Hello, historians. I know my question must sound rather strange. I stumbled across a non-scholarly "listicle" that implied the existence of gay and bisexual pirates. Being bisexual myself, any idea of more historical record of people with same sex desires existing is tantalizing, but it's important to be skeptical. So I did some digging.
The first source cited by the totally unscholarly website appears to be a book, but it has bad reviews and was discounted in a PhD dissertation I found. (More on that below).
The second source cited in the "listicle" is a queer and gender studies book, which makes me dubious because those tend to overstate the prevalence and importance of LGBT people in history and literature. That source cites a book called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, saying:
Among pirates or buccaneers in the seventeenth century (and perhaps earlier), matelotage was an institution “linking … a buccaneer and another male—most often a youth—a relationship with clearly homosexual characteristics” (128). While the bond of* matelotage* among pirates, as opposed to sailors, was sometimes tainted with abuse—violence was a way of life for many pirates—“the generally recognized bond it created between men and the understanding that an inviolable attachment existed between the two as long as the master wanted it to remain so gave matelotage, a sacrosanct aura among buccaneers” (Burg 1984:128). In some cases, even among pirates, the relationship of matelotage appears to have taken a marriage-like form, with the two matelots sharing all property in common and with the one inheriting all property on the death of the other (Burg 1984:128). It is conceivable that the term bardache, often used, as mentioned earlier, to refer to a male who takes the receptive role in male-male erotic relations, may have been applied to one of the partners in the relationship of matelotage….
But even a source from a GLBTQ encyclopedia says that it's highly doubtful that pirates were at all accepting of homosexuality or homosexual behaviors and that we can never know anyway because of how historical sources and evidence get lost to time.
The third source that the listicle cited doesn't have any readable text, but they only cite it for a definition of matelotage. The fourth source from the listicle is a PhD dissertation, but it's a dissertation regarding portrayals in fiction, rather than something by a historian. I also want to note that a footnote in this dissertation questioned the credibility of two of the above sources:
B.R. Burg’s two general histories of homosexuality in seafaring, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil and Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition are at times forced and unsubstantiated. His biography of Philip C. Van Buskirk’s erotic encounters on the high seas, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail, is much more convincing however. Turley’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, on the other hand, is more sensationalistic than historically accurate.
To save having to dig through a dissertation, I'm going to give the relevant pages (as you would type them into the page number box of the pdf, not the ones actually on the bottom of the page):
The original listicle makes the outrageous claim that:
The French sent hundreds of prostitutes into Tortuga in the mid-1600s, they were trying to counter matelotage. The result was not what they expected. The fluid sexuality of the pirate community welcomed the prostitutes and many engaged in threesomes with the women.
And it links the above PhD dissertation as a source, but I couldn't find it in there. Granted, I didn't read it cover to cover, but I dug around for a little while and didn't see anything. Did that ever actually happen? Or did some internet author hoping to get more site hits make something up and falsely link a source? (Edit: According to these 1 2 3 it was the French governor le Vasseur in 1650. One is uncited, one cites a book that has been called dubious but the third cites Alexandre Exquemelin's History of the Bouccaneers of America... so does that mean that it's possible that it really did happen?)
I've heard that the punishment for gay and bisexual men, or anybody who committed "sexual crimes against nature" in Elizabethan England would be burned at the stake. (The only source I have for that is admittedly wikipedia.) I've also heard that the burning at the stake punishment led to the term "flaming (insert derogatory term for gay/bi men here)". Being burned at the stake sounds horrendous- so would piracy be a way for some of those men to escape potential death for "crimes against nature"?
One last complicating factor: different types/definitions of bisexuality (source here: page 30 of Marjorie Garber's treatise on bisexuality, but they were first outlined by a psychologist, Fritz Klein, in 1978)
Any history of someone falling into any of those categories would be interesting.
So, I've laid out the ghost that I chased. Are there any actually trustworthy sources that would indicate such practices? (Google scholar gave me zero luck.) Is this just something that is wishful thinking on the part of some authors? Will we never know because sources and evidence were lost to history? Even if some pirates engaged in such practices was it incredibly rare? I'm trying to approach this with as much skepticism as would be had by a straight person being told "did you know a bunch of pirates were bisexual?". I'm just an engineer and figured that this is something to ask actual historians for help on.
Erin Mackie in her 2014 Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the 18th Century, has argued that categorical differentiations like straight, gay, or bisexual do not apply to early modern piratical sexuality. Her book includes a chapter on pirate masculinity, and it may be of interest to you.
Thanks to the development of academic history studies on gender and sexuality studies in the last few decades of the 20th century, some historians tried to study sexuality and piracy. Said studies didn't bring about much strong evidence regarding homosexual or bisexual pirates. On top of that, a number of these late 20th-century scholars appeared to be writing more about current political and social issues rather than trying to understand the past better - kind of a projection issue. As a result, there is tons of sensationalism in writing about the subject.
One practice I see engaged in way too much is analysis of period published literature (often fiction) regarding piracy and then using that as direct evidence regarding the sexual activities of the actual pirates of the time. Fictional writings of the era does not equate to evidence for the real pirates.
The hardest thing for people to get around in regards to this whole issue is this concept that pirates were this kind of separate entity from the rest of society. Said idea is currently being cracked by pirate history scholars, such as Mark Hanna and Ed Fox, who are showing pirates still participated in and were even embraced by many communities. Plenty of pirates had wives or married local women in the communities they settled in after pirating. There is also plenty of evidence of pirates interacting with women while they were pirates. The idea that maritime communities had this night and day view of piracy is false. In taking away this pirate separatism idea, I find that these other ideas of pirates running to these supposedly removed and more sexually diverse societies fall apart even more.
Anyway, the evidence of pirates having a kind of sexuality that was typical for period society is readily available while evidence for anything else is practically nonexistent. While that doesn't mean what people today define as homosexual and bisexual today never happened at all among pirates, it doesn't appear to have been anywhere near a common occurrence. A bigger issue is talking about sexuality when today's definitions of it don't fit into period understandings of it. For more on this subject, you might be interested in this previous post on AskHistorians: What was the prevailing view in the age of pirates reguarding sexuality? I ask this in reference of the show "Black sails".