Everyone’s obsessed with the gay pirates of ‘Black Sails’ now that the adventure drama is streaming on Netflix
Black Sails.The adventure first aired on Starz back in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Part prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s lit classic Treasure Island, part historical fiction, the series drew from real people and places of the past to tell an epic story set during the “Golden Age Of Piracy” filled with sea-faring scallawags, scandal, and sex (it was a Starz show, after all!).Black Sails ended its run in 2017, but nearly a decade after its premiere, its found a second life on Netflix, debuting on the platform this month—and quickly sailing into the streamer’s TV Top 10.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.And as new fans of the show are coming to learn: The pirate life?
Yup, it was pretty queer!Not unlike Max’s more recent pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, Black Sails uses the well-argued belief that homosexuality was common on the high seas as a jumping off point to explore a sort of fluid queerness in a number of its characters.Of course, painting a portrait of LGBTQ+ characters during a unique period of world history wasn’t entirely the point of the show, but it’s notable how seamlessly same-sex attractions—and even a little gender f*ckery—were threaded into its many intersecting plot lines.‘Our Flag Means Death’ is back for Season 2 on Max.In simplest terms, Black Sails is set during a time when a sense of lawlessness ruled the oceans and the British colonial empire was hard at work trying to put an end to to it.
