- OTHER MEDIA
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- Butt Pirates
S.F.'s captain of theatrical camp, Sean Owens, explores the sexuality of
fabled seafarers with mixed results
By Chloe Veltman
SF Weekly June 20, 2007
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- Of all the urban legends surrounding British children's television
series, the myth concerning Captain Pugwash has to be one of the most enduring.
Whether it was a 1970s English comedian or underground 'zine of the era
that started the rumor about the 1958 BBC cartoon concerning the maritime
adventures of a mustachioed pirate and his jolly shipmates is still open
to debate. But the notion that the series, unbeknownst to its kindergarten-aged
viewers, was packed with R-rated double entendres has left its mark on
an entire generation of British schoolchildren. The allegations about Pugwash
turned out to be hogwash. But I, for one, have never stopped thinking about
what might have happened to my impressionable young mind if the series'
creators had gotten away with giving their characters names like Seaman
Staines, Roger the Cabin Boy, and Master Bates.
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- Because sailors traditionally considered women to be bad luck on ships,
and sea voyages involved men living in close quarters often for years at
a time, stories about gay pirates have, like the Captain Pugwash ruse,
loomed larger in the public imagination than the facts of naval history
— and children's television, for that matter. Hints of homosexual
hi-jinks on the high seas were floating about long before Johnny Depp first
pranced onto the Black Pearl's poop deck in Pirates of the Caribbean. From
the dandylike title character in Daniel Defoe's picaresque novel The Life,
Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton to the publication
of highly speculative studies about homosexual seafarers such as Barry
R. Burg's Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (which Depp reportedly used as
a source for his portrayal of the sexually ambiguous Jack Sparrow), the
figure of the gay pirate has become a cultural fixture despite the absence
of hard evidence. The truth is that no one really knows much about the
sexual habits of Long John Silver and his ilk. But that hardly matters
when the Urban Dictionary boasts no fewer than 37 definitions of the term
"butt pirate."
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- With his salty one-man show titillatingly titled Naught but Pirates,
San Francisco's very own captain of theatrical camp, Sean Owens, explores
the murky line separating truth from fiction in the great debate about
seafarers' sexuality. The play, divided into three monologues, centers
on the legacy of one Richard Dark, a fictional gentleman pirate of the
early 18th century, whose possible penchant for plundering anal ports and
pillaging cabin boy booty earned him the nickname "Black Dick."
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- Owens holds off on introducing the dead pirate to us in person until
the third and final segment of his show. At the start, we nip forward in
time to the present to meet Solomon Lynch — epicurean, aesthete, and
author of numerous obscure historical tracts including a scholarly biography
about Dark — as he tucks into his solitary evening meal. Between bites
of salad and sips of wine, the writer rails against one of his most devoted
fans. Lynch's main issue with Kevin Trast, a 28-year-old obsessed with
naval history, is an act of literary piracy against Lynch's book about
Dark so brutal that it almost constitutes rape in the author's eyes.
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- It's only when we encounter Trast himself in the middle part of the
performance that we begin to understand the reason for his assault on the
author's work. Lynch, in Trast's opinion, has not given Black Dick his
biographical due. Citing dubious evidence culled from the hidden depths
of the Cleveland Public Library, Trast hopes to out Dark and his chronicler
both literally and metaphorically.
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- Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Owens' intricately written but
uncharacteristically somber play is that its two greatest flaws might also
be its biggest assets. The confusing nature of the storytelling and the
lack of definition surrounding the character of Dark might make us want
to walk the plank, but our feelings of frustration at the dramaturgy may
hint at something profound about our propensity for believing only what
we want to believe when it comes to sexuality, regardless of the truth.
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- Trast and Lynch are boldly drawn and hilarious portraits of an overly
earnest young gay man and pretentious closeted old author. Details like
Trast's predilection for composing mawkish Debussy-esque piano solos (samples
of which, created by Owens' longtime music collaborator, Don Seaver, are
cleverly woven into the story), and Lynch's affected eating habits and
way of talking to the audience as if addressing the readers of an epistolary
novel, define the two characters as sharply as the point of a cutlass.
But Dark is different. The pirate comes across as a flimsily conceived
stock character from an airport romance novel. His veracity is further
discredited by a highly debatable accent and some sloppy fact-checking
on the part of the playwright. Dark refers to Cornwall as "the town
of my birth" but speaks like a Dubliner. And Cornwall is a county
in the west of England, not a town at all. Staring into middle distance
and bellowing about his run-ins with the law and his imminent visit to
the gallows, Owens' Dark is a scratchy sketch in comparison to his other,
more lurid creations.
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