Boy at Sea

Kenny Roper has seen too many movies about WWI to hang around and be caught in the draft of WWII. If he goes down, let it be in water and not in trenches. He joins the U. S. Coast Guard. He won't have to go overseas, will he? Guess again, Kenny. You're in for a rude awakening, as well as a riotous and raunchy adventure. 'Do you like girls?" he is asked in the examination room. What do they think, he's antisocial? So begins Boy At Sea, a novel that, as the title suggests, is about conflicted sexuality as revealed through the picaresque adventures of a college freshman-turned-sailor. Kenny meets great guys on ship and on land, but none so intriguing or troubling as blond gunner's mate Blake, stationed aboard the same destroyer escort in the South Pacific. Kenny's travels take him from Wilmington and other parts of California to New York and Boston, Brisbane, Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone and Alaska. He experiences the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1943 and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, but nothing sears itself into his consciousness like his relationship with Blake.