In 1919, a mid-level Navy official in Newport named Ervin Arnold learned that some sailors stationed there were meeting up to have sex with other sailors and civilian men. Arnold made it his personal mission to root out homosexuality in the Navy.
What followed would come to be known as the Newport sex scandal – culminating in three weeks of military trials, with some of the sailors sent to prison on charges of sodomy and “scandalous conduct.” The incidents became nationally infamous – not just because there were sailors having sex with each other, but for the investigation methods which involved sending sailors out to seduce other sailors and entrap them.
The scandal is the inspiration for a new musical documentary, “Scandalous Conduct, a Fairy Extravaganza,” by co-creators Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida.
“We were drawn to the story for a couple of reasons,” Lawrence said. “It’s high drama, for one thing. It has a lot of real characters involved. The more research we read, the more individual sailors started to have personalities for us. I’m from Rhode Island. Jason’s been here for decades. We feel like we know a fair amount of local history. We know a lot of gay and queer history, and this just was not on our radar at all.”
Starting in 2019, Lawrence and Tranchida delved into the history of the scandal. They knew they wanted to build a project around it, but they weren’t sure if it would be a film, a book, a mini-series, or something else.
“I started thinking of the whole scandal and the project as a sort of opera,” Tranchida said. “There’s all these characters, there’s melodrama, there’s the Navy, there’s water, there’s boats, it was, you know, it’s like all the stuff was there. We don’t write opera, so it didn’t become an opera,” but, he said, they knew “this has to be something performative.”
“Scandalous Conduct” is a three-channel video – three screens linked to a soundtrack. Part of the soundtrack is pulled directly from the Navy’s records. “So the guys who were going out doing the entrapping were known as operators,” Lawrence explained, “and by 10 a.m. every morning they had to file a report detailing what they had done the day before. So we have hundreds of those.”
Here’s an excerpt of one of the reports as used in the piece: “Frederick Hoag, hospital apprentice first class. Hoag was at the YMCA. He met a tall Marine from the torpedo station who he calls his husband. And it is generally known that Hoag is supplying the Marine with money for immoral purposes.”
There are about a dozen men on the screen wearing dress white old-fashioned sailor uniforms. They dance together, approach and embrace each other. Between the different scenes illustrating the testimony, there’s a recreation of a theater performance that was happening just down the street from where the “scandalous conduct” was taking place.
“One of the things we stumbled upon … in our research,” Tranchida said, “was that while the scandal was going on, just like blocks away, the Navy was producing a really elaborate musical, which they’re known to do, but it’s essentially a drag show. All the characters are played by male sailors. It’s a fairytale-themed musical. It’s of the vaudeville era. It’s pretty wacky.”
This was right after the end of World War I, and the Navy was having trouble recruiting. The military of today uses the entertainment of today – they have social media accounts and they consult on video games and movies like “Top Gun” to help boost enrollment. In the early 1900s, they used live theater.
“So we started to unravel it a little bit and that it was sort of a fairytale mashup,” Tranchida explained. “So it involves ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ and ‘Sinbad’ and ‘Puss in Boots.’ But the vaudeville musical was set up in a way it was just almost like a series of vignettes. So this sort of mashup thing made sense. … We actually got our hands on the original 1896 score, and then had an even better idea of what this wacky thing was all about. And then also, you know, the name of the whole name of the musical, it’s ‘The Strange Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk, a Fairy Extravaganza.’ So none of that was lost on us,” he said, ending with a laugh.
Lawrence explained further, saying, “Audio-wise, those are the two sources. Visually, the sailor world, a lot of that was inspired by archival photographs that we found at the archives of the Naval War College because they have tons and tons of photos of what Newport looked like in World War I, and also what the base looked like, and what the sailors looked like.”
Lawrence and Tranchida found many little stories while searching through the archives, but they had to narrow it down to a few for the production. “So just as one example,” Lawrence said, “there’s an Episcopal minister that was being targeted by the Navy who was a chaplain, and there’s also this strange, decorator character that’s kind of sinister. And the two of them are hanging out with this sailor named Jedry. But we know from other reports that Jedry actually was Jack in the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ production. So the Navy is using, if not openly queer, then at least flamboyantly queer, actors playing Jack in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ to promote the Navy.”
“Scandalous Conduct” is presented in the Great Friends Meeting House in Newport, a large but simple building that dates to 1699. “We came into this space, and of course I knew it, and it was sort of a dream of mine to actually film it here,” Tranchida said. “It’s got a vibe, the place feels like a ship, actually. So about 50% of the video is filmed in this space. And then it just made sense to us to be like, oh, you know, what if we present this project in the space that we filmed it, which is actually like half a block away from the Army/Navy YMCA, and sort of ground zero of the scandal itself?”
It’s a great setting to enjoy the piece. You can wander among the three screens as your attention is pulled from one to the other, listening to the reports of the encounters and the recreated vaudeville songs. It’s a fascinating bit of forgotten local history that’s presented in a thoroughly enjoyable way.
“Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza” is open to the public Thursdays through Sundays 12-4 p.m. until Oct. 6 at the Great Friends Meeting House in Newport. Lawrence and Tranchida will also have an artists’ talk this Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
