VICE Reports: Pilgrims Were ‘Super Gay’
Peter D'Abrosca
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Vice published an enlightening Thanksgiving piece Thursday about the alleged “super gay” nature of the colonial Pilgrims.
“Dig into the history and you’ll see plenty of early American colonizers were super gay—and their compatriots had views of it that were complicated, to say the least,” the piece was sub-headlined.
Those darn Pilgrims and their non-acceptance of the LGBTQIA community back in the 1600’s.
“According to historians and original records, the pilgrims founded an unusually queer society—one that wasn’t straight-up accepting of all that queerness, per se, but had a more complicated relationship with it than you might think,” the piece said. “In fact, as historians note, the name ‘Merrymount’ can also refer to a Latin phrase meaning ‘erect phallus’—quite a coincidence, given the men erected an 80-foot pole in the center of town.”
The publication did make sure to note that the Pilgrims’ understanding of human sexuality was not as polished ours in the current year, though.
Apparently there’s a guy at Harvard that studies all this, because what else with they do with that huge endowment?
“[Indigenous] gender roles—not all the time, but a considerable amount—were completely foreign to the Europeans. Every tribe had their own word for it, but there was a considerable amount of gender fluidity,” Professor of Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Michael Bronski told Vice.
“[C]learly, they were f****** before they were married,” the noble academic added.
Not all of the Pilgrims were gay, Vice noted. There was still some of that 1600’s Puritan traditionalism going on in the colonies. Sodomy was apparently punishable by death back in those days. But that did not stop the more promiscuous of Pilgrims.
“My reading of this is that the Puritans were like, ‘people do this stuff, but it really shouldn’t be public,’” Bronski reportedly said. “‘We don’t want to go too far punishing them, because that would hurt the community.’ The most important thing is to keep the community stable.”
And there you have it – the true story of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims were gay.
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