re: Black Sails is Fantastic

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yep, the story could have been told exacly the same or better if flint wasnt gay. that is a fact.

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But this wasnt pushing an agenda. They just made him a bisexual character.

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But this wasnt pushing an agenda

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They just made him a bisexual character.

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There were actual pirates who liked other dudes

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it's not like it was something thrown in there just for the sake of having some homosexuality in it.

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I mean I thought the ending was pretty gay

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His inappropriate relationship with Thomas and Miranda was central to the entire story. The whole reason Flint is so driven is because of that relationship that ruined them all. It's actually a pretty well conceived plot device.

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was their? how do you/they know?

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so you dont.... so why even have this in a pirate story.

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More pertinent to our subject is Arthur Gilbert’s “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861,” Journal of Social History, 1976. Gilbert suggests there’s some basis to the belief that the Royal Navy’s traditions consisted of “rum, sodomy, and the lash” (a witticism often misattributed to Winston Churchill). While conceding that “it is impossible to judge the incidence of buggery in the military,” he goes on to quote one British officer as follows: “I have been stationed, as you know, in two or three ships….On the D—, homosexuality was rife, and one could see with his own eyes how it was going on between officers. I have been told that in some services (the Austrian and French, for instance), nobody ever remarks about it, taking such a thing as a natural proceeding: that may be so or not; but in any case, nobody was ‘shocked’ on board either the A— or the B—. There were half a dozen ties that we knew about.…To my knowledge, sodomy is a regular thing on ships that go on long cruises.”

Still, Gilbert suggests, common is one thing, brazen is another. British naval buggery, however prevalent, was necessarily discreet: Sodomy was officially considered a grave offense, and punishment was harsh. Buggery “comyttid with mankynde or beaste” was first made a capital crime by Henry VIII in 1533; naval buggery was specifically made a hanging offense in 1627. In 1806 there were more hangings in England for sodomy than for murder. Punishment could be brutal even if you escaped the noose. A sailor convicted in 1757 of raping a boy received 500 lashes; in 1762 two seamen received 1,000 lashes each for consensual sex. That was an extreme case, but average lash counts for morals offenses were often double those for mutiny and desertion. Officers weren’t exempt: Capt. Henry Allen of the sloop Rattler was executed for sodomy in 1797, and Lieutenant William Berry was hanged in 1807 for buggering a boy. Conclusion: Whatever may have gone on beneath the poop deck, sex with boys at sea was never openly tolerated in the Royal Navy, let alone made a fixture of the officers’ mess.

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