Do you have to be gay to be a pirate
History of Gay Pirates
I had set out to write a light hearted story about gay pirates this week; however, along my journey, I found out some pretty horrible information about pirates. This is my warning: while this story sounds very funny, and has some fun moments, there is a discussion of sexism and prostitution. Be mindful of the difficult topics this article includes.
The finest way to launch this article is by establishing the social context for the time. Alike sex relationships were highly stigmatized on land and illegal in most places. Piracy however was known for rejecting societal standards and expectations. Some pirates went as far as baptisms in sea water, brand-new names, and completely leaving behind their past identities.
Queer relationships at sea were not uncommon during the Golden Era of Piracy (1650-1730s). Relations between men was often encouraged. At the moment, men on ship knew more about their crew mates than even their wives and children on land. This drew in a lot of homosexual men to piracy.
Pirates had their possess form of civil union called matelotage. These unions could range in definition (fraternal, platonic, sentimental, etc.) but were respected among most pirate crews.
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So my family has a Gay Pirate Plate.
Stay with me.
We do not recognize how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This entity a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Queer Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.
I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.
It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay copy illegally painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.
(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That steal is a flaming lgbtq+. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That copy illegally is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)
Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like
The Problem with “Gay Pirates”
The major issues with the song “Gay Pirates” by Cosmo Jarvis are twofold, somewhat intertwined, and as follows:
1. gratuitous torture porn, and
2. historical inaccuracy.
A quick look at the lyrics shows us this song really, REALLY wants to tell us all about every single horrible thing Cosmo Jarvis thinks a gay pirate would go through. Not even twenty seconds into the song itself, we are explicitly informed that at least one of the gay pirates is gang-raped every single night by the rest of the crew. You’d think that’d be enough torture for one homosexual love ballad, but wait, there’s more!
They are given saltwater to drink (which is essentially a death sentence); thrashed, whipped, AND lashed (again, you’d think just one flogging with a cat-o’-nine-tails would do the trick, but no); and forced to walk in glass-filled sandals, which sounds appreciate a great way to sever a tendon and be rendered permanently lame, if not hit an artery and bleed the fuck out.
Add all that together, and “Gay Pirates” starts to look a bit like Saw at sea. It’s not just the unbelievable volume of the torture Sebastian’s boyfriend goes through, it’s the odd spe
READING HISTORY
On 28 December 1720, a court was convened in Spanish Town, Jamaica, whose audience bore witness to one of the Golden Age of Piracy’s penultimate acts of defiance. The last verdict decreed that the prisoners: ‘go from hence to the Place from whence you came, and from thence to the Place of Execution; where you, shall be severally hang’d by the Neck, ‘till you are severally dead.’ A unattached moment later, the prisoners played their trump card, claiming that they were both pregnant, and so the court was brought to a standstill. By ‘pleading their bellies’ as it was called, both women could not be hanged for their piratical crimes, and so they were granted a linger of execution, acting for a unique moment in the wider history of piracy. The two women in question were Anne Bonny and Mary Read, now known the society over as the pirate queens, or the Hellcats of the Caribbean.
As we have previously explored in Pirates Legends III, Bonny and Read’s story represents one of the Golden Age of Piracy’s most notable acts of defiance. In their challenging of the norms of their age in such a spectacular way, they continue to epitomise the social rebellion view of pirac
But I don't think this answers the question. Pirates were referred to at the time, as "Gaye Fellowes". What's up with that? Why is the pos so often used?
The proof is, pirates WERE same-sex attracted. They were NOT homosexual.
The secret here is that words change in sense, and the word "Gay" has changed a lot since it came into the English language.
When I write this - that words change in essence - I can almost hear someone shouting, "No, they don't! Words denote things. They always imply the same things. Just look in a dictionary!" Yes, I know, the idea that language isn't always the same is disturbing to some people. But language NEEDS to change, to keep up with our changing society. And if you question me, get a duplicate of the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives the history of the sense of each word it contains, and start reading up on how the meanings of some words has evolved.
Sometimes new words come i