Revisionist History is a Pain in the Butt

There was an inter-racial First Thanksgiving, of a sort, that was much enjoyed by both grateful Pilgrims and visiting Pequots and Wampanoags--some sort of civil and pleasant, three-day harvest-feast, probably in late October or November, to celebrate what had proved an amazingly bountiful year (1621).

And the reason it (1621) had been all so bountiful was the arrestingly simple, yet far-sighted, rule, laid down by the amazingly astute Governor William Bradford the year before, that all pilgrims (including, specifically women and children) might profit from their own, individual labors. Without quite acknowledging that they were doing so, and while making their education both free and compulsory, Pilgrims effectively emancipated and enfranchised their children (who were, from an early age, contributing members of society; who fattened pigs, raised fowl, gathered eggs, milked cows (after 1623), and grew squash, corn and melons in the garden-space allotted them, and who were permitted, thanks to sagacious old Governor Bradford's wise ruling, to keep their profits and their produce for themselves, selling it back to the community, with their consent, at reasonable prices).

Amazingly, even though a tenth of them (of young males) were massacred by red-skinned Native Americans in King Philip's War, they proliferated. Visiting Englishmen said the flocks of young children in Colonial New England were like "ducks on a pond." Abundance of food, salubrity of climate, 100% literacy, virtually absolute personal liberty--a powder keg, waiting for Fannie Trollope to touch it off.

I have heard (or read somewhere) that what gay men and boys did--during the century and a half before the Revolution, when the urge came on them, and knowing not what else to do, but gravitating instinctively to the docks and wharves along the waterfront where all the young men and boys (sailors) hung out--was walk around with their flies open, or, as men's flies were then fashioned, partially undone, to show that they were cruising, in a way that straights wouldn't tumble-to, but which was picked-up on by their homoerotic fellows, if any. And this is why there was only one prosecution for Sodomy in all of American Colonial History: They didn't know that what they were doing was, exactly, Sodomy.