While school history textbooks characterize the earliest Puritan colonists in the US as Christian zealots who punished all sinners, dissenters, and non-believers, an early American settler established a small community that held the seeds of LGBTQ+ counter-cultural revolution.
The Mayflower ship of pilgrims arrived on the tip of what is now known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts in November 1620. But by 1625, English lawyer and trader Thomas Morton and a group of indentured servants hungry for freedom established a small trading post called Merrymount, near what is now Wollaston in Quincy, Massachusetts, not too far from the Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English settlement in New England.
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Morton actually wrote a three-volume book satirizing Puritan culture and describing the town. The 1637 book was called New English Canaan, and it was one of the first books to be banned in America.
In it, Morton said that he found the “infidels” more friendly than the local Christians, and he described his community’s members and local Native Americans erecting an 80-foot pine maypole (something considered a pagan practice to celebrate fertility and spring), and posting deer antlers at its top. The Merrymount citizens then brewed beer and assembled guns, drums, and other instruments for a community celebration at the start of May 1627.
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William Bradford, the then-governor of the Plymouth Plantation, found out about the celebration, and wrote:
“They also set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had a new revived & celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise (to shew his poetry) composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction & scandal of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idol May-pole.”
Horrified at Morton’s pagan-worshipping bacchanal — and the fact that he sold firearms to local Native Americans — Bradford dubbed him an atheist “lord of disrule” and sent military captain Miles Standish to arrest Morton.
During the raid and arrest, no blood was shed, but Standish took down the maypole. The community members scattered over the following years as the Puritans renamed the place Mount Dagon. Morton would have legal run-ins with the Puritan government over the next decade until his death in 1647 at the age of 71.
American author Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the community in his 1832 short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” describing some of its celebrants thus:
“One was a youth in glistening apparel, with a scarf of the rainbow pattern crosswise on his breast. … There was the likeness of a bear erect, brute in all but his hind legs, which were adorned with pink silk stockings.”
In the story, Hawthorne also referred to Morton’s revelers as a “crew of Comus,” an allusion to the Greek satyr (half-goat, half-man) god of festivity, revels, and nocturnal dalliances, whose ancient celebrations involved men and women exchanging clothing.
Hawthorne’s story ends with Puritan leaders tearing down the maypole and punishing the celebrants, but it’s likely that his description of Merrymount and its citizens drew on a fair amount of poetic license rather than on primary historical documents recounting the real-life community.
Nonetheless, while the historical documents on Merrymount do not specifically mention any LGBTQ+ behavior, Michael Bronski, author of the 2011 book A Queer History of the United States, also connected the imagery in Hawthorne’s story to gender-fluid costuming and same-sex-coded mythological figures, such as Zeus and his male lover and cup-bearer Ganymede.
Puritan societies in early America outlawed dressing as the opposite sex under a set of Biblical laws meant to prevent “immodesty” and confusion of the natural order, since a woman passing as a man would’ve given her certain privileges in the male-dominated society.
Though Puritan societies also had laws against same-sex sexual encounters (some even punishing them with death sentences), historical records show that the earliest American colonists had gay sex anyway.
Historians say that the Puritans’ anti-gay laws were mostly about promoting procreative sex at a time when half of all infants died early in life. Thus, non-procreative sex endangered the longevity of these new colonial settlements. The Puritan colonists may have ignored some same-sex encounters, historians say, to maintain community peace rather than to risk upsetting cohesion and morale through executions.
Morton’s colony — its aim to free indentured servants, its racial mixing with Native Americans, its pagan public revelry, and its eventual shutdown by zealous religious leaders — are all worth remembering in this modern age, when Republicans and conservative Christians still vilify all LGBTQ+ people, queer celebrations, anti-racist activists, and opponents of capitalism as “ungodly,” “anti-American,” or “anti-Christian.”
It turns out, there really is nothing more American than rebelling against religious authority and drunkenly partying with other open-minded, marginalized community members.
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