Our Flag Means Death Champions the 'Later in Life' Coming-Out Story

When Our Flag Means Death raised its black sails over television screens in the spring of 2022, the pirate comedy became an instant darling — not only for its instantly memeable moments, carousel of delightful guest stars, and immaculate needle drops in its soundtrack, but for its unapologetic queerness. The tale of “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby), a soft-handed, soft-hearted landowner turned aspiring swashbuckler and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi), whose reputation as the savage of the high seas precedes him, is a love story. Instead of allowing a slow burn between its central odd couple to fizzle on in perpetuity, never committing to more than intense stares and hints of a kiss, OFMD gives Ed and Stede the swoon-worthy romance befitting any other TV duo.

In a piece for The Atlantic, Emma Sarappo observes that OFMD circumvents the queerbaiting common in most mainstream media by creating a world saturated in queer love and community: “Our Flag Means Death handles television’s legacy of letting LGBTQ+ viewers down by making the show undeniably queer, even if Stede and Ed initially don’t appear to be. It introduces multiple characters whose LGBTQ+ identities and relationships are treated as unremarkable in their milieu … As for Stede and Ed, their friends and enemies alike remark on their chemistry before they themselves are even aware of it … [it] is the opposite of queerbait: It’s a love story told over a season where the narrative constantly affirms that the romance being teased is real.”

If OFMD is a radical departure from most rom-coms for allowing queer characters to literally steer the ship instead of serving as mere passengers on a straight lead’s voyage, it also occupies a unique terrain even within queer media—that of the middle-aged, or “late in life” coming out. From Heartstopper to Sex Education to Red, White and Royal Blue to Bottoms, many of our pop cultural narratives about gay life are centered around youth. As characters come into their real identities, they contend with algebra homework instead of rent payments; their bodies are taut and Instagram ready, never sore just from getting out of bed; and they get to come out with their heads snuggled in the laps of gracefully accepting parents, like President Uma Thurman, not to bewildered spouses, and never as the first part of other, even harder conversations around shared custody of the kids.

OFMD doesn’t just give Ed and Stede a Ross and Rachel-esque slow burn to keep viewers plowing ahead to the next episode — the story is an organic, honest account of both men discovering their own queerness as they fall for each other, even in the swaddle of middle age. If the more prevalent coming-out stories position the teens and twenties as the prime era of discovery, OFMD reminds us that we can still surprise ourselves, though we’re starting to see gray hairs. Shortly before my 40th birthday, I knew the shock of real desire for the first time in my life: At an adult coloring party, an event I attended because I felt too old and boring as a homebody, another woman touched my arm with a silkiness that slipped through my skin. A quicksilver softness that took residence in the deepest chambers of my body, spreading outward and upward until I felt like I was melting from the inside.

So discombobulated I missed my exit on the way home, I thought, oh, this is me — the part of me I didn’t know was truly missing, though I tried to fill with professional success; the part of me that bloodied its fists banging against a heavy gate of trauma and chronic pain that only a hysterectomy would remedy. The part of me that was home now and would not be ignored. For hours, I’d scroll through TikToks of other “late-in-life” queer women deconstructing compulsory heterosexuality and offering flirting tips; I studied the Lesbian Master Doc with the solemnity of an ancient scholar. As I encountered more people who had their epiphanies post-thirty, I realized that the queer media I saw growing up in the suburbs — mostly The L Word and Queer As Folk — may feature characters long out of high school, but they were already out and well-established as gay.

When the standard narrative is that we emerge into adulthood with all core aspects of ourselves knit into place, I wondered if I was less authentically queer for missing something so elemental, for so long. Though shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Grace and Frankie feature characters living in the aftershocks of coming out later-in-life, these characters exist among predominantly straight leads living predominantly straight stories. OFMD is a marvel for people like me: a show so saturated in queerness revolving around the romantic tension rippling between two men well over 40 (both Darby and Waititi are nearly 50). OFMD explicitly acknowledges that queerness discovered long after our supposed formative years is as worthy of exploration as the stirrings of youth. Even beyond demonstrating that middle-aged people can fall in love for the first time, OFMD captures the more liminal aspects of journeying into one’s queerness as an adult.

Long before he and Ed lock lips in the penultimate episode of Season 1, Stede is estranged from the world he’s always known. He has the beautiful, talented wife and two kids he’s told he should want, yet his longing for a more authentic life compels him into the wild unknown of pirating. His coming out, and coming into his own, does not come without consequences — people left behind, whispered accusations of “selfishness.” The poet Adrienne Rich certainly didn’t picture Stede Bonnet staring a thousand yards over yet another family supper when she coined the term compulsory heterosexuality. But the character’s kaleidoscope of emotions — guilt, curiosity, and exhilaration — at stepping out of an established, if uncomfortable life, into an uncharted truth, resonates with many people whose coming out precedes separation and changing the lives of their children.

While Stede’s story might reflect a more conventional life in the closet, Ed’s arc — a growling avoidance of intimacy sparked by childhood trauma and manifest in a singular fixation on becoming the most feared pirate of all time — feels closer to my experience. Spending years without a compass toward my own heart, I circled the same terrain, chasing a big career and holing up in my own captain’s quarters. Though my loneliness was bristling, and it made me feel sour and mean, it felt safe. It was known. Ed begins Season 1 in a rut that even being a king among pirates can’t pull him out of, immersed in the kind of personal inventory that only middle-age can prompt: What is the true measure of my life so far? And what if, as the song goes, that’s all there is? There is a unique loneliness to middle age, sonorous with the ache of everything we lack, and the sharper pain of knowing if we don’t do something, soon, we may never get to have it. Ed finds peace from that hurt in the crystalline blue of Stede’s eyes. For me, hope sprang from a flirty touch and a smile with heat in it.

In many works focusing on younger characters, like Love, Simon or Sex Education, the act of coming out is a prelude to happily ever after. Suffused with the optimism of youth, these stories rarely entertain the possibility that owning our truth can’t knit our broken places firmly together. Sometimes, our jagged edges don’t glide together. The cracks will show. When I came out and started the journey to love and be loved in earnest, part of me assumed that my more avoidant tendencies would simply vanish. Wasn’t my antipathy toward dating simply my spirit protecting my real self from a life I didn’t want? My relief at finding reasons to decline a second date was my lack of desire for men, not love, right? And yet, that kraken of terror at being known gripped my throat and cracked my chest with its tentacles, even when the person smiling across the table was another woman. Coming out could not undo years of trauma, rejection, and pain. It could only be the first step in healing them.

OFMD seems poised to confront these truths as it sails into its second season. Towards the end of Season 1, Stede, in his own flash of terror at being loved for the first time, flees to the stagnant comforts of his old life. His abandonment awakens an ancient trauma in Ed, that can only be sated by rage, a return to the arctic-hearted pillager of yore. Both men, like me, like anyone who has ever come out “later,” have an ocean of life behind them. Waters choppy with triggers and resentments. Coming out, and even declaring their feelings, can’t save them.

Not yet, anyway. We’ll have to see how the showrunners put the “will they” back into the dance of “will they, won’t they?” In a time that feels increasingly oppressive for queer people politically, and in media, where representation feels still all too rare (especially for Sapphic viewers), Our Flag Means Death shines a bright beacon. Among its treasures, the tenderness of two middle-aged bodies leaning into each other, sparked with the alacrity of a new crush. In another world, a world where I could have come out much earlier, I might have found a place for myself in tales of high school ardor and youthful confusion. But Our Flag Means Death is the show I need now.

Our Flag Means Death Season 2 premieres October 5 on Max with three episodes. Two new episodes drop weekly through October 26. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

When she's not watching TV, Laura Bogart is writing books or tweeting at @LDBogart.