Join the Rhode Island Historical Society on Tuesday, October 1st, for a discussion with Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence about their multi-channel musical documentary Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza. The project uses first-person reports to tell the story of the 1919 Newport Sex Scandal, an entrapment sting targeting LGBTQ+ service members conducted by the United States Navy shortly after the end of World War I. The scandal marks an important moment in LGBTQ+ history, military history, and Rhode Island history, though few people today know that it ever happened.
In February 1919, a machinist’s mate named Ervin Arnold was shocked to learn about an underground queer culture centered in Newport, Rhode Island. He personally set in motion a covert and highly unethical operation that ultimately implicated everyone from the city’s clergy to the station commander’s wife to the cast of a Vaudeville musical to future president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Tranchida and Lawrence began researching the Scandal in 2019, and have spent the last year creating the piece, juxtaposing frank and often alarming reports about soliciting “fairies” with choreographed re-creations of archival photographs—several pulled from the Rhode Island Historical Society Library—and adaptations of numbers from the Navy’s production of the Barnet and Sloane musical The Strange Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk: A Fairy Extravaganza.
The project is up in Newport at Great Friends Meeting House through October 6. For more information, visit scandalousconduct.com.
Tickets are free, but registration is required. Sign up now here.