Fleet Week NYC: Gay Events Schedule For 2016 Celebration Of Sea Services Promotes Equality And Diversity
Fleet Week NYC has kicked off in the Big Apple, and hoards of sailors are in New York City to celebrate and honor the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. The annual festival serves another equally important purpose: Fleet Week NYC’s gay events schedule for the 2016 celebration of sea services promotes equality and diversity in a sector traditionally dominated by males and hampered with homophobia and sexism. This year’s offering for Fleet Week’s out and proud sailors is enough to welcome the Fleet’s LGBTQ community with open arms, if not free drinks, deals at the bar, boat parties, and gay discos. With this smorgasbord of Fleet Week gay events encouraging the thousands of people who serve their country to be proud of who they are, Fleet Week NYC represents a liberal culture that is desperately needed within naval and military services of other countries around the world.
This year’s Fleet Week in New York City boasts an events schedule with something for everyone, and the week of naval festivities is well known for enlivening the nightlife of NYC with world class parties and discos. Paper Magazine listed NYC Hells Kitchen club XL’s Fleet Week Party, La Bottega’s Do Ask, Do Tell cocktail party deal at a third of the price and a screening of Top Gun at the Intrepid as some of those events that were popular among the fleet’s gay sailors last night. Tonight’s Fleet Week gay events include East Village bar-hopping – featuring a visit to gay favorite, The Cock NYC – and Sunday, leather-loving sailors can visit the Eagle’s legendary beer bust on their rooftop with a view.
With Fleet Week NYC’s 2016 gay events and city-wide festivities often taking center stage, many of the other important aspects of the celebration of U.S. sea services can go unnoticed.
Fox 5 reports that community service is also an important part of Fleet Week in New York.
“Fleet Week is not just about the ships, the sailors and the socializing. It’s also about community service. 30 volunteers from the U.S. Navy, Marines and Coast Guard spent the day in Harlem giving the gymnasium at the Graham Windham Manhattanville After School Center a much-needed makeover,” reports Fox 5. “Another 20 were in Coney Island repairing a home still damaged by Superstorm Sandy.”
CBS 8 reported on the significant progress made by sea services since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” days when, in June last year, a Naval Air Station in San Diego held the first ever Navy gay pride event during Pride Month.
“Three keynote speakers were there, including Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, [who is] the first openly gay presidential candidate, Jacquelyn Atkinson, chairperson for the San Diego LGBT Veterans Wall of Honor, and Sheri Swokowski, a retired army colonel with more than 30 years of service. She’s the highest ranking openly transgender service woman in the whole country,” reported CBS.
“They are celebrating their diversity of more than 3,900 personnel, including 800 active-duty military.”
With a history of excluding women from enlistment in sea services, Associated Press reported that the U.S. Navy came under fire for a brochure featuring allegedly sexist wording in April this year.
“The U.S. Navy said…it scrapped a national recruiting mailer that promised women they can enlist without compromising their feminine side and pursue careers that ‘most girls aren’t even aware of’,” reported AP.
Navy spokesman Nate Christensen told AP that sexism was not intended by the wording and noted that women have “shown great courage and sacrifice” in the sea services, and many missions “simply could not be accomplished” without them.
While women and members of the LGBT community remain a minority in the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard, Fleet Week NYC’s gay events schedule for the 2016 celebration of sea services promotes equality and diversity in a sector traditionally dominated by males and hampered with homophobia and sexism.
[Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images]
