Shortly After the Pilgrims Arrived, A Settler Founded a Very Gay Community
A detail shot of "The Lord and Lady of the May", an 1900 illustration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" | Bertha C. May via public domain Daniel Villarreal While school history textbooks characterize the earliest colonists in the US as Puritan 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. Morton actually wrote a three-volume book satirizing Puritan culture and describing th...
