Our Flag Means Death: "Act of Grace" and "Wherever You Go, There You Are"

(This is the fifth and final [for now] installment of my biweekly recaps of Our Flag Means Death, the HBO Max comedy series that debuted in March 2022 and quickly discovered an adoring fandom. I’ve never seen it! These recaps are only available to paid subscribers.)

• “Act of Grace” (originally aired March 24, 2022)
• “Wherever You Go, There You Are” (originally aired March 24, 2022)

‎While fighting the American Civil War, Union soldiers, hundreds of miles from their homes in the country's northern half, found themselves longing for the comforts of home. These soldiers could not court women from the South for reasons of both practicality (few Southern women wanted to date them) and strategy (those who did were often spies). Thus, they sometimes took it upon themselves to throw an elaborate ball at which several of their comrades would play women's roles. Some of the soldiers who recorded the events of these balls alluded to activities turning sexual among the ball's attendees. Some soldiers even suggested that they themselves had slept with their dates.

I first encountered this historical tidbit in a wonderful comic by Levi Hastings and Dorian Alexander. Hastings and Alexander nod to the fact that historians have often suggested that it is impossible to understand precisely how queer the soldiers attending these balls were. That seems self-evident to me. Surely, several attendees were primarily straight and simply wanted to have fun with their friends. (There have always been queer people, and there have always been allies.) What Hastings and Alexander argue, however, is that the mere existence of these balls opens up a door in the historical record just a crack. And queerness squeezes through that crack. It's always been there if you know where to look.

Our Flag Means Death is a classically structured sitcom, and as such, it has a classically structured will-they/won't-they. Ed and Stede kiss in the first season's penultimate episode. Stede also leaves Ed in the lurch in that episode. He has been sufficiently terrified both by the British Empire, his conscience, and his bad luck with members of the Badminton family into returning to his estranged wife, Mary. Yet Mary previously declared him dead so she could pursue her painting career and her painting instructor, Doug (an amusing Tim Heidecker).

Meanwhile, Ed spends the first-season finale breaking bad, living up to the fearsome legend built around him rather than nursing his heartbreak. Stede doesn't become his worst possible self without Ed around, and he ultimately decides to return to the high seas to pursue his true love. But before he does that, he fakes his own death, which is not exactly the world's most wonderful act. (Granted, he's doing so to help Mary, so if ever there were a wholly selfless reason to fake one's death...)

If you look at the story of these final two episodes, it's a pretty classic sitcom tease of the show's central couple finally getting together... only for circumstances to keep them apart. Tune in next season to see what happens! When done well, this sort of story turn can be exquisitely heartrending, and the Ed/Stede rupture is exquisitely heartrending, to go along with two final episodes filled with dark turns and cliffhangers that function as silver linings. Surely, our two main lovers will come together eventually.

Even as we understand that simply having the characters end up together immediately would be dramatically unsastisfying, we're also annoyed that they're not. The best will-they/won't-theys manage to unspool that tension across many seasons of television, but even the worst ones can usually sustain it for a season or two. The tension inherent to watching two people who obviously belong together but keep acting like they don't functions as a sort of renewable dramatic energy. As always, Our Flag Means Death is perfectly deploying the workplace sitcom book of tricks in a highly satisfying fashion. Nothing here is subversive on a storytelling level. It's just how sitcoms work.

And yet the characters we're so invested in are both men. Everything here is subversive.

Even when I was a child, before queerness was more readily accepted in American society, I had a vague sense that there were specific environments in which men spontaneously fell into bed together.

Usually, those environments were ones without access to women, such as, say, the Union soldier encampments of the Civil War or ships out at sea. Indeed, sailors during the era depicted in Our Flag Means Death often engaged in a practice called "matelotage." Some scholars argue this practice was a kind of same-sex domestic partnership centuries before we had such a thing in mainland European society. Regardless, two men caring for each other like spouses would again leaves that door open just a crack for queerness. You cannot reasonably argue every single person involved in this practice was cisgender and heterosexual. It beggars belief.

And all of that is before we get to the many, many, many people who lived across the gender binary throughout recorded history. Or the societies both ancient and not so ancient where genders outside the binary were understood to exist. Or the seemingly blase attitude that, say, ancient Greece (among many other civilizations) had toward gay and lesbian relationships. Or I could go on. Everywhere you look in history, once you know where to look, that door is open just a crack.

For many years, the usual explanation by non-queer historians (both of the professional and "amateur who has strong, unfounded opinions on history" sort) for these instances of queerness in history was that in the absence of heterosexual options, humans would soothe their sexual urges via queer acts. They would use modern prisons, which are usually segregated along gender binary lines and often feature long-standing sexual relationships between people who would otherwise be straight, as examples.

‎This approach seems to have fallen by the wayside, so far as I can tell. The motivations and intentions behind a queer act do not strip it of its queerness. Two men having sex is still a queer act, and experimenting with gender non-conformity is, too. A person might have many reasons to engage in queer acts without being queer, but that does not remove the possibility of queerness from even the straightest, cis-est lives. All you need is a permission structure where experimentation becomes possible, and the world might unfurl for you in unexpected ways.

I am perhaps more comfortable with these ideas because of my transition journey. My marriage is no less one between queer women because we entered it under the belief that I was a man, just as my wife and I were no less bisexual when the world perceived us as heterosexual.

Yet, these ideas terrify a lot of people. If all you need to engage in queerness is a permission structure, what might happen to me if I reorganized my life into one of those? We'd better get rid of anything that might make me or someone I care about think they're queer!

Or, put another way: When I was growing up, learning about how sometimes men who went off to war fucked each other for lack of alternatives, the US government was also pursuing its Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

What's so moving about the relationship between Ed and Stede, in the end, is that it's a real romance. These are not two men who fell in love because they lacked women to fall for. These are two men who were irresistibly drawn to each other, who altered their lives for each other, at least until Stede bailed.

When people talk about Our Flag Means Death's use of queer storytelling tropes, they often talk about how the show pulls off a queer will-they/won't-they without engaging in pointless queerbaiting or forcing the audience to jump through 500 subtextual hoops. Once you've finished season one, the show has made its case that these two guys should be together, even if it will take some doing. What's more, it doesn't really offer alternatives. Stede and Mary aren't going to get together, and when it comes to Ed... I guess he could end up with Izzy? (That chills my blood so much that the sadomasochistic side of me kind of wants to see it happen.)

Yes, I appreciate the way this show uses the classic, rigorous workplace sitcom structure to tell a queer love story. And yes, I love how relentlessly queer it is in almost every corner of its world. Every single one of the relationships on the show is queer in one way or another, and it seems completely chill about that. Moreover, the series' core setting operates like a self-contained Pride parade float out there on the high seas.

Yet when I think about how this show is subversive, I don't really think it has anything to do with how it subverts sitcoms but with how it subverts the stories we tell about history. It is one thing to know that pirates often had deep, emotional relationships with their fellow sailors. It's another to see it depicted and to appreciate those bonds within a modern, queer idiom. These are not people who fell in love because they lacked other options. They're people who fell in love because they fell in love. Our Flag Means Death kicks the door open and allows all of the queerness implicit in our historical storytelling to become explicit, and it tells some very funny jokes along the way.

Ultimately, Our Flag Means Death argues that queer people will find each other, no matter how far you push them off the map. We'll wander away into the hinterlands of the high seas to build places where we can be ourselves. If queerness thrives under a permission structure, then we'll build places where the permission structure is implied. If you're going to make our existences criminal, then we'll turn to lives of crime to afford them. And so on and so forth.

None of this is stated outright by Our Flag Means Death because Our Flag Means Death knows it's best to leave these elements hanging around in the subtext. Yet when it takes Ed and Stede seriously or grounds them in storytelling tropes that probably everybody alive right now is deeply aware of on an almost molecular level, it's arguing, in its own way, for the place of queer stories amid the historical record.

Did the real Ed and Stede have a doomed love affair? Probably not. But lots and lots of other pirates did, and in this love story, we see dim reflections of all of theirs.

It is a scary time to be queer, especially in the US but also in many other countries around the world. Pop culture like Our Flag Means Death, which existed as a kind of permission structure of its own, is increasingly seeing raw, angry pushback from regressive forces who would reverse what progress queer people have made in the last several decades.

The battlegrounds go far beyond our screens, too. In the US, there is a loud, terrifying movement aimed at driving queer people out of public life and back into the closet. Needless to say, such a movement succeeding would threaten far more than a show like this one. Still, it's worth noting that much of the growing acceptance of queer identities in the 21st century has been closely tied to our existence within popular culture. Seeing yourself onscreen can mean finding the ability to speak yourself into being offscreen, and the two feed off each other.

Those who would do us harm want to eliminate queer people, sure, but I suspect they know they can never get rid of queer people entirely. We are always being born, and we will always find new places to be ourselves. The real target of these laws is the permission structures, the places where queer people assure each other that they've found a home, somewhere they can feel safe. But what these laws forget is that we've always been building those places as long as there have been people. You can try to drive us out of society entirely, but we'll always find our way through that door left cracked open. After all, when you run out of land to stand on, you can always take to the sea.

Next time: That's it for this show, everyone! I'll be back sometime in 2023 with recaps of a different show. Maybe a drama this time?? See you then!