Loose Lips: A Gay Sea Odyssey

by Joseph Brennan

Overview

Dockyard mansex adventurer Olli Turner has stowed away on the biggest ship the world has ever known, forced to set sail incomplete.

Built up rivet by rivet through his formative years, RMS Queen Elizabeth watched over Olli's sexual awakening. Staying with her seems to promise passage to a new world of landed men. 

Yet in March 1940 war is churning. That short coastal voyage to Southampton he was expecting turns into a daring dash across the Atlantic and plants instead seeds of a years-long life at sea.

Conspiring undercurrents sabotage his troopship to troopship bounce as need for a place, however perilous, in arms of to-war men proves a powerful piece in this war's chess match of primal evils.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780645555318
Publisher:	Hard Crossing Press
Publication date:	11/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Joseph Brennan, PhD is an authority on gay pornography published by Oxford University Press. This is his debut novel and just the start of the stories he has planned. Discover more at josephbrennan.com

Table of Contents

I. PART ONE

1. Queen Elizabeth

2. Normandie

3. Mauretania

II. PART TWO

4. Queen Mary

5. Elizabeth

6. Aquitania

III. PART THREE

7. Île de France

8. President Coolidge

9. Romsey

Editorial Reviews

2023-01-05
A young Scottish man sneaks aboard a World War II transport ship in this debut gay erotic novel.

February 1940. The son of a shipbuilder’s agent, young Oliver Turner experienced his sexual awakening at the Glasgow shipyard in the arms of the men laboring to build the RMS Queen Elizabeth. It’s only appropriate then that he should stow away on the completed ocean liner as a means of escaping his dreary existence in Glasgow for a life of high adventure. He’s caught almost immediately, but luckily the man who discovers him, Senior First Officer Robert Bell, is willing to stay silent in exchange for making Ollie his shipboard plaything—a desirable amenity on a long voyage. But Ollie soon learns that the ship’s maiden voyage will not be ferrying passengers across the Atlantic. Now that war has begun, the Queen Elizabeth has been commandeered to transport British troops to foreign battlefields, dodging U-boats and the Luftwaffe along the way. The resourceful stowaway doesn’t keep to one ship but finds himself serving across a fleet’s worth of vessels, picking up lovers along the way. Ollie quickly discovers that life aboard a ship during wartime is no picnic—even when there are plenty of willing sailors to share a bunk with. Brennan’s prose is dense and wry, filled with colorful comparisons between ship parts and sailors’ anatomies: “His success with securing the roughest of men meant he had honed a skill for knowing—to draw from his shipyard wanderings—which of the men rendered hard through the toughest of ship-building tasks would want to rivet his hole soft.” The writing may prove a bit ornate for some readers, and there is some confusion at times as to which character is being referenced in the litany of he’s and him’s. Even so, fans of gay stories at sea should enjoy this immersive and period-specific picaresque, which manages to capture its milieu in a way that feels simultaneously timeless and contemporary.

An engaging tale about a gay stowaway on British navy ships during wartime.

Kirkus Reviews