Abstract: Drawing from the long tradition of pirate fiction, Our Flag Means Death utilizes the eighteenth-century pirate ship as a fantasy backdrop to explore compulsory heterosexuality, hypermasculinity, and racism while embracing queer potentials. Loosely inspired by the real-life pirates Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach (better known as Blackbeard) the show filters its romantic leads through the queer archetypes of the fop and the leatherman. As the two explore their identities as individuals and as a couple, the show considers both the very real history of these figures and the twenty-first century assumptions about what these aesthetics and tropes represent. Stede and Ed's relationship serves as a testing ground for the boundaries around acceptable masculinity on land and at sea as they each try out how the other side live, eventually determining that existing models of identity are stifling and insufficient for their happiness.
Ziona Kocher (Thu,) studied this question.