My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

15. Trying to Remember

Trying to Remember Although Bérubé never finished his book on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, he did produce several incomplete drafts, each one approaching the material in a different way. In this selection, drawn from a draft he wrote in 2003, he experimented with using a first-person voice to present this history. He injects himself, the interviewer, into the narrative , thus allowing readers to see something of how he worked as an oral historian. The approach gives this account of labor struggles in the 1930s and 1940s an immediacy as it draws the reader into the lives and homes of these historical actors. The excerpt illustrates Bérubé’s commitment to preserving the stories of an older generation of gay activists, many of whom have died since he conducted his interviews. I first met Stephen “Mickey” Blair, who called himself a working-class queen, in 1983 at his home in Seattle. A former boyfriend of mine, Chip Parker, and his lover, Gregg Kasner, introduced us. My friends knew I wanted to talk to older gay men, as I called them, who sailed as merchant seamen. I’d heard fantastic stories about how, from the 1920s into the 1950s—the golden age of luxury liners—hundreds of “queens,” as they called each other, sailed in the stewards departments of the big passenger ships, put on drag shows for their shipmates, became active in their multiracial unions, and were even elected as union leaders. Legends too outrageous to believe, I thought. But I needed to know for sure, because I wanted them to be true. My memory takes me back to the morning we first meet. Stephen, who spent decades serving meals to passengers and crew, cooks me what he calls a “whore’s breakfast”—scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, pancakes with maple syrup, strawberries, muffins, toast, coffee, and orange juice—which he spreads out for me banquet-style on his kitchen table. “It’s what the girls ate to get their energy back after a long night’s work,” he explains, then suddenly remembers one of his stories. This one’s about Unpublished manuscript, 2003. 15 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • trying to remember : 271 mcsu members Frank McCormick and Ted Rolfs. Courtesy of the Allan Bérubé Collection at the glbths, San Francisco. Frank Bowers, a queen he worked with in the stewards department of the coastal passenger ships run by the Alaska Steamship Line. “Miss Bowers would always get the whores going from Seattle up to Alaska for the season,” he begins. “One time, a group of girls and their madam called him to their table.” Stephen performs the women summoning the waiter by clapping his hands three times. “Miss Bowers—he was blocky and short and tough—walked over to see what the women wanted. “‘Good morning ladies, how many in your party?’ “‘Well there’s six of us,’ they said, ‘six old whores!’ “‘No, no,’ he said, ‘seven!—I’m here now!’ “I tell you,” Stephen laughs, “that fucking dining room would rock and roll!” Stephen had lived in this West Seattle house—one of the only places he ever felt at home—with his life partner, Frank McCormick, from the 1960s until Frank succumbed to lung cancer in 1977 at the age of eighty. “Frank died in my arms at the table here,” he tells me. At first, Stephen doesn’t talk much about Frank. Each time he says his partner’s name, he grows quiet, then changes the subject. But over the years, his story of their relationship slowly comes out, sometimes in a single detail, other times in outbursts of praise or tears. “I met Frank during the ’36 seamen’s strike in San Francisco,” Stephen tells me one afternoon. Frank had found work as a waiter on the luxury liners of the Matson Line after being kicked out of the navy for allegedly 272 : a labor historian making an advance at a fellow sailor. As a member of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, he organized seamen’s support for the 1934 longshoremen ’s strike on the West Coast. During the national seamen’s strike in 1936, Frank, who then was thirty-nine, was organizing strike activities when nineteen-year-old Stephen came to San Francisco looking for work, after also being kicked out of the military on homosexual charges. “I was in disgrace,” Stephen tells me. “I couldn’t go home. My...