Abstract
Our Flag Means Death (OFMD) premiered to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that it is a romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article, we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the context of queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognise, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources. This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext. We argue queer reading is a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to do extra work. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated. Season One of OFMD is a unique case study where we explore how the show achieves a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.
Keywords
‘Now that's a fuckery’: Introduction
Our Flag Means Death (2022) 1 , a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, created by David Jenkins and produced by Taika Waititi, premiered on Max in March 2022. Semi-based on a true story, it stars Rhys Darby as Stede Bonnet and Taika Waititi as Edward Blackbeard Teach. The real-life Bonnet was an aristocrat who abandoned his family, bought a pirate ship and paid his crew a weekly wage before crossing paths with Blackbeard (Moss 2020). When creator and showrunner David Jenkins first discovered Bonnet's story, he was fascinated by the gaps in his history (Jenkins in Lane 2022). In several interviews, Jenkins discusses his first impression of Bonnet and Blackbeard's relationship as potentially a romantic one. ‘When [Taika and I] were talking about it early on, the reason to do the show is figuring out how these two people fell in love. It's essentially a rom-com. It's a pirate romance between these two characters’ (Jenkins in Travers 2022). Arguably, the genesis of this show was a queer 2 reading of historical facts.
Queer reading was theorised in the early 1990s, arguably the practice is much older. Readers interpret or queer texts that are not explicitly queer, reading into the gaps, silences and subtexts in existing texts (Doty, 1993b). Often this is an act of working to read a text queerly, or as an explicit practice of generating new material around the original text (Ng, 2017). With Internet 2.0 and social media, this practice often underpins audience-authored forms such as fan art and fan/slash fiction (see Anselmo, 2018; Dhaenens et al., 2008). Historically, the lack of direct and supportive representations of queer existence and stories, particularly in film and television, has been exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. Despite queer representation improving in the twenty-first century (GLAAD, 2023b), it still often exists in the subtext, gaps and silences, relying on a viewer to recognise, infer and construct themselves.
This article draws on the work of scholars researching audience labour, meaning making as a social practice and LGBTQIA+ representation in fictional media. We do so to make the case for the practice of queer reading being both intertextual (Ng, 2017), and a specialist form of audience labour in that it has historically relied on queer readers to do extra work to see themselves and their communities onscreen. As argued by Anselmo (2018: 86–87), this extra work is: …commonly driven by a high-stakes quest for identarian valorization, cultural legitimization, and positive media representation. A hunger made of starvation predisposes queer fan labor to be simultaneously undervalued and exploited by showrunners and publicists.
This quest is critical because representation can have a massive impact on the livelihoods of marginalised communities. O'Shaughnessy et al. (2016: 37) write, Systematic absence from media representations can also be a form of discrimination because it gives the invisible group the message that they are not valued or noticed by society, an attitude that is absorbed by most other people in society.
We write this article as fans to unpack our experiences with the show, which we saw mirrored in the responses on the internet as the fandom grew alongside its impressive rankings. 3 The popularity of Season One made it clear that this show resonated with both members of the LGBTQIA+ community and wider audiences. We write this article from our perspectives and experiences as academics and avid consumers of cultural content. Luttrell's perspective is a queer non-binary Australian who specialises in music, multimodal analysis and cultural semantics. Banks’ perspective is a straight, cisgendered female Pākehā New Zealander who specialises in collaborative theatre-making and feminist performance. Throughout this article, we deliberately use familiar expression and queer vocabulary to challenge the traditions of heteronormativity in academic writing. We also want to emphasise the key theorisation in this article that additional labour to ‘understand’ and ‘fit in’ is usually expected to be performed by LGBTQIA+ people because the default audience is assumed to be cishet.
In this article, we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the historical and cultural contexts around queer depictions in Western fictional media. To do this, we also theorise queer reading as both a social semiotic intertextual practice (Lemke, 1995a) and a particular form of audience labour. We then discuss Season One of OFMD as a case study to explore the mechanics of how character, narrative, queer coding and tropes are used to achieve a low/easy labour environment and how this is an act of care and empathy for a viewer used to doing extra work.
‘This is the life, now act or die’: theory and literature
The function of narrative as a social and cultural practice forms a core thread of many scholarly theorisations of why and how we tell the stories we do to each other. Many go so far as to explicitly state the intrinsic nature of storytelling as a part of human existence. Barthes and Duisit (1975: 237) states narrative ‘is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of [hu]mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative…’. In terms of audience, stories are ways to see and be seen, which is especially important to marginalised communities who have historically been erased, gatekept and symbolically annihilated from explicit textual representation (Gerbner and Gross, 2003). As Richardson (1990: 129) states, ‘At the individual level, people make sense of their lives through the stories that are available to them, and they attempt to fit their lives into the available stories. People live by stories’. The stories we tell, and how we tell those stories, are fundamental choices of ‘symbolic action’ (Burke, 1978) in that they provide a representation of the allowable, desirable and didactic ways of being within a society at any given moment (Graham, 2023). They function to teach, shape and maintain in moral terms (Graham and Dugmore, 2022: 3–5). Or as Adams (2008: 175) summarises, if we learn how to think, feel, and interact with society via narratives, we also learn ethical ways of being with others, ‘correct’ and ‘appropriate’ ways that serve as foundations for many of our interactions.
We proceed from the assertion that queer reading is a meaning-making practice that utilises intertextual patterns to construct readable representations in texts via things like queer coding. Intertextuality – as framed by Bakhtin (2008), Kristeva (1980), Halliday (1978) and Lemke (1995a, 1995b) – is a fundamental aspect of discourse analysis and social semiotics. It describes the process of understanding a text by ‘constantly reading… this text in the context of and against the background of other texts and discourses’ (Lemke, 1995a: 10). Lemke narrows the field of possible intertexts by explaining, ‘In our own community, texts are more relevant for one another's interpretation the more they share the same patterns of presentational meaning’ (Lemke, 1995a: 41). In terms of queer representation, this is an intertextual canon of other texts that fit together and enhance each other through recognisable multimodal patterns of what is contained in them; in particular, recognisable patterns of how the story is told and how the characters are depicted. In other words, these are similar semiotic resources, or groups of them, that gain meaning potential by how they are used to mean, across texts, through time, by certain discourse communities (Van Leeuwen, 2004: 2–5; Lemke, 1995a, 1995b). We propose that queer codes are combinations of dynamic semiotic resources, that are recognisable to an audience from text to text and are often used together to make the queer potential of a reading more persuasive. The question of author intent (encoding) versus audience interpretation (decoding) is almost a moot point, as both authors and audience might actively use the same patterns of semiotic resources. But the patterns themselves come from an intertextual understanding of representation in texts. Vázquez-Rodríguez et al.'s summarising of Lipton (2008) states that, …cultural products constitute open, unfinished texts whose meaning is woven between the authors and the readers, who decode them by bringing their specific socio-political backgrounds, individual fantasies, and intersectional identities, questioning the various modes by which desire and identity are produced. (Vázquez-Rodríguez et al., 2021: 199)
Our assertion is that queer codes and tropes function as Lemke's Intertextual Thematic Formations or ITFs (1995a: 37–55, 1995b). According to Lemke (1995a: 42), thematic formations are repeated across a variety of texts and are ‘the direct meaning-making resource’ for any discourse community. Historically, the explicit presentational aspects of queer characters and stories were often disassembled, deleted, or part of the subtext – symbolic annihilation. In this context, the reading of queerness involves learning to recognise and identify intertextual codes or patterns, those used by the discourse community to see and author itself in texts that were otherwise unable or unwilling to include them. It is this, and the framing of meaning making as ‘social practice in a community… a system of doings, rather than a system of doers’ (Lemke, 1995a: 9) that helps us understand the undertaking of that act as a particular kind of labour.
To understand the claim that queer audiences perform a specific kind of labour, we also need to place it in historical context. Early writing about queer representation on screen includes Russo (1981), Doty (1993a, 1993b, 2000), Sedgwick (2008) and Dyer (2002). A running theme through these texts is about using visibility as a metric and how historically there was a dramatic absence of representations of queer people and stories (Cover 2022). This was exacerbated by socio-political contexts and laws regulating LGBTQIA+ lives. For example, the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–1968), known as the Hayes Code, dictated what was morally allowed to be shown on screen, forcing queer representation into the subtext (Benshoff and Griffin, 2004; Noriega, 1990; Russo, 1981). In addition to this, the World Health Organization only removed homosexuality from the ICD-10 in 1990. These examples are evidence of shifting cultures leading to changes in representation on screens. The cultural visibility, at least in Western media, of LGBTQIA+ characters and stories has been increasing. One of the largest advocates of this change is the non-profit organisation GLAAD, which was founded in 1985 and focuses on amplifying queer storytelling and creating cultural change. In 2005 GLAAD started publishing statistics that reported how many LGBTQIA+ characters were appearing on television. In the first report covering the 2005–2006 season, the representation of LGBTQIA+ characters was less than 2% (GLAAD, 2023a). Since then, it has increased almost every year not only in volume but also in diversity of story and identity (helped by the rise in streaming), except for a dip in 2020–2021 due to COVID-19, and another dip in the most recent 2022–2023 season (GLAAD, 2023b). 4 Even with this increase in representation, a queer audience typically still must do more labour, and this particular labour can be harmful for the audience.
The labour that an audience performs is complex. Shimpach (2005: 344) states that, ‘The first fact is that the audience, as a matter of being the audience, performs labor’. Shimpach is drawing on theorisations of labour which stem from Marx and were further defined as audience labour by Smythe (1981) and others. As Graham writes, ‘Audience labour is the labour of watching television, listening to radio, turning up to a football match, even reading a book or billboard. It is a labour of meaning’ (Graham, 2023: 2). We return to Lemke (1995a: 157) here to emphasise that, ‘Making meaning is a practice, a process, an activity’. Discussions of audience labour tend to be less about the labour performed when reading texts, and more about the audience's role in the economic process of creating and maintaining themselves as a commodity (Graham, 2023, Shimpach, 2005). However, before an audience can become an audience and perform the kind of labour that produces ‘self-selecting groups of people who can be sold to advertisers’ (Graham, 2023: 2), an audience requires the labour of individuals in the act of interacting with a text. This is especially important, and onerous, in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated.
In relation to the labour that a queer reader performs, we assert that the labour of becoming an audience means two things. Firstly, the pre/post work before and after any viewing, ‘homework’ (Shimpach, 2005: 350) and ‘reception practices’ (Anselmo, 2018: 86). This is where the audience learns codes or ITFs that have been used or read to represent/signal queer existence or are regularly recognised and deployed by members of the discourse community to do so. For example, costumes using the colour purple, the phrase a friend of Dorothy's, or camp/effeminate behaviour (a collection of ITFs as a trope), are all common ITFs in early texts from the Hayes code until the 2000s’ (Benshoff and Griffin, 2004). These ITFs function as persuasive codes which an audience can learn to more effectively read queer identities, bodies and communities into a text (Russo, 1981). It is work, labour, to find these codes and learn them – especially in the pre-internet era when it was not possible to watch a YouTube video or read a blog article doing that labour for/with you. Secondly, the during work is then using those codes, you have learnt as being common to your discourse community, to observe ITFs while interacting with a text. In cases where the representation is explicit, the labour for queer readers is reduced. However, in cases where that representation is relegated to subtext, or invisible, that labour requires more from the reader both mentally and emotionally. The during work is also particularly vulnerable for a queer reader due to the high stakes of queer audiences searching for validation and visibility in media representation. Anselmo (2018: 88) asks, ‘can there be such a thing as “invulnerable” queer reception labor – labor that is not bone deep, love that, when unrequited, does not hurt on an identarian level?’ Queer audiences, long having been pushed to the margins, must work harder and perform more labour as an audience to read and see themselves in texts. As an audience, if the majority of texts you engage with deny explicit confirmation of representation, then you are used to your labour being exploited and devalued, often at personal emotional cost. This leads scholars like Anselmo (2018: 88) to question whether queer viewers can ‘ever choose to be “passive” watchers, or is finding pleasure and identification contingent on them acting as engaged decoders, translators and even caregivers?’ We argue that the fan response to OFMD suggests that yes, they can. As a case study, it is a unique example of how the show and the creators manage to take care of the audience while they watch.
‘His name is Ed’: time for queerbaiting to walk the plank
Season One of OFMD premiered at the beginning of a wave of media in early 2022 that celebrated queer narratives and characters. 5 This expansion of inclusive storytelling comes at the end of two decades where even though queer narratives were included more, they also often came with queerbaiting and harmful tropes (Brennan 2019). McDermott (2021: 844) defines queerbaiting as ‘the perceived intentional practice of “baiting” audiences with the promise of queer representation, through marketing, or subtextual hints and gestures, but ultimately failing to meet expectations’. Fathallah (2014: 491) also describes it as a ‘strategy’ to ‘gain the attention of queer viewers via hints, jokes, gestures, and symbolism suggesting a queer relationship between two characters, and then emphatically denying and laughing off the possibility’. These practices are damaging to queer audiences as, ‘Denial and mockery reinstate a heteronormative narrative that poses no danger of offending mainstream viewers at the expense of queer eyes’ (Fathallah, 2014: 491). As an example, Anselmo (2018) writes that the fallout from Season Four of the BBC's Sherlock (2017) was incredibly damaging for the audience. The queer reading labour of these fans ‘mutated quickly into care work’ as the community provided support for each other and began social media campaigns to raise awareness of the harms of queerbaiting (Anselmo, 2018: 108). In contrast, OFMD uses many strategies to reduce and support the labour of audiences.
Firstly, we explore how Season One of OFMD uses a characterised chaperone, Lucius, to guide us through the main romantic story (that could otherwise easily trigger queerbaiting alarms). Lucius is a member of Stede Bonnet's crew and is represented with many ITFs which facilitate a fast reading of him as not masc and potentially queer. In the past this combination of ITFs often leads to a stereotype of the effeminate gay character, for example, Jack from Will and Grace (1998), or the asexual gay best friend for a cishet woman, for example, George from My Best Friend's Wedding (1997). Critiques of which are often aimed at the two-dimensionality of the character or their desexualisation in the story world (Hart, 2016). However, Lucius is a fully rounded character. He is integral to the workings of the ship as the most literate crew member and Stede's scribe, offering skills no other crew member appears to have. He is also the first character in the show to have an implied sex scene in Episode 5 ‘The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well’ (2022), and onscreen kiss with his love interest Pete in Episode 6 ‘The Art of Fuckery’ (2022). Lucius and Pete continually provide a strong and comforting confirmation that queer sexuality and romance is possible in the universe of this show. Lucius is also a particularly anachronistic character who feels far more modern than the other crew members – in a show which is full of deliberate anachronisms. We argue this combination means he becomes an audience surrogate, an easy way in for the audience to a historical pirate sitcom which helps position him as chaperone through the main story.
While Lucius is a fully rounded character, we argue that the main narrative function of Lucius is to support and facilitate the lead romantic couple, Blackbeard and Stede, as they slowly develop their feelings for each other across the second half of the season. These narrative moments are traditionally points of vulnerable labour for an audience in that they are often asked to buy-in to a queer story with no guarantee that story has a future, is real, or is anything more than an easy moment of humour in a cishet story (aka queerbaiting). The construction of narrative in Season One is such that every time we reach a vulnerable moment of potential queerness in the lead story there is a character (usually Lucius) or other context in the story world (which Lucius is usually part of) which helps to chaperone, voice and reassure viewers with their queer radars going off that those readings are not only likely but legitimate.
We summarise our point in a truncated list of examples. In Episode 4 ‘Discomfort in a Married State’ (2022), Lucius enters Stede's chambers and interrupts Blackbeard observing the unconscious Stede who is recovering from a stab wound. Lucius' presence as chaperone begins before Stede and Blackbeard even have their first conversation. While there are multiple ways to read Lucius’ reaction, he clearly is surprised by the unexpected intimacy of their physical closeness. In Episode 6, Lucius again interrupts a moment between Blackbeard and Stede. During an elaborate performance to scare off enemy pirates, Blackbeard (tasked by his First Mate Izzy) is about to kill Stede but Lucius' sudden and dramatic entrance distracts Blackbeard. Lucius literally interrupts the trope of bury your gays (Bridges, 2018). In Episode 7, ‘This Is Happening’ (2022), Stede plans a treasure hunt to keep Blackbeard entertained and Lucius accompanies them. Over a campfire snack, Lucius is a curious witness to playful banter between Stede and Blackbeard. While Stede is trying to get a piece of snake out of Blackbeard's beard, the camera cuts to Lucius’ reaction with his line, ‘Oh my god, this is happening’. Lucius is literally voicing the queer reading of the relationship, even if they are not quite ready yet to see the significance of the moment, judging by their reactions to him. Later in the episode, Lucius confronts Blackbeard, who has been cranky the whole trip, and says, ‘That bizarre little man over there likes you very much and you like him’, making it clear to Blackbeard that the relationship is more than platonic.
In Episode 8, ‘We Gull Way Back’ (2022) we see an opening shot of Lucius and Pete cuddling while sleeping, a reassuring reminder that queerness is possible in the show. This episode also features Calico Jack as an implied ex-lover of Blackbeard, who voices to Stede the first sexual reading of his relationship with Blackbeard: ‘Are you two buggering each other or what?’ Fearing he is not good enough for Stede, Blackbeard chooses to leave with Jack, leading to breakup scenes where Lucius chaperones them individually through their feelings. Lucius is helping the audience read this as a romantic breakup, he says to Blackbeard ‘You know he really liked you’, while invoking the trope of the friend returning the exes possessions. At the end of this episode, Blackbeard returns to save Stede and his crew from being killed. They are captured, tied up and thrown on the deck; Blackbeard reaches out and gently nudges Stede's foot with his own – a moment of apparent happiness at complete odds with their predicament and read by many viewers as their first romantic gesture and confirmation of their relationship. 6 In Episode 9, ‘Act of Grace’ (2022) Stede and Blackbeard are away from the crew, forced to work for the royal navy on land. After a confession of feelings from Blackbeard, they share their first – albeit rather chaste – kiss before immediately being separated from each other. Blackbeard thinking Stede has left him, returns to the ship, and Stede goes back to his wife. A chaste kiss is a common way to confirm connection but deny sexual potential in a bromance (DeAngelis, 2014). In other shows that queerbait, this is a common technique to quickly shut down the sexuality, often occurring directly after an explicitly queer moment. In Episode 10, ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are’ (2022) we are shown explicit confirmation of another queer couple in the show, Oluwande and Jim, with an onscreen kiss and implied post-coital scene. This is an important way the show reassures audiences, again, that queerness exists in the world of the show. Lucius then supports Blackbeard through some uncharacteristic but classic heartbreak behaviour, confirming for him and the audience the significance of his relationship with Stede. Blackbeard reverts to his violent self after Izzy taunts him about ‘pining for his boyfriend’. Meanwhile, Stede comes out to his wife about being in love with Ed (Blackbeard) and makes moves to return to him. Blackbeard's next violent act is to push Lucius overboard, effectively killing our chaperone. However, this sequence of scenes has already made the queer reading explicit in the text, which is confirmed by the final shots of Stede as the romantic hero setting sail to find his lover, and Blackbeard distraught looking at the only thing he has left of Stede, a painting of a lighthouse. These examples, particularly Lucius as chaperone, help to support an audience through the vulnerable labour whilst still delivering moments of tension, surprise and heartbreak.
Other ways that OFMD supports queer readings and readers through the act of watching are found family, character diversity and transformation which help reinforce that this is a story world with inclusive representations. Found family (or chosen family) is a concept common in LGBTQIA+ communities, especially in times and contexts where families struggle with or do not accept queer identities (Weston, 1991). There are numerous occasions when all the characters accept and support each other around points that might be used as big drama in other shows, for example, how easily they all begin using they/them pronouns after Jim is revealed to have been in disguise in Episode 4. The found family is not restricted to the characters on the screen either, it is also evident in the way the cast and crew treat each other and the fans. Many of the cast and crew refer to the fans as ‘our crew’, the fandom calls themselves ‘crew’ and the fan campaigns for the show to be renewed are called ‘Renew as a Crew’. 7 This is especially evident in how the cast and crew interact with fans on social media; this includes reposting of fan art, videos and think pieces about the show. This is the kind of labour that Anselmo (2018) refers to as ‘reception practices’, but in this case, the creators of the show are engaging with and amplifying the labour of the fans. A specific and meaningful example can be seen when Twitter user @vilbbit posted some thoughts about how important the show is after Episode 8 (when the foot touch happens) but before Episode 9 (when they first kiss). It is a vulnerable moment in the narrative before the queer reading is explicitly confirmed. This post thanks the creators for making a show, a love story, where their communities are represented. Waititi re-posted this on Twitter and Instagram, along with three emojis: the pirate flag, the pride flag and a heart, and showrunner Jenkins also responded to @vilbbit. 8 This example shows that in a moment of potential vulnerability for the fans, the creators of the show were confirming the queer reading, amplifying the labour of fans and supporting them with care. There is also a wider context here of Waititi and Darby's history of creative collaborations which introduce a kind of reassurance of care in OFMD via an audience's familiarity with those intertexts. Past collaborations have included Flight of the Conchords (2007–2009) and Hunt For The Wilderpeople (2016), but it is only in the film What We Do In The Shadows (2014) that they shared a few minutes of screen time as the vampires and werewolves clash. This scene can be read as a comment on toxic masculinity and late-night drunken fights, but it is diffused by the werewolves doing breathing exercises. The themes and exploration of homosocial masculinity and different versions of masculinity are common in many of the previous works of both leading actors in OFMD (Bannister, 2021, Burns and Veri, 2015).
In terms of character diversity and transformation, we acknowledge our inability to speak for the lived experience of anyone other than ourselves. We point to the following examples as things we noticed in the show, or in the online discourses which contribute to the sentiment that the audience labour of watching was being supported in unique ways. The low/easy labour environment of the show extends beyond queerness to other diverse and historically marginalised people, those routinely symbolically annihilated from media. This includes issues of ethnicity and class, examples of which are beautifully articulated by fan lunaescribe in a series of Tumblr posts (lunaescribe, 2022). The show also provides many examples of non-normative masculinity and gender identities in ways that expand and challenge tropes and binaries. This is clear in the character journeys of both Stede and Blackbeard but also in the characters and stories of Jim and Spanish Jackie.
The transformation and journey of characters are also important, as moments like coming out or disclosing, that are often treated as major points of traumatic narrative tension, are in fact more about character development. OFMD follows Schitt's Creek (2015–2020) in creating a world where sexuality and gender is a relative non-issue (Schaab, 2020). In Episode 10 where Stede articulates his love for Blackbeard to his wife Mary, this is done without dwelling on the anxiety of it as a disclosure and Mary immediately smiles and hugs him. When Stede says he thinks he is in love with someone and Mary asks, ‘What's her name?’, Stede simply responds, ‘Ed… his name is Ed’. Having a universe where characters can disclose without it being treated as a dramatic plot point, or where they do not even need to disclose or label themselves but can exist as they are and love who they love, takes the burden of emotional labour off both character and audience.
Another example is how the show deals with possible moments of homophobia or genderphobia. Unlike Schitt's Creek, where there is a deliberate absence of both (Ivie, 2018), OFMD has a few moments where behaviours of characters can be easily read as ‘phobic. However, these moments are diffused immediately by other characters in the scene. At times Izzy uses language or behaviours that are common cultural ways of expressing ‘phobic views, especially in his distaste of Stede's presence in Blackbeard's life. He also could be read to be trying to threaten and bully the couple of Lucius and Pete, especially in Episode 5. On each occasion he is undermined or challenged by other characters in the scene; in one case mutinied due to his behaviour towards the crew; and in Episodes 9 and 10 punched and physically threatened by Blackbeard. Casting Con O’Neill as Izzy is also a way the show – perhaps inadvertently – supports an audience through these moments. O’Neill has played a number of queer characters in other texts including Uncle (2014–2017), Cucumber (2015), Banana (2015) and Bedrooms and Hallways (1998). For a queer reader who has knowledge of these intertexts, it helps to diffuse the potential harm of the character Izzy. The other character, who expresses potentially genderphobic sentiments towards Stede, is Calico Jack in Episode 8. Although Blackbeard ignores a few early comments, he eventually stands up to him and chooses Stede. This is also undercut by the conversation Jack has with Stede implying that he and Blackbeard are ex-lovers (which may be a lie) and that he clearly does not have a problem with queer couplings. This also occurs in the context of earlier episodes where other character's rejection of the gender binary and gender roles have been an absolute non-issue. The careful crafting of the show, and behaviour of cast and crew, helped to take care of an audience through moments of vulnerable labour when the baggage of queerbaiting is still fresh in cultural memory.
‘Take your sword, run me through’: queer codes and tropes
OFMD also takes care of its audience in the deployment and reimagining of queer codes and tropes. We position tropes/stereotypes as a particular combination of ITFs or codes occurring together in such a way that they have gained cultural labels that refer to the collection of them. We argue that OFMD's deliberate use of codes and tropes is recognition of the homework labour done to develop an ITF vocabulary of queer reading. In addition, the reimagining of them in this show counters the often-negative baggage of how codes and tropes have been used historically, both in media and in culture more generally. At the end of Episode 5, a red silk pocket square features in a heavily charged but unresolved romantic moment between Stede and Blackbeard. This is potentially a reference to the hanky code, a covert sartorial code used by queer men in the twentieth century to signify sexual tastes and sexuality (Cornier, 2019). Another code used and subverted by the show is the concept of a beard, typically a partner used by someone to conceal their real sexual orientation (Hart, 2017). In this show, the beard is a literal beard. Blackbeard sports a long beard until Episode 9, and it is only after he must shave it off that he and Stede kiss and confirm to an audience that their implied romantic interest in each other is reciprocated. In a playful nod to the closet metaphor (Sedgwick, 2008), in Episode 4, one of Stede's first interactions with Blackbeard is to take him into his secret closet where Blackbeard admires his clothes and fabrics. This is also the location where he comes out to Stede as Blackbeard. Costume codes are highly utilised throughout OFMD right from Stede and Blackbeard's first meeting where they swap clothes and perform as each other. Purple, as a colour, has a long history in Western popular culture of being used as a visibility code for queerness both by the community and against it (McMillan, no date). In Episode 5, when Stede takes Blackbeard to a fancy party on board another ship, Blackbeard's upper-class outfit is almost entirely purple, including purple bows in his beard. Blackbeard also wears a purple t-shirt under his black leathers during Episode 7 when Lucius confirms the relationship for the audience and for Blackbeard. Aside from Blackbeard, there is a notable absence of purple in the costuming of other characters.
Several codes and tropes are hangovers from the Hayes Code era where intimacy had to be shown in other ways that excused physical proximity or touch (Keller and Stratyner, 2006; Russo, 1981). At the beginning of Episode 6 after their unresolved romantic moment in Episode 5, Blackbeard starts flirting with Stede by teaching him to sword fight; how to ‘take the blade’ and survive. This is an example of violence standing in for intimacy (Greven, 2016: 96), but here is played as silly and caring. It is also revealed that Izzy has overheard them and likely interpreted the noises they were making as sexual ones. When kissing was not allowed on screen, another common way to portray intimacy was to have one character cup their partner's cheek with their hand. In Episode 9, Blackbeard places his hand on Stede's cheek during their first kiss, doubling down on the explicit representation. It is notable that none of the intimate and romantic moments in the show come out of violence. The Slap Slap Kiss 9 is a common trope both in queer media, for example, Brokeback Mountain (2005), and in too many heterosexual romantic comedies to count, dating all the way back to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. But in Season One, Stede and Blackbeard's intimate moments together are gentle and tender, and importantly the onscreen kiss occurs in the penultimate episode and is not the end of their love story.
Tropes are very common in romantic comedy as a genre, but can lead to two-dimensional characters, or in the case of queer characters and stories are often weaponised as derogatory stereotypes (Benshoff and Griffin, 2004). OFMD is a deliberate romantic comedy that employs stereotypical story beats and tropes from cishet rom-coms as well as queer codes and tropes to tell more inclusive stories about three-dimensional characters. For example, Stede and Blackbeard fit into a will they, won’t they plot line; the show employs multiple thwarted kiss moments; and uses the narrative of the ex-lover showing up to ruin everything. Stede also ends Season One dressed in a romantic hero billowy shirt a la Mr Darcy, off to reclaim his love Blackbeard. While Season One does not end with the main couple happy and in love, neither of them die and the show does make it very clear that they do love each other.
Subverting the butch versus femme binary is another clear example of this show reimagining tropes. At the start of Season One, Stede is a collection of ITFs which have been used for foppish, flamboyant, camp and effeminate stereotypes. He likes fashion, reading, the arts, has an empathetic management style where he encourages his crew to talk about their feelings, and is generally not cut out for the physical or emotional conditions of being a pirate. In popular culture, Stede would be read on the femme side of binary. In contrast Blackbeard is the butch one, he is a collection of ITFs that could be described as an aggressive leather daddy. He is almost always dressed head to toe in black leather, covered in tattoos, with long hair and beard. He is highly successful and feared as the greatest pirate, a master navigator, tactician and warrior. However, both Stede and Blackbeard consistently subvert their own stereotypes. Blackbeard never belittles Stede for his eccentricities, particularly those that could be read as the effeminate trope. In Episode 4 when they first meet each other, Blackbeard excitedly suggests they ‘do something weird’ to dress up and perform as each other in front of their crews, with Stede donning the leathers and Blackbeard wearing a frilly shirt and silk pants. In Episode 6, Blackbeard is triggered by something and essentially has a panic attack and disappears. Stede finds him crying in a bathtub and comforts him. Blackbeard is the most outwardly vulnerable character who cries the most in the show, whereas Stede rarely cries and in Episode 10, they almost have a complete role reversal whilst dealing with their heartbreak/separation. Blackbeard and Stede are just two examples of characters in the show who do not subscribe to gender binary tropes.
OFMD could also be interpreted as a gay for you trope or coming-of-age genre, both of which are very common plotlines in narratives that are designed for wider audiences. The gay for you trope is subverted by neither character ever labelling their sexual orientation, nor is the core drama of the show about that realisation. The coming-of-age trope in queer screen representation usually focuses on young or teenage characters who are discovering themselves and their desires for the first time. OFMD fits this category but is about middle-aged men who are pirates. Younger queer narratives using these tropes, often manufacture jeopardy with plot points that revolve around the gender identity and sexual orientation of characters. But as middle-aged men, Stede and Blackbeard already have full lives packed with their own baggage, almost none of which is due to their sexuality or gender identity. In this show, their trauma – and what drives them apart – is not about each other… yet.
‘We talk it through as a crew’: Conclusion
Like many fans in the OFMD crew, before Season One finale had even aired, we found ourselves thousands of words deep trying to unpack why this piratical sitcom had such a profound impact on us both. Our lived experiences meant that we approached this show with different baggage and expectations of audience labour. Banks did not carry the weight of queerbaiting and joyously committed to the reading of Blackbeard and Stede from Episode 5. Whereas Luttrell, ready to be heartbroken and disappointed, was reluctant to commit to the reading until Episode 10. While our personal experiences were different from each other, they were not unique. They were reflected and extended by the fans sharing their lived experiences and the impact it had on how they watched and related to this show. We would like to thank the incredible labour that the crew (fans) do in and around this show. From our experience it is a beautiful community of learning via support, via the lived experience of other people, taking care of each other, and sharing the labour of being a vulnerable audience. At the time of writing OFMD has not been renewed for its final Season 3 and the dedication of the fans has been truly remarkable, both in how they have supported their crew and how they have campaigned for the show they love. 10
OFMD had huge audience numbers and was the most in demand show in the U.S. for weeks after its release. 11 This popularity is evidence that inclusive media that supports its niche audience can also be commercially successful. We have seen this in subsequently released shows like Heartstopper (2022), A League of Their Own (2022), Good Omens Season 2 (2023), Sex Education Season 4 (2023) and others that are prioritising ensemble casts with more diverse representation. In this article, we have made the case for framing queer reading as audience labour to understand what appears to be a cultural turn towards more inclusive queer screen representation. The impact of this shift is significant because ‘Getting things to be said, meant, valued and done differently is changing society’ (Lemke, 1995b: 111). Narrative and media are ways for a culture to represent itself, but also inculcate audiences into the ideal morals, values and attitudes by what is or is not included in the representations (Graham, 2023: 2). ‘New narratives offer the patterns for new lives. The story of the transformed life, then, becomes a part of the cultural heritage affecting future stories and future lives’ (Richardson, 1990: 129).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical approval statements
This article does not contain any studies with human or animal participants.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
