Be Gay, Do (Sea) Crimes: Pirate Tropes and Queer Resistance
As Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, pirate stories thrive on “all the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way.”
“What a ship is, what the Black Pearl is,” says pirate Jack Sparrow, drunkenly watching the horizon, “is freedom.”
When Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl launched into theaters in July 2003, freedom was the ever-present theme of the film. But really, it’s the theme of all pirate media—and always has been. Political, social, and sexual freedom are the turning points of almost every contemporary pirate story. Pirates resist convention; they operate by deviating from the norm, cut from the same storytelling cloth as outlaws, bandits, and highwaymen.
Amidst all this deviance is an undercurrent of queerness, long an established trope of maritime writing, made all the more clear in our modern-day explorations of pirates. Queerness, like piracy, exists outside of societal norms, and it feels easy to draw parallels between homosexual queer enclaves and the brotherhood of pirate outlaws. Queer historicism always runs the risk of ascribing contemporary labels or framings when the culture and language of the time elides definitions, but at least in the case of pirates and piracy, we have quite a bit of evidence for the cultural revolution—and the queerness—that pirates implicitly espouse.
When I set out to write my own pirate novel—Pasha the Storm,[1] released June 30—I knew that I wanted to write a story that played with the tropes and caricatures that had been around since the 1700s. But even during the time when buccaneers were sailing around the Caribbean, the contemporary literature was largely fictive, their exploits used more for inspiration than information.
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Parsing the details of pirate history from pirate story wasn’t strictly necessary to write a novel like Pasha the Storm (an epic fantasy book set in an alternate world), but understanding where these stories began, parsing the politics behind how pirates operated in the Caribbean, and analyzing the corpus of media that has built up the image of the pirate over the past three centuries made my novel stronger, because many readers can—almost instinctively—recognize the disparate parts of a pirate story. To create something fun, exciting, and surprising, I had to figure out where these tropes came from—and decode the queerness at the heart of the pirate legend.
