Aquatic and Queer
An interactive essay focusing on non-conforming gender and sexuality throughout history and modern interpretations of LGBTQIA+ maritime criminology.
Ancient history
Facts retrieved about the misconceptions and realities of 18th and 19th century piracy.
recent media
Interpretations and news regarding non-conforming pirates the 21st century.
bibliography
A compiled list of research studied. Beware the dangerous waters! Source credibility varies.
Background illustration and writing by Ken Comer for Honors Comp. II, Spring 2023.
Ancient history
aye, aye, matey!
The theorized origin of the pirate catchphrase "matey," matelotage was a form of pseudo-marriage commonly but not exclusively associated with gay and lesbian pirate couples of the 18th century. The parties were delegated with the responsibilities of their matelot's belongings upon death, alongside being those responsible for carrying out their fellow mate's last will and testament.While matelotage was not inherently exclusive to LGBTQ relations, the prevalence of homosexual activity on the high seas increases the likelihood of its popularity pertaining heavily to an influx of romantic and/or sexual relationships among pirates. Andrew Milne’s post “Inside Matelotage, The Same-Sex Partnerships Between Colonial-Era Pirates” suggests the government attempted to flood the shoreside with prostitutes “in hopes that the presence of more women would curb the prevalence of matelotage,” resulting in unofficial polyamorous marriages among the new wives and matelotes, but the credibility of that evidence is to be determined.
Two well-known lesbian matelots, often pointed to as exceptions due to their controversial period of infamousy, are Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Donned in traditionally masculine attire, the women were documented as inseparable lovers on multiple accounts. Both Anne and Mary, temporarily monikered under a male persona “Mark”, were also known for their open physical relations. Despite historical cover-ups suggesting the fact Anne had not known Mary was female during or previous to these intimate moments, evidence to the contrary implies they had known to the contrary for a long time.Recorded snippets of their lives display how serious their relationship was, with Mary killing men that Anne seduced purely to lower their defenses to engage in sabotage afterward out of pure jealousy. Near the end of their careers, after a mutiny by Calico Jack, they lied to the court about both being visibly pregnant to dodge death penalty for their crimes while the rest left to hang. The actuality of their pregnancies has not been proven, but are likely suggested to have been false.
boobs and buggers
During the age of maritime piracy, the terms used to describe homosexual relations and activities were sodomy and buggery, both related to assigned-male-at-birth (AMAB) anal and oral penetration. Its relation to cisgender adult gay men and usage of the penis are heavily implied in legal recountings. Many queer-focused papers for the Golden Age of Piracy have been male-fixated, often leaving popular terms frequently associated with homosexual pirates, such as sodomy, buggery, and “mateys,” to be exclusively penile associated.In terms of non-male-presenting pirates of the time, fixation on the sexual organs of assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB), lesbian, trans, nonbinary, or otherwise, have attributed to gender inequality for generations, to the extent that an entire realm of research has delved into this topic alone, such as “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body.” Written by Fairfield University’s English and Queer Studies professor Sally O’Driscoll, this academic journal outlines the symbolism of female sexuality and roles women partook in societally during the 18th century. As mammary glands have often been cited as symbols of womanhood, oversexualization and exaggeration of them have been attributed to gender inequality for generations.
Stereotypes regarding the weak and pious nature of women during the Golden Age of Piracy led authorities to avert attention away from gay, gender queer, and AFAB pirates, and the gravity of their actions. Names like Maria Lindsey Cobham (Canada's Pirate Queen) have been swept under the rug due to this historical neglect. She and her husband were theorized to have attacked helpless, destroyed ships to loot their goods, killing any victims left in the wreckage. Unfortunately, information on Maria has been stagnant and incredibly difficult to assess for credibility. Greater generalizations on women in terms of maritime crime and taboo activity bring our topic farther inland. Pressured ashore, AFAB criminals would often stay landlubbers act as middlemen for smuggled goods or would receive such goods themselves.Early 2000’s Department Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Margaret Helen Persin, overviewed the typical woman’s life during the height of piracy through early Spanish literature dictated by “Mermaids, Pirates, Women and the Sea in Recent Spanish Poetry by Women.” Referencing a plethora of 18th century creations, Persin dissected the dichotomy between society’s patriarchal romanticism of awaiting a male sea-faring lover and the actuality of the heartbreak women faced during the horrific adaption of life on land. A few of the primary topics explored by AFAB poets during this period included lax gender identity (many poems having been written by trans men) and the struggle between societal expectations and their personal desires. An era of self-discovery, stories of self-accomplishment and individuality swept the culture of female creative writing authors. One example is how sirens are frequently referenced as a narrative tool that analyzes the way the patriarchal gaze of sexualized women can be reversed to empower women for their natural talents and beauty.
Recent Media
modern popularity
Word of Anne Bonny and Mary Read is the most extensive across the academic world, leaving other female and/or nonheteronormative pirates incredibly under-discussed. In fact, the story of their lives is so popular that in 2020 a commissioned marine concrete statue, known as “Inexorable” and sculpted by Amanda Cotton, was erected at the London execution docks. It creation coincided with the publicization of “Hell Cats,” a pay-to-listen, fully voice-acted Audible podcast on Anne and Mary’s lives. The statue itself is a symbolic piece of two roughly outlined figures standing arm to arm, one with flowing hair and both with pieces of their form chunked out. As quoted by PinkNews, “In creating the powerful sculpture, Cotton decided to focus on the women’s incredible personalities and lives instead of their appearances. “The sculpture’s design is a metaphor for Bonny and Read’s personalities – fire and earth,” she said. “Individually they were strong independent women but when Anne (fire) and Mary (earth) combine, they were dangerously unstoppable.””Another reason the popularity of queer maritime piracy has increased in recent years may be the publishing of 2022 a HBO Max television show “Our Flag Means Death.” A comedy set place in the Golden Age of Piracy, LGBTQIA+ characters within the show are written gracefully yet accurately to the standards of the period, with folks of various nonconformative identities battling the oppression of gender and sexuality performance through the escape of maritime crime. A quote from transwoman Youtuber, Jessie Gender, in her half-hour video essay on the subject states, “…the series’ intense historical accuracy dispels the stigma and misconception today that trans people are somehow a new phenomenon or just a fad of the 21st century. Yet, while the show is set in the 17th century, [nonbinary character] Jim[‘s story within the show] also speaks to a need that we have in the 21st century today; a desire for trans people to see [them]selves in [their] totality, both accepted and acknowledged, and getting to thrive and be [their] best selves, while not dismissing or ignoring the harm that societal expectations for [their] gender have caused [them.]”Academic journals that support the claims made by Jessie Gender and “Our Flag Means Death” are credible and various. “Mermaids, Pirates, Women and the Sea in Recent Spanish Poetry by Women.” by Margaret Persin done in 2007 dissected a plethora of topics covering lax gender identity and expression among AFAB historical creations related to 18th century maritime piracy. Ula Lukszo Klein. “Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature.” spoke out about the frequency of cross-dressing among gender queer people during the period and its relations to societal freedoms, aligning perfectly with the story of Jim’s gender transition in Our Flag Means Death. While the TV show heavily focuses on a dominantly male cast, the implications from historical studies on all members of the gender spectrum’s influence on maritime pirate culture heavily suggest that Our Flag Means Death’s historical fiction upholds sustainable accuracy in terms of real-life application.Unfortunately, the popularization of these stories has led to buckets of misinformation spread to coast along the hype and gain traction for various services, malforming the representational power of true stories. Some educational avenues intentionally exploit so, while others simply gather information from unchecked, overtly biased sources, where lack of concrete evidence for many numerous outrageous claims follow. Many news articles created by uninformed journalists’ penny-pushing hunger for subscriptions outright sell poorly researched falsehoods for the public’s entertainment. The top Google search result for “history of gay pirates” comes from a high school newspaper’s personal research story that lacks any citations, Brianne Leber’s article for the Roosevelt Review. While not outright spreading intentional lies, the outrageous unprofessionalism creates a devastating example for the entirety of the LGBTQIA+ historical criminology field but shows how popular the concept is among modern audiences.
examined exploitation
Written two years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt High School senior Brianne Leber, this journal is regrettably a personal narrative on their research and does not have credited sources attached to it. However, the contents are not disproven by the rest of the citations available in this bibliography. Descriptions of phenomena such as matelotage, the pseudo-marriage between pirates, do not contradict the statements shown in B. B. Wagner’s Ancient Origins heavily researched article, “Be My Matelotage! the Civil Union of 17th Century Pirates.” After describing matelotage, Leber continues her article to describe the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. However, the way Leber describes these instances seem unrelated. She does not clarify whether Anne and Mary were matelots, and spreads misinformation on the reality of their pregnancies. As pointed out by Erin Blakemore in JSTOR Daily’s “Women Were Pirates Too,” Anne Bonny and Mary Read claimed to be pregnant to escape from Rackam prison. Whether or not they both bore child has been subject of debate among a multitude of historians. A lack of documented evidence suggests the contrary, at least during the time of their claim. Concisely, Brianne Leber’s worryingly popular search result for queer pirate history is a poorly conducted ruse of an attempt at drafting a convincingly professional newspaper article.An example of a LGBTQIA+ maritime piracy article to approach warily due to a lack of citations is “Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Queer Pirates of the Seas” published by LesbianNews. Articles present on the LesbianNews website normally base their contents around current events such as queer rights in American legislature, female homosexuality in fiction, and the work of underrepresented but notable individuals. However, maxum50’s article on Anne Bonny and Mary Read was written for a category on the news site known as “Flashback Friday” in which hallmarks of LGBTQIA+ activism are given spotlight. While the author’s unprofessional penname grants them a total anonymity necessary for personal safety on the internet, that anonymity harshly debunks credibility their works in terms of lack of background information regarding their previous research. Neglecting to mention matelotage when speaking on the term Boston marriage adds to this lack of credibility, considering the pseudo-marriage between homosexual partners was commonplace among 18th century piracy. However, maxum50 seems aware of the speculatory nature of Anne and Bonny’s sexuality in a manner which assists their credibility into a realm of plausibility. The author dictates similar claims to other researchers such as the two women’s supposed bisexuality, backstories, and quotes. One discrepancy is that, according to maxum50, Mary was forced onto Anne’s crew and made to show her chest to Anne so that she would not seduce Mary in her male persona, avoiding a target on her back by “Calico Jack” Rackam. Without due credit to this claim, this idea can easily fade into the obscurity of simple rumor.Another example of uncredible, incredibly popular search results Andrew Milne’s post “Inside Matelotage, The Same-Sex Partnerships Between Colonial-Era Pirates” to the website “All That's Interesting.” Updated only three days after its initial release, Andrew Milne’s online news article is an interesting beast in terms of quality. The page is rather bland, though nicely coordinated and featuring a soft variety of imagery, juxtaposed by a National Geographic Top 5 YouTube tier list on pirate myths and a use of Wikimedia sources. While the use of Wikipedia is not inherently unacademic, the fact that anyone can edit the site without a need for proof of evidence at any time causes doubt to form for a viewer on the credibility of Milne’s factoids. To demote this heinous act, the rest of his images come from well-known historical resources, such as the National Portrait Gallery and Library of Congress. In the format many online news articles take, keywords work as underlined hyperlinks to a variety of related information sources. Alongside his lack of notable references as an author, Andrew Milne’s work should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the article does not contradict heavily with one of its credited sources, Ancient Origin’s “Be My Matelotage! the Civil Union of 17th Century Pirates.” By B. B. Wagner which has proven credibility in author and content.A final example, among many, to top off the list of shakily credible LGBT+ maritime piracy articles would be Queerstorian’s “Robert Culliford.” Presented in a lighthearted manner, this recounting of the tale of Robert Culliford’s gay union on the high seas sets a clear level of expectation to the reader how they are intended to digest this information. The casual language sets the audience in a listening position akin to a passing conversation. While Queerstorian’s information is supported by other sources of its kind, it falters within the same pit many matelotage defining websites are trapped under, a lack of academic sourcing. The author begins explains theoretical questions and historical background through an eye of skepticism while ignoring historical context and outside sourcing. When the text begins to follow the biographies of Robert Culliford and John Swann, opinionated wording and outright disregard for the word of researchers begins to occur. Queerstorian explains their reasoning behind their deductions in a manner inseparable from their research that can lead a keen viewer to look over this source entirely. While the credibility of Queerstorian is undoubtedly little, the valuable information that comes from this source is how it supports the idea that queer pirate historia has been found under-researched and highly speculatory. The anonymity garnered by online publications spreading falsehoods or misinterpreted half-truths should be a spoken rise for concern.
bibliography
“30. Steinhoff, Heike. 2011. Queer Buccaneers: (De)Constructing Boundaries in the Pirates of the Caribbean Film Series.” English & American Studies in German, vol. 1, no. 1, Dec. 2012, pp. 66–68. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1515/east-2011-0032.
Blakemore, Erin. Women Were Pirates, Too. JSTOR Daily, 6 May 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/women-were-pirates-too/.
Boissoneault, Lorraine. “The Swashbuckling History of Women Pirates.” Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution, 12 Apr. 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/swashbuckling-history-women-pirates-180962874/.
B. R. Burg. Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean, Second Edition. NYU Press, 1995. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=342271&site=eds-live.
Cheng, Dorothy. “Liberty in Piracy.” Journal of Undergraduate Studies Winter, vol. V, no. 1, 1 April 2017, pp. 77-80. Trent University Library & Archives, https://ojs.trentu.ca/ojs/index.php/just/article/view/115.
Dalby, Paul. “Canada's Pirate Queen.” Canada's History, Canada's History Society, 9 Jan. 2016, https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/women/canada-s-pirate-queen.
Douglas Catterall, and Jodi Campbell. “Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800.” Brill, 2012. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=489719&site=eds-live.
Earl, Jessie. “Our Flag Means Death: The Real History of Transgender Pirates.” Youtube, uploaded by Jessie Gender, 13 May 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQJ3NZqFtyQ.
Gilmer, Brittany. “Invisible Pirates: Women and the Gendered Roles of Somali Piracy.” Feminist Criminology, vol. 14, no. 3, July 2019, pp. 371–88. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117741361.
Johnston, Dais. ‘Our Flag Means Death' Finally Portrays Historical Queerness Correctly. Inverse, 3 Mar. 2022, https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/our-flag-means-death-historical-queerness-nonbinary-trans-stories.
Keegan, Nicole. “Men and Matelotage: Sexuality and Same-Sex Relationships within Homosocial Structures in the Golden Age of Piracy, within Homosocial Structures in the Golden Age of Piracy, 1640-1720.” Undergraduate Library Research Awards, 2, 15 Dec. 2020, https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/ulra/awards/2021/2.
Kelleher, Patrick. Two Swashbuckling Queer Female Pirates Erased from History Commemorated with Powerful New Statue. PinkNews, 29 Nov. 2020, https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/11/29/anny-bonny-mary-read-pirates-hell-cats-podcast-audible-statue/.
Laura Sook Duncombe. Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas. Chicago Review Press, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1413511&site=eds-live.
Leber, Brianne. “History of Gay Pirates.” The Roosevelt Review, 17 May 2021, https://therooseveltreview.org/25313/op-ed/history-of-gay-pirates/.
maxum50. “Anne Bonny and Mary Read: Queer Pirates of the Seas.” Lesbian News, 7 Oct. 2016, https://lesbiannews.com/anne-bonny-and-mary-read-queer-pirates-seas/.
Milne, Andrew. Inside Matelotage, The Same-Sex Partnerships Between Colonial-Era Pirates. Edited by John Kuroski, All That's Interesting, 31 July 2020, https://allthatsinteresting.com/matelotage.
Norton, Rictor. “Lesbian Pirates: Anne Bonny and Mary Read.” Gay History & Literature: Essays by Rictor Norton, Lesbian History, 14 June 2008, https://rictornorton.co.uk/pirates.htm.
O’Driscoll, Sally. “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 53, no. 3, Oct. 2012, pp. 357–79. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.23365017&site=eds-live.
Persin, Margaret. “Mermaids, Pirates, Women and the Sea in Recent Spanish Poetry by Women.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol. 84, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 239–54. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820701237480.
Queerstorian. “Robert Culliford.” Matelotage, World Queerstory, 3 Oct. 2020, https://worldqueerstory.org/tag/matelotage/.
Rediker, Marcus. “When Women Pirates Sailed the Seas.” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 4, Sept. 1993, p. 102. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=9403086993&site=eds-live.
Redmond, Edward. “The Incredible Story of a Forgotten Irish Queer Pirate’s Romance Has Been Turned into an Audiobook.” GCN, Gay Ireland News & Entertainment, 22 Dec. 2020, https://gcn.ie/incredible-story-true-irish-queer-pirates-romance-audiobook/.
Rhodes, TS. “Gay Marriage Among Pirates.” The Pirate Empire, Blogspot, 1 July 2013, https://thepirateempire.blogspot.com/2013/07/gay-marriage-among-pirates.html.
Susan Signe Morrison. A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages. Oxbow Books, 2016. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1243061&site=eds-live.
Tucker, Judith E. "She Would Rather Perish: Piracy and Gendered Violence in the Mediterranean." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, vol. 10 no. 3, 2014, p. 8-39. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/552281.
Ula Lukszo Klein. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. University of Virginia Press, 2021. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=2700419&site=eds-live.
Wagner, B. B. “Be My Matelotage! the Civil Union of 17th Century Pirates.” Ancient Origins: Reconstructing the Story of Humanity's Past, Ancient Origins, 18 Sept. 2020, https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/matelotage-0012504.
“Were There Female Pirates?” Royal Museums Greenwich, https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/were-there-female-pirates.