A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

In 1624 Thomas Morton and others, including thirty male indentured servants, founded a decidedly non-Puritan colony in Wollaston, now the township of Quincy outside of Boston. They named the colony Merrymount, punning on Mare-Mount and Mary-Mount, direct references to bestial sodomy and Roman Catholicism. Morton befriended the local Algonquian tribe, whose culture he admired, and urged intermarriage between native women and male colonists. He also released the indentured servants and made them equal “consociates.” In 1627 he erected an eighty-foot-tall maypole with buck’s horns attached to the top (indicative of the sexualized god Pan or, from a Puritan view, Satan) and held, as was customary in medieval England, revels. Morton declared himself a Lord of Misrule. Morton understood the sexual implications of his permissive agenda. In one of his writings about Merrymount, he noted that “there was likewise a merry song made, which [to make their revels more fashionable] was sung with a corus, every man bearing his part; which they performed in a dance, hand in hand about the May-pole, whilst one of the company sung, and filled out the good liquor like Gammedes and Jupiter.”24 His invoking Gammedes (Ganymede) and Jupiter (the Roman name for Zeus) in Elizabethan culture was a clear reference to the archetypical male lovers in Greek mythology.