‘Oh my god this is happening’: How Our Flag Means Death staged an empathic mutiny against the labour of queer reading practices

Our Flag Means Death (2022) is a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, premiering in March 2022 to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that this show is a deliberate romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the historical and cultural contexts of fictional queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognize, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources, Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1995a, 1995b). This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext in fictional media, exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor, and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. We also make the case for queer reading being a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to ‘do extra work’ to see queer bodies and communities in texts. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated, and those individuals are repeatedly required to perform that extra labour to “see themselves”. The popularity of Our Flag Means Death made it clear that this show resonated with both members of the LGBTQIA+ community and wider audiences. Season One is a unique case study where we explore how character, narrative, queerbaiting and coding are used to achieve a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.