Scandalous Conduct / Special Recruiting

Shortly after the end of World War I, the United States Navy sparked national scandal when sailors and civilian men alike were targeted in a homophobic undercover operation to root out “immoral acts”.

The young men were recruited by a machinist’s mate and amateur detective named Ervin Arnold, who convinced the sailors to engage in sexual acts with other men and then report their findings back to him over the course of several weeks.

Hundreds of daily reports were written by a group of young men stationed in Newport, Rhode Island in the spring of 1919.

Scandalous Conduct / Special Recruiting is a work in progress presented as an audio recording of the daily reports of the recruited sailors as part of Brown University’s REMAKING the Real Festival.

Scandalous Conduct / Special Recruiting premiered on Wednesday, September 30, 2020.

Remaking the Real

This May, the Brown Arts Initiative (BAI) awarded Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence a Community Development Grant. The grant supports the development of Scandalous Conduct and included development of an audio piece that premiered during the BAI’s Remaking the Real festival.

Remaking the Real is a series of programs considering the ways in which artists, media-makers, and art and media theorists engage with the real - envisioning, re-envisioning, and aesthetically remaking images and narratives of reality so as to bring new possibilities into existence.  Programming will address subjects as diverse as imagining and re-imagining "real stories" in the creative space of documentary practice; mapping and shaping the both persistent and changing realities of marginalized cultures; artistic connections and corrections to historical records and archives; constructing personae as strategies of artistic, authorial, and performative creation; finding "the real" in mixed, "virtual," and immersive realities; and engaging with the fantastical, the dreamlike, the "unreal".

For more information, visit the Brown Arts Institute Website.