It seems that some Navy ship is currently parked in the Port of Seattle as there’s strapping young lads in sailor suits wandering about all over.
Looking at them, however, I can’t help but feel that they look anything short of dippy and at worst flaming–though the men themselves aren’t pinging my gaydar.
Would you guys say that this is inherent due to the cut and color of the outfit? Or that it’s simply a matter of having seen too many references to sailor outfits as a sexualized symbol?
They certainly looked that way when drawn by Tom of Finland (who likely influenced the Village People).
As for the sailors in your port, you have to consider that yours is not the only gaze and plenty of women likely find them quite attractive.
Men in sailor suits tickle my happy bones.
MG (Married to a merchant navigator and former navy officer).
But is that because of, or in spite of?
So far as I’m aware, any guy in uniform is going to do well in town.
But would you say it looks macho? Or more like cute and huggable?
To me (a straight young man), they don’t look so much gay as boyish. They look like something a kid would wear, like pajamas or something.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. 
No, I like them because they are young, fit and handsome. Almost everybody is at that age, specially if they are in the military. Depending on the country some uniforms are very nice and make them look elegant (Spanish officers have the best uniforms).
My former fiance was also a navy officer (different countries), but it was a complete coincidence. I never saw my ex, nor my husband in military garb. I met them both after they had left the military. The thing that my ex and my husband really have in common is that they are both good at math. I find that sexy in a man.
Long before the Village People became popular, it was pretty much a common stereotype that Gay men were more likely to sign up for the Navy than any other branch of the military. How much of that was true (which I don’t doubt to a certain extent) is up for debate, but you can’t exactly blame/credit the Village People with turning sailor suits into a Gay fetish of sorts - due to that popular stereotype.
There are vintage Gay porn sites that have quite a few photos of men in the military, and the most popular and common is Navy/Sailor outfits - so even back in the late 40’s and early 50’s, this was a popular notion.
I remember taking a sexuality class as a junior at IU and one of the units in our class was on gay lifestyle in early 1900s America - there was some big scandal in the Navy before WWI, sometime really early in the 20th century, where hundreds of homosexual sailors were being found out; they were referred to in the literature from the time as “pogues” or, very matter-of-factly, as “cock suckers.” Like, there was some transcript of an interview that was conducted by the Navy police back then, and they said stuff like, “are you now, or have you ever been a cock sucker?” It looked very silly on paper but I imagine it was considered a big humiliation back then.
That uniform is all kinds of jacked up. Granted, that’s a costume off Amazon.com, and all military costumes seem to make a purposeful effort not to look too similar to the real thing, but it’s still a hot mess.[/soapbox]
In my experience, being a Sailor (in a non-Navy town) can go further than, say, being a Soldier. “Oooh, a Sailor!”, has that exotic connotation to it.
They were probably wearing those dress whites (what you link to) because the Captain made them. Dress whites aren’t very popular because they’re impossible to keep clean and they look silly. But they’re traditional, so what can you do? The real sex-getter is the dress blues, the crackerjacks. Dark fabric, tailored for thin waist and broad shoulders. It’s hard not to look good in those.
There’s gay people in every branch. In the Navy I’ve seen some serve relatively openly, and some highly homophobic spots. Cecil dispelled a couple of the more common myths in his pegboy column. I really think a lot of that “Sailors r teh Ghey” comes from Army guys using it to rag on the rival branch, as all homosexuals are effeminate waifs, apparently.
Since porn is all fantasy, there’s porn of military members across all the branches. Marine is just as common as Army. The only branch trailing up the rear (errr…) is Air Force, probably because Air Force just doesn’t have that mystique that a Sailor or Marine would in the pornographic fantasyland. (So I’ve head.)
lulz
I wore “Cracker Jacks” when I was in the Navy. Much more comfortable than the gabradine crap we wore before.
“The Fleet’s In” by Paul Cadmus was removed from a WPA exhibit in 1934.
It shows The Navy (and The Marines!) ready for several sorts of action…
We knew about the gay stigma attached to us, but we also knew that in reality, homosexuality was more common among the Marines. We just chalked it up on the long ledger of civilian cluelesness of military reality.
(Besides being more gay, Marines were more dumb. This was confirmed to us when several Camp Pendelton Marines were punished for homosexual conduct after making videos in the LA pornogrphy industry, featuring themseves as solo masturbators. They made a deluded protest that it was aimed at a female audience)
We didn’t think the dress whites made us look gay, just childish. (I once had the experience of wearing my dress blues at an I-Hop at the next table to a 4 year old girl dressed identically. Or almost, since her chevrons showed that she outranked me)
What did look gay was what was worn when we went running in the Phillipines:
these on our feet, these on our loins, an olive-drab hand towel around our necks, everthing else exposed to the air.
It always looked gay for Donald Duck. Course maybe the lack of pants had something to do with it.
I think this is it. There’s something hot about knowing things will be NSA (No Strings Attached), and you can even pretend he would have stuck around anyway if he wasn’t just on shore leave for the weekend, if you must.
The first child to wear a sailor costume was Prince Albert, son of Queen Victoria.
To support the OP thesis that there was a homosexual stigma attached to wearing this, the prince did go on to become one of the 19th Century’s most enthusiastic heterosexuals, for whom his favorite Paris brothel built this customblow-job chair. (SFW)
Almost as if Albert had something to disprove, after how he’d been dress as a child
That chair is awesome. 
As for the navy, the following is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill:
“Don’t talk to me about naval tradition - it is nothing more than rum, sodomy and the lash!”
I have noticed many of the world’s naval forces China, Russia, Japan have a version of that uniform style than the other military branches. The world’s Navies really do stand quite apart in style from the others, why?
I’m trying to work out in my head how the users positioned themsleves.
