Since you're all about sea shanties these days, WHO WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRACY?

Now, a lot of what we're about to tell you is the subject of debate, because history, when written down, tends to elide homosexuality. Therefore, there's nothing in history which outright says "these pirates were hella gay and marrying each other all across the high seas".
So, among pirate communities during the golden age of piracy, there was an arrangement called "matelotage". Crew members could form a bond together where one would inherit the other's wealth - rather like a marriage.
Now, some say that matelotage was a strictly economic arrangement for division of assets, but tbh, that's what a conventional marriage is, so.
There was definitely passion involved in some matelotages - for example, when Captain Bartholomew Roberts stabbed a crewman for being rude to him, the dead man's matelot got VERY angry, confronted his captain furiously... and Roberts stabbed him, too. Then had him beaten.
One of the more famous matelotages was between Robert Culliford and John Swann. They lived together openly, with Swann being referred to as "a great consort"... these guys properly shared a life together.
As we said, there's no hard evidence that any of these men were in romantic or sexual relationships with their matelots, but on balance of probability, it's statistically unlikely no men were jolly rogering each other when spending a long time at sea in one another's company.
In the Royal Navy, it was definitely acknowledged that men often shagged each other at sea, and they made that very illegal, punishable by whipping and even death. Pirate ships, though, didn't have these restrictions, separating themselves from rules of empires
Then there's Tortuga. The French governer of Tortuga was a little concerned by the gender balance on the island - it was, frankly, a sausage fest, and it's likely some pirates were living openly in same sex relationships. So Le Vasseur decided to try to solve it.
1650 women were brought to Tortuga, a mix of prostitutes and criminals, to try to civilise these horny, horny gay pirates. It was a nasty and misogynistic arrangement as women were sold off at auctions.
And it also didn't exactly curb the same sex relationships among pirates; some of them formed three-way relationships between their matelot and a woman. So now we have POLYAMOROUS BI PIRATES
We'd be remiss in this thread if we didn't also do a quick shout-out to Ann Bonny and Mary Read, about whom there's a cool story that each fell for the other's disguise as a man, and then fell for each other and formed a cross-dressing wlw pirate relationship.
(but that story probably isn't true, sadly. At some point we WILL do a thread on Bonny and Read though because they have some amazing stories we'd like to tell you about that aren't really relevant here)
Ultimately, there is no concrete proof of any homosexual relationships between pirates, because same sex love is scrubbed away by those who write and collate histories. But from where we're sitting, it looks a lot like they had gay marriage.
goodness, this blew up, here is the obligatory soundcloud: https://t.co/Hv6AVMiTXd

More from Society

A long thread on how an obsessive & violent antisemite & Holocaust denier has been embraced by the international “community of the good.”

Sarah Wilkinson has a history of Holocaust denial & anti-Jewish hatred dating back (in documented examples) to around 2015.


She is a self-proclaimed British activist for “Palestinian rights” but is more accurately a far Left neo-Nazi. Her son shares the same characteristics of violence, racism & Holocaust denial.

I first documented Sarah Wilkinson’s Holocaust denial back in July 2016. I believe I was the 1st person to do so.

Since then she has produced a long trail of written hate and abuse. See here for a good summary.


Wilkinson has recently been publicly celebrated by @XRebellionUK over her latest violent action against a Jewish owned business. Despite many people calling XR’s attention to her history, XR have chosen to remain in alliance with this neo-Nazi.

Former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP is among those who also chose to stand with Wilkinson via a tweet.

But McDonnell is not alone.

Neo-Nazi Sarah Wilkinson is supported and encouraged by thousands of those on the Left who consider themselves “anti-racists”.
Tomorrow, January 6th, MAGA chuds, Proud Boys, and white supremacists are planned to descend on Washington D.C. to contest the election. Among them will be NSC-131, a New England based neo-Nazi organization. Let's welcome them by saying hi to one of their members, Eddie Stuart!


Edward Stuart, from Chester, New Hampshire, has been a member of Nationalist Social Club (NSC) since the very beginning and is a staple participant in their actions. He is known in NSC chats as "Carl Jung" and is well connected in the New England Nazi scene.
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NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that was started in Massachusetts in early 2020 by Chris Hood. You can learn more about NSC and it's members in these threads:


Eddie describes his ideology as "Esoteric Hitlerism" which is an occult form of Nazism that literally worships Adolf Hitler as a god, or, specifically, as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. Here is Ed holding the RigVeda with some of his occult Nazi pals. Interesting Ed!
4/


Much of this ideological insight was gained from Eddie's Twitter, where he originally used his "Carl Jung" persona and reposts explicit neo-fascist content and racist memes. In one edited picture, Eddie can be seen at an NSC event in late June 2020 holding a Nazi Sonnenrad flag
5

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x