. I’ve spoken about that on another episode, something called, appropriately enough, “The Summer of ’69.” (https://armisteadmaupin.substack.com/p/the-summer-of-69) It felt monumental to me at the time. I guess it still does. Until you give yourself permission to enjoy your sexuality, your life hasn’t started. In spite of that roll in the hay, I was still very much a frightened young conservative trying to please my father. And I think you can see something of that in this letter that I wrote home. I wrote this from the Grand Harbor in Valletta, Malta actually: “I have just finished reading The Caine Mutiny. The ensign who tells the story is RPS custodian and a comm officer, so I completely identified with his confusion. It is the most exciting book I have read in years, and yet, it depressed me too. I feel as if I have discovered the Second World War several decades late. All of the things that you used to tell me about Daddy, all of the stories about the YMS-195 and the South Pacific, seem so human and real now. What depresses me is the realization that this war of mine is pretty much of a fraud as wars go. I don’t mean that there isn’t a communist threat—I just mean that I don’t feel that I’m doing much about it. I have the completely uncharacteristic urge to be shot at, or maybe just frightened a little. There were certain times last year at OCS when I felt a very solid sort of contentment. I felt that way because I was in a cold, barren place far away from home and my future was as uncertain as it had ever been in my life. I guess that sounds pretty crazy, but I felt good about what I was doing. I used to take walks in the snow, in the evening during liberty hours, and look at the old temporary frame buildings and the drill field and the icy bay and feel comfortably desolate. I actually enjoyed the deprivation, because there was a direction to it and a funny sense of doing something that had been done before. So now I have to come to my war and it is all about “can-do” tenders and trumped-up church services and obligatory cocktail parties. I don’t pretend to hate all of it, but I won’t ever brag about it. Back in Charleston, the news came that Captain Tidd had been assigned to work at the Navy headquarters in Saigon. And so I wrote him and asked him if I could come be with him. I liked him that much. I trusted him that much. And I guess I kind of figured he wouldn’t get me killed. So I put in the request. And it wasn’t too long before I shipped out. “Shipped out” is probably the worst term for it. We left on a military charter on Braniff Airlines with stewardesses in hot pink Pucci dresses. What I remember about it was that a bunch of guys at Travis Air Force Base, before we took off, got s*******d. The problem with that was that at the same time there were people coming back from Vietnam who were filling everyone’s ears with how gruesome it had been. I remember them saying, “You f*****g have no f*****g idea, man. You have no idea.” And that rattled everybody and made them get drunker. And they were sobering up on this sixteen-hour flight to Saigon. When we finally did set down in Saigon, the stewardesses had this melodramatic way of saying, “We hope we’ll be able to take all of you back a year from now,” which is really a morbid thing to say because obviously some of those people might not be taken back a year later. The morbid tone continued when we took the bus ride into Saigon. The guy who was driving the bus, who must have been very bored with his job, told us that if we saw anybody on a bicycle throw anything onto the side of the bus, to please tear it off the bus and throw it away. Of course, all we saw were bicycles. They were everywhere. And the guy was having fun with us. We didn’t know. We were adjusting our feelings to every new thing that came along. When we got into the Navy compound, it was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. It looked quite foreboding, but once you got inside, it had an almost bucolic feeling to it. There were banyan trees and banana trees, and it felt very peaceful. It felt like something out of a Bogart movie, especially the admiral’s quarters. The sight of it soothed me. I ended up working on the second floor with a yeoman named Cloud. I remember his name still after fifty years because it was a very popular song by Judy Collins then: “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow…” He was not pleased with it, but I thought it was amusing. Cloud and I were basically travel agents for the Navy. We booked people on flights, usually American dignitaries, both pro and against the war, to come and experience it firsthand, to see what was happening. And so that meant flying to all sorts of remote locations. That was where I first got my glimpse of how other GIs and sailors were living. I’d be in some tiny outpost somewhere, and they’d be there in their faded greens and looking very much in tune with their surroundings. And I wanted that for myself. I wanted to wear the faded greens. I wanted to have the experience of being in that war in such a picturesque place. I didn’t want to get killed. I was not after that, and I didn’t want to kill anybody. But I loved the idea of being out in the boondocks. Back in Saigon, my life consisted often of taking Mouza Zumwalt, the wife of Admiral Zumwalt, on shopping trips in Saigon. She lived in Manila, I think, but she came over for conjugal visits with her husband. She was a beautiful woman and very intelligent. And she kind of reminded me of Patricia Neal at the time, the actress Patricia Neal. We went shopping at one point for those ceramic elephants, the big things that you sit a cocktail glass on or something. And there were all sorts of kinds of them available, so it was fun to look for them with her. She would send them to friends back in the States. They were called BUFEs. She never knew why. I knew why they were called BUFEs, because it stood for “big, ugly f*****g elephant.” And I never had the heart to tell her, although she might have thought that was very funny. I don’t know. Her husband, Admiral Zumwalt, was an imposing figure. He had these big, bristly dark eyebrows, and he wore sometimes some Filipino shirt through which you could see his black chest hair. He was a very kind man. He later went on to become Chief of Naval Operations in the States, where he was considered one of the more liberal of the military. I liked him a lot. And, of course, I liked Admiral Tidd, who was working longer hours than I was, so I rarely saw him. Zumwalt’s name was Elmo R. Zumwalt, and so, you know, naturally they adopted a less dorky nickname for him, which was Bud. People who knew him called him Bud Zumwalt. I met his son, Bud Jr. or was it Bud III? We went out and got drunk together several times. He was stationed out in the boonies, so I was glad to give him a little R&R in the city. A lot of the guys on Admiral Z’s staff kept what they called short-timer’s calendars, which were basically Playboy Playmates or nude women of some sort whose parts you colored in as the days wore on. And at the end you would end up in the pubic region and then you’d leave the country. I never had anything like that. My efforts at looking straight were much more clever than that. I went on one occasion with a friend to a place called Mimi’s Scientific Steam Bath. Mimi was legendary. She had all gold teeth and she gave b******s to the GIs, basically. I understand she was putting two daughters through the Sorbonne. She came into the cubicle with me and put up a valiant effort, poor thing. I ended up saying “beaucoup sai,” which means “very drunk,” excusing myself, and we left it at that. On another occasion, I took a Tu Do Street tea girl to a Dracula movie, oddly enough. She’d never seen anything like it, and I tried to explain what Dracula was, but it disturbed her as much as anything, I think. But she ended up wanting me to buy her things, buy her a dress, as I recall. She reminded me of Liat from South Pacific, the native girl in that film. And I took a picture of the two of us together that I could send home to my family so that my father could, you know, get a chuckle out of it and think, “The boy’s doing well for himself over there.” Everything I was doing with them at that point was for effect. And it embarrasses me to admit it now. I wish I could admit it to my father now. It’s been a long time since he’s been gone. But I was trying very hard to make the world think that I was straight because I wasn’t comfortable with myself yet. I was all about effect and subterfuge. I enjoyed being a fish out of water. I fancied myself as a bumbling lieutenant in a Jack Lemmon movie about the Navy. I could see myself playing that role. I was beginning to wonder if that was the right movie for me at all because I had such a cushy life in Saigon. I was beginning to feel guilty about the war I had, which consisted of cocktail parties sometimes and being what they called a “staff puke.” There was a vast gulf between the life I was living in Saigon and the guys that I had seen out in the field in faded greens. So I eventually appealed to Captain Tidd to send me to the boonies. He was reluctant because I think he knew that I was a total fish out of water. He knew I had not received any military training in the States or elsewhere that could put me into that kind of danger. And so I ended up being sent to some place called Danger University, which was a training ground for people who needed to know how to work on the front lines. I was the only Navy man at Danger University when I went, which made me somewhat of a novelty. It was an Army installation, so I was mercilessly teased. And they called me “Navy.” Which was something of a relief because I’d been called Army for a long time by people who thought it was a cute way to shorten my name. I hated it when people called me Army. I still hate it to this day. It’s not my favorite nickname. But there I was with all these Army fellas, learning how to shoot an M16 and to wear a gas mask. Outside the walls of our little training camp, I could hear actual gunfire going on. The real war was just outside the place. I’d never heard it—never been that close to it before. It didn’t rattle me exactly, but I really became aware of the irony that I was pursuing something that was going to take me closer to that noise, the heat of war. Around this time, I wrote to my parents to let them know that I was asking to be transferred to the field. And my mother, predictably, immediately became worried about that. She said, “Teddy, you’ve always had a Lawrence of Arabia complex.” And she didn’t know at the time that Lawrence of Arabia was queer, but it was the closest I ever got to a real description of who I was. My father pretended he was gruff about it, but I think was secretly proud that I was going to war finally. There were several false starts before the Navy finally settled on the right post for me. One was a very tiny and remote place on the Cambodian border called Chi Lang. I had met a monkey there who was called Ass Breath by the people who cared for the monkey. And I posed with him for a great picture. Another was a place called Moc Hoa, as I recall. And it became, in my mind, the place that I was going to. I didn’t end up going there, but Moc Hoa became symbolic to me of what I wanted out of the war. Back in Saigon, I realized that I was going to have to set free my parrot. It was only one parrot now. I had originally had two parrots called Ong and Ba, meaning man and woman, but Ong had died while I was away on some sort of expedition. And my mama-san, who took care of the room, was so distressed about it—or she wanted proof, I guess, that I’d lost the parrot—so she wrapped it in tinfoil and set it on the air conditioner. The other one was in a cage that I had built for her. It had to be metal because she had broken out of the bamboo cage that they sold me in the market. She wasn’t happy with the cage. She wasn’t happy with me. It was not a good marriage. So I decided I would set her free. I went to the window and opened the window and kind of shooed her. She didn’t leave right away. But eventually she did, and I saw her take off into the night sky. And I wrote my parents rather dramatically and said, “Even parrots have their Moc Hoas.” Which shows me more clearly than ever what a posturing little thing I was at the time. I was a total popinjay at that point. But I thought it was a dramatic thing because I was feeling my move that was about to come on. I felt at that point like I was about to be freed from my cage in Saigon and that I was going to go to a place where I could experience the camaraderie of men and find freedom—real freedom—as strange as that sounds now. But I did, and I wrote about it. I’ll tell you about it the next time we meet, about my time in Chau Doc, Vietnam. Thank you for coming along today, and I look forward to seeing you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe (https://armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   2 Sept 2026

   “I Love You, No Boolsheet”

   When I was 24 years old, I joined the Navy. It was during the Vietnam War, so part of the effort was to see that I wasn’t going to be on shore in a combat situation. I went to Officer Candidate School up in Newport, Rhode Island. The very first part of the tour was in Charleston, South Carolina, which was hot as hell and miserable. But then we heard with great excitement that the destroyer tender I was on, the USS Everglades, was going to Naples and Malta. A destroyer tender takes care of other destroyers. That’s why it’s called that. And so it means you’re mostly in port at the time. There was a wonderful opportunity to see Europe, and I jumped at it. I didn’t have much choice because that’s where we were going, but I was very excited about the fact that we were going to be going to these European ports. In Naples, when I first went ashore, it was to Santa Lucia, which is a famous fleshpot. The smell of pizza, charred pizza, was in the air. And sex—for me, I mean, you could sense that there was sex there. I was in the closet. I hadn’t had sex with anybody. So when we went ashore, some guy came up to me and said, “Hey, Joe, you want to buy flying cock and balls?” I was afraid that he’d clocked me, that he knew that I would love a flying cock and balls. But it turned out to be this little icon, a little thing you wore around your neck that was a cock and balls and had wings. The sailors loved them. My fellow sailors loved these things and bought them in great abundance. But I felt like having one around my neck would be like having a scarlet letter around my neck. It was not something I wanted to advertise. There were also guys there at Santa Lucia advertising “exhibeesh,” which was a sexual show, basically, between a man and a woman, sometimes between a woman and a donkey. I never went to see them. I can only imagine what that was like. But again, it was sex all around me, but nothing I could partake in. I heard about them from my men when they returned to the ship late at night, and I could feel the Chianti breeze of their breath on my face as they told me about their exploits. Sometimes somebody would grab my knee for emphasis, and that sent me around the world, really. During that time, I wrote a lot of letters home. I was a pretty well-behaved young man. Everybody in my family got letters, including my grandmother. My mother saved them all, and they’re now in my archives at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. There’s an excerpt I want to read to you about one night I went ashore. It reveals what I liked to tell my parents and what I liked to hide from my parents. And the reason this is in all caps is that I had recently absconded with the communications typewriter, which types in all caps, so I don’t want you to think I’ve turned into Donald Trump. Cliff has been gone for about five days. The last night we frequented one of the white hat bars for the sheer laughs of it. This particular one was called the Cactus Club (pronounced “Cockatoose Cloob” by the lovelies who hang around the joint, à la Long Branch, to drum up trade). Two of these adorables plopped their pasta-stuffed buttocks in our laps as soon as we sat down. Dialogue: Lovely: Hey Joe, buy me drink. Me: I am very poor. I no can buy drink. Lovely: You reech. You offeece. Buy me drink. Me: They are too expensive. Lovely: Negats, Joe. Buy me drink. Me: Try somebody else. I am very poor. Lovely: Hey, Joe, I love you, no boolsheet! That was sort of the theme of Naples: “I love you, no boolsheet.” I am going to put in for Christmas leave now, so that I’ll have a stronger chance of getting off. I will get either Christmas or New Years off. That is, ten days or so in December or ten days in January. Since most of the officers live in Charleston and can go home every evening anyway, it seems only right and proper that I should get Christmas off. That remains to be seen I guess. I devour all the news from home. I miss you all so much and I love you, no boolsheet. Teddy Sometimes on my day off I would take the ferry to Capri. I would go with my friend Jim, who was really in it for the girls. I just needed the company of somebody, and Jim was a good one. Once, during a Revlon festival of all things, we were on Capri at the Hotel Quisisana, sitting there in the sunlight. And Jim made the observation, “Don’t look now, but that’s Faye f*****g Dunaway over there checking us out.” And it was. The star of Bonnie and Clyde was there, looking very young and pretty. We also spotted George Hamilton and Penelope Tree that day. Jim was very taken with the girls. And I was kind of distracted by the young men I saw in the square with silver-dollar nipples peeking through their mesh T-shirts. That’s where my mind went. That was the first time I’d seen fishnet T-shirts. They hadn’t come to the States yet, as far as I know, and it was a novelty to see them. I went from there to fantasizing about these young men up in their rooms, stripping naked and getting on with it. And I was not getting on with anybody. I felt it. I felt the absence of sex and love in my life. It was a hard time, really. After Naples, we sailed into Malta. I’ll never forget that entrance into the city, into Valletta. Everything was sort of sandstone-colored and all of one piece. It looked like some sort of old lithograph. It was amazing. Malta had all sorts of attractions for me that weren’t sexual, that were just the visual nature of that beautiful place. I was assigned my first-ever cabin mate. I don’t know how it happened, but a Greek ensign was allowed to room with me. His name was Giorgos. I got a lot of teasing in the wardroom from the other officers, who were saying, “Oh, you know about those Greeks, Armistead. You better watch out for them. Don’t drop the soap.” Well, I had some hopes about that. But it was pretty obvious very early on that Giorgos was as straight as they come. But he was also Greek, and he had an adventurous quality to him. When I told him how much I loved Zorba the Greek, the movie, he offered to teach me the sirtaki, the dance that was in Zorba the Greek. We’ve all seen that done. And so I had the opportunity to stand with him, arms against each other’s shoulders, and do this dance. That was probably the closest I got to any tactile relationship with a man at that point. There was a delicious freedom in this, of course, because it was all right, even manly, for men to dance with each other. Alan Bates and Anthony Quinn did the dance in Zorba the Greek. And it was many years later that I discovered that Alan Bates himself was queer. So I was always getting in on the news late. One night in Malta, Jim and I took a taxi to the far end of the island, where we saw in the headlights of the car these old ladies in what looked like mourning garb. It was a haunting scene. It seemed very common for women to be in a perpetual state of mourning, just as I was in a perpetual state of longing. My theme song was this haunting gypsy tune that seemed to be in every alleyway. For a long time I thought it was something local and unheard of. It sounded like something out of Malta. It was only after I left there that I discovered it was “Those Were the Days,” sung by Mary Hopkin, and that it was a worldwide hit. I approached the captain when I was put in charge of the cruise book, which is the equivalent of a high school yearbook, really, and told him that I wanted to name the cruise book Those Were the Days. He was all for it because—well, I left out the part about “Was that lonely woman really me?” and emphasized the line “We’d fight and never lose,” which sounded sufficiently military to please the captain. We dug up a copy of the book not long ago, and there it was. The song was really an anthem for me at the time. There was this wistfulness, and the way in which it spoke to my own longing without really addressing it officially. By the time we got back to Charleston, life settled into rotors on the deck and cheerleaders and water welcomes—the things that I had been doing before—and I felt really kind of empty. I knew that something had to change in my life, and I knew what it was. I knew that I needed to lose my virginity. I’d like to read you a letter that I wrote home at the time. It’s apropos of nothing, but I think it’s kind of funny. And it’s about the beginning of this. About four days ago I shaved off a mustache of two months. It was a magnificent creature which curled up at the ends and was intended as a Christmas surprise for me family. It was light brown, with red overtones, and bore a disquieting resemblance to a dormant centipede. I shaved it off because: * It began to feel like a dormant centipede. * Every night at the wardroom movie the boatswain would yell: “Move over Maupin, your mustache is in the way.” * I developed a nervous habit of twisting it at the ends like a silent film villain, whenever a major crisis arose. All of the ensigns on the ship have tried this little experiment, but there is only one mustache left now. He is being very stubborn about it, but I think he’ll give in any day now. I have only one picture of myself wearing the contraption—one taken of me and Cliff by a street photographer at a sidewalk cafe—but that one was taken when it was only three weeks old. I started to cut it off in one hunk and mail it to you so you could tie a blue ribbon around it or something like my baby locks, but after examining the residue I decided that the idea was somewhat macabre. The next time I talk to you, I’m going to tell you about my second tour of duty, which was in Vietnam—on shore in Vietnam. But thank you for coming along to hear about this, and I do appreciate it. It’s nice spending time with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe (https://armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   11 Aug 2026

   In the Navy: Closeted, Confused and Full of Lust

   Here’s a transcript of the video: When I signed up for Officer Candidate School for the Navy in the late ’60s, it’s a good thing that my mother filled out the form and not me, because it asked if I had had any “homosexual tendencies”. It was on the list of maladies that you needed to recognize before they let you in. So I didn’t have to lie about that, but I knew in my heart what was going on with me, who I was attracted to, all of that. It was a big dark secret that I hadn’t acted on at that point, but I knew what I wanted to act on. And fortunately, the Navy provided more inspiration in that regard, if not actual action on my part. I had been asked to appear on a television show, I think, to talk about the Navy. I don’t remember what. It was something in Charleston. It was my first time on TV, and I made every effort to make sure that I didn’t come off like a big sissy. I’m sure I did when I look back on it, but I put a little swagger in my step in order to pass. It’s hard to think about it now. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anybody to not know I was gay, but I didn’t at that point. I wrote a number of letters home, which my mother saved religiously. And those letters are now in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley as part of my archives. I’m very pleased that it’s there, by the way. I’d like to read you an excerpt from a letter that I wrote home to my family just a few days after I had reported on board the USS Everglades. I’d already made a joke about the ship being named after a swamp. The letter really captures what my mood was at that time. Here we go. Dear Mummie and Daddy, The last three days have been a real jolt to my system. For a while I felt so depressed and inept and frightened that I was eleven years old and back at Camp Seagull again, wondering what humiliation my uncoordination had in store for me that day. The captain, Tidd (it rhymes with Kidd ) nodded gravely when I told him of my lack of training in crypto and communications procedures and all I could see was Wyatt Taylor filling out a little green card reading… Wyatt Taylor was the big guy at camp. “Needs to improve ability to play various types of ball games.” That’s very much true about me then and now. I have no interest in various types of ball games. I was so awkward at camp, and I felt the same way really on board the Everglades. It was 600 men, and it was just a big factory. It was in the stinky heart of North Charleston. It was pretty miserable, actually. There were mosquitoes, and it was a very hard time for me because I felt like I was not where I belonged at all. I was constantly getting lost. I couldn’t even find my own room sometimes. And it was embarrassing for an officer to ask an enlisted man if he knows the way to his room — especially if you call it a room. It was a cabin. I was just really a fish out of water, and Charleston didn’t make it easier on me. The ship itself was a destroyer tender that held 600 men. Its function was to sit in port and take care of other ships, other destroyers. That only got interesting when you went ashore, which is what we did eventually. But on board the ship, the captain sort of embraced me. I think he knew I was a doofus and wanted to help out. And he let me write the ship’s newsletter, which I named The Tenderloin, as in Destroyer Tender: Choice Cuts on the Chopping Block. I spent way too much time picking on the executive officer, who was very unpopular, a little martinet of a man. And I’m a little ashamed of that now when I think about it. I think he must have needed some friends, and he didn’t have any. I was a communications officer, which meant that I was in charge of the signal flags and the radio and a lot of other things that I had no clue about whatsoever. I soon learned that enlisted men do all the work on one of these big ships, and officers have to pretend that they are, so that’s what I did. I had something called a Cosmic Top Secret clearance, if you can believe that, which meant that I would go ashore once a week and pick up these rotors that had something to do with encryption on board the ship. And I would go ashore and I would bring those rotors in. I remember feeling really nervous that I was going to drop them into the bay. But you can see what my state of mind was. I was always living in fear. Captain Tidd was a tall, affable — very affable — man with protruding ears and a pleasant smile that somehow or other, for me, conjured up Donald O’Connor in those Francis the Talking Mule movies. He was basically a decent chap, and I was really lucky to have him take me under his wing in the way that he did. Later on I would follow him to Vietnam. He demanded professionalism. Even when he was chastising me, he did it in a nice way. I’ll never forget the day he approached me about the fact that I was sunbathing on the deck. And he said, “I don’t mind if you and the men sunbathe on the deck, but if they’re sunbathing on the port side, then I’d like you to be sunbathing on the starboard side.” And I think that was the first clue I had that he had some sense of what a threat I might be if they unleashed that monster. There were a dozen men in my division, and I really liked most of them a great deal. Some were smarter than others. Some were cuter than others. One of them really stood out to me, a 19-year-old Billy Budd of a blond named Spikes. He was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. He was a signalman, which I considered the most romantic of all the Navy jobs. My father learned of my birth when he was in the South Pacific through signal flags. I think it said, “Mother and son doing fine,” something like that. But Spikes, when he worked his flags, every muscle in his body seemed to participate in the procedure, and it was a lovely thing to watch. I still get chills thinking about it today. One of the other officers on the ship told me that he thought that I was spending too much time with Spikes, showing favoritism. I believe that was the way he put it. And I couldn’t imagine what he would have seen in my behavior that would have made him think that, unless it was the time that Spikes was in the hospital having an appendectomy and I went to visit him, which is what naval officers are supposed to do with their enlisted men when they go into the hospital. And Spikes sort of pushed his trousers down — not his trousers, whatever he was wearing in the hospital — so I could see his “war wound,” as he called it. He was a very sweet guy. I still remember him with affection. Nothing, of course, ever happened. I just dreamed of it. As you can tell, I was quite smitten with him. But there was temptation everywhere on board the ship, not just Spikes. During the morning muster, some of the men very proudly wore their morning wood against their thirteen-button flies and made jokes about it. It’s when I realized that something that was very real and powerful for me was just a joke for other guys. They would grab each other’s asses and say, “I’m going to get me some of that,” completely in a joking mood, but it was still homoeroticism. My writing in The Tenderloin caught the attention of Captain Tidd, who could tell that I had a taste for the vivid, and he put me in charge of the welcome-home committees for the ships coming into the harbor. This usually involved tugboats doing a water welcome, which was a huge ejaculation of water to celebrate the arrival of the ships returning home. I worked with some cheerleaders in the Charleston area who participated in some of those welcome-home committees. And then I had the brainstorm of hiring a stripper to be standing on deck and welcoming — doing a little hoochie-cooch on the deck for the men — until the captain said, “Nice try, but this doesn’t happen in the Navy. Civilian women aren’t allowed on board a ship in the Navy.” So we had to come up with another solution. And finally, it happened when the captain said two words: “Get Lurch.” Lurch was a machinist’s mate way down in the hole of the ship who was known for doing all sorts of wild stuff. I knew what he meant, and Lurch immediately volunteered for the job of being in drag, basically, to welcome these ships home. It was an amazing thing to watch. He got into it completely, and I think the guys who were being welcomed home, the ships that were coming in, were more on board than they would have been if we’d had an actual female stripper. Lurch ended up doing the bump and grind to the “Bump and Grind” number from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and ended up in a bright red cocktail dress, tearing it off and shaking his hairy ass at the troops as the ship pulled into the harbor. It was a memorable moment, to say the least. Those first few months on board the ship were a mix of things for me. The terrible awkwardness I felt in my own body and the raging lust that I felt for my shipmates that I knew I had to keep under control. And I did. But it makes those memories so vivid in several different ways. I want to talk to you more about that, and, as a matter of fact, to tell you about my time in Naples, which is coming up, I think. But thank you for coming along today, and I’ll see you soon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe (https://armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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