I asked this question many years ago, but didn’t get much success. Thought I would try one more time.
In the late 70’s, when I was living in NYC, there was an article (Village Voice?) about a book that claimed many of the famous pirate ships of yore were actually groups of homosexual men, not the typical Hollywood swarthy types to lust after women on shore leave. They showed an old poster than had been posted in NYC warning, “Keep Your Young Boys Away From The Docks!” and it went on to say that 12-14 year old boys would be snatched by pirates and taken onto ships as pegboys and never heard from again.
The article mentioned several old newspaper clippings in major ports of call about “perversions” common among pirates on the ships, and claimed that some bars in port cities were turned into defacto Gay bars when these pirate ships would dock and the crew would swarm into a bar, hitting on other men and recruiting them to join their ship.
I have never been able to find the book that was referenced, nor the article…it could have been in the New Yorker, or any other NYC magazine - this was way back about 1978 or 1979. I know I read this article/book review and can recall sitting at a cafe reading it and making a mental note to buy the book they were talking about.
Has anyone run across a book on this subject, or an article?
First, consider the source. A New York based magazine in the 1970s? Back when every all-male group or society that ever existed, including Jesus and his disciples, was called covertly gay? Sounds like an agenda at work.
Second, I would be sceptical as to the practicality of a group of gays organizing their own shipboard society. Piracy was first and foremost about making money. I can’t see that you could have a functional working group of men while having the ship be a floating bathhouse. The sexual politics alone would wreck the kind of order needed to run a ship and be efficient plunderers.
Homosexual behaviour was pretty commonplace among pirates; at one point the French government sent women to Tortuga or some such dump to try to cut down on all the ass-humping.
Now, somehow I don’t think this was so much a case of homosexuals becoming mariners as it is that mariners turned to gay sex in the absence of available females.
The Simpsons made a joke along these lines in one episode. Apu went to the docks to deliver a stash of girlie magazines to the ship captain, who thanked him by saying, “They’ll keep my men from resorting to homosexuality … for about ten minutes!” And the sailors around him all laugh knowingly.
I don’t doubt that homosexual activities went on with pirate ships, but I wouldn’t trust a poster like this to be telling the truth. There are plenty of young boys during any historical period who join gangs, pirate crews, outlaw bands, etc. Warning them that they’ll get it up the rear is a better way to make the life seem less appealing than trying to warn them about scurvy or prison.
What I have is mostly WAG – because I’d heard it on some humor website, like Cracked, or something like that. But you may be able to google for my info, and then find a citation. Anyway, what the web page said was that pirates may have had intercrural sex (between the thighs,) because anal sex and fellatio are not pleasant prospects, when people don’t have access to running water for a good wash.
Agh … missed edit window. My point was, the description of the practices in the OP’s quote doesn’t match standard practices of gay men of the time period and environment. The site also mentioned that these men wouldn’t be circumcised for example, and without copious water, keeping clean enough for contemporary gay practices wouldn’t be possible. So that helps put the “scholarlyness” of that article in question.
Pirates floating on the ocean don’t have access to water? What?
It’s true they didn’t have running water, with plumbing pipes all through the wooden ship, but neither did other ships (or even most houses of that time, in fact). And salt water works for washing – most of our sailor through WWII and later had salt water showers rather than fresh water for bathing.
of that article in question.