McKee scours sailors' diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews to uncover the lives and secret thoughts of British men of the lower deck. From working-class childhoods to the hardships of finding civilian employment after leaving the navy, the former sailors speak with candor about the naval life. Illustrations.

SAILOR MAN is an examination of the combat service of James Preston Nunnally, an underage enlistee aboard the USS Fuller in the Pacific Theater during WWII. Popularly known as the "Queen of Attack Transports," the Fuller received a wartime high nine battle stars for participation in that number of invasions. Nunnally was a crew member for seven of those actions (Bougainville, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, the Philipinnes-twice, and Okinawa). It is primarily based on letters Nunnally wrote to his son four decades after the events occurred in an attempt to explain why he had abandoned his son and digressed into a life of alcoholism. In addition to Nunnally's letters, other documents are used, such as a semi-official accounts of the Fuller's actions written in 1945, and interviews with Nunnally's son and sister.

In the title story of Sailor Men, Maki is best friends with Kana, but he never thought of him in any other way. Until one night, Kana dresses up in a sailor uniform to entertain everyone. Suddenly, Maki finds he has feelings that he doesn't quite know what to do with. And Maki's just one of several young men falling in love and lust in the hot romances told within Sailor Men.

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans. Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and the pride of the British fleet. Hello Sailor! uniquely shows what it was like to be queer at sea at a time when land meant straightness.

"It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice... are all obvious." The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

In the old days when American sailing ships still plowed the seas, it was the custom of their sailors to enliven both their work and their leisure time with song. The songs they used were not, generally speaking, those current and popular ashore at the same period, but were traditional compositions of unknown date and authorship, growing as all folk-song does out of the needs and experiences of men. These songs of the sea have in every line of their verses and every bar of their music the distinctive flavor of seafaring. They are of equal interest to students of folk-lore and to those who love the memory of old days spent on blue water; and it is with both in mind that this work has been undertaken.