#been steeped in queerness
I’ve seen a lot of people comment on how Our Flag Means Death is refreshing because it’s not a story about ~queer people Being Queer™~ but it’s about queer people doing their thing while happening to be queer, just like straight people get in all the stories about straight people.
And yes, I totally get what it means - Stede’s story is not “coming out as gay”, it’s becoming a pirate captain, Jim’s story is not “coming out as nonbinary”, it’s about revenge, and so on. But it’s also… not quite all of it, in my opinion?
Our Flag Means Death IS about queerness. The plot is a narrative tool to convey messages that are about queerness. Okay, not only queerness – what the show is about in its core is that area of intersection of masculinity, queerness, trauma and identity. So yes, it is about queer people being queer.
What makes Our Flag Means Death refreshing and so, so good to watch is that it does this with love, with sweetness, with lightness despite not shying away from the dark parts of what it talks about. It’s a love letter to men, queer men specifically, written with so much care.
Everyone has pointed out how the men in the show look like regular men, not thirty-year-olds with six packs that play high schoolers on a CW show. And those regular men are shown as attractive, they are attractive, and interesting, and funny, and silly, and capable of love, and also capable of hurting others without meaning to because relationships are complicated and people are hard to figure out and our own selves are super hard to figure out.
In fact, the ideal of attractiveness of the show is very much queer (as in both queer and not imperialistic), and so is the value set of the show. The subtext is queer, and by this I don’t mean the queerness is all in the unsaid and not in the explicit, by this I mean that the unsaid of the show is about the queerness (and the other related topics, of course) in the way subtext is supposed to work, i.e. enriching and giving complexity and facets and depth to the text.
Itis a story about people doing things where the people are queer. But it’s not a story where the people doing the things “happen” to be queer. And that’s the great thing about it. It’s a gift from queer people to queer people (especially men and transmasculine people, but judging from the amount of queer women who are absolutely mindblown by the show, it goes for all of us) and that’s amazing.
