That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

Just so everyone's clear, the source Sung cited was from the Ask A Historian Subreddit asking about how historically accurate your meme was. And, bear in mind, Ask A Historian has some damn high standards for what they'll keep.

To put the actual answer into perspective, since Huggy Bear's been taking paragraphs out of context to claim that the historian is saying "No, it's not real, but here's why it is," here's the conclusion, which explains it succinctly:

n conclusion then, yes, the meme you have encountered is largely fictionalised. Whilst the sexual exploitation of male slaves by white men and women alike was absolutely a real thing, as was the use of ritualised public humiliation and violence as a means of dehumanisation and asserting control, the exact phenomena this article describes strikes me as being quite fanciful. It is doubtlessly circulated with an ulterior motive and an agenda in mind, one that is probably tinged with homophobic sentiments. There is no shortage of very real trauma in the historical record when it comes to slavery - these real people who suffered so much injustice do not need to have, nor do they deserve to be demeaned by, us inventing more. We should likewise be careful not to impose our own modern ways of thinking onto the people of the past, for similar reasons - as historians we must try to understand these people somewhat as they understood themselves. Our own ideas about which boxes people should be placed into aren't very useful for doing that.

And, of course, the author supplies several sources.

So, to sum up:

• Male on Male Sexual Abuse between Massa and his male slaves was a thing that happened on occasion: Confirmed (though, it should go without saying that Massa-on-"N-word-called-a-Wench" sexual abuse was far more common.)
  
• Buck Breaking as described as in Huggy Bear's meme: Busted
  

And, frankly,  I should probably note that (as counterintuitive as it may seem) rape, especially in contexts like this where there's such an extreme imbalance of power, isn't even necessarily related to sexual orientation. Case in point, Oz:



When Schillinger (or Adebisi) rapes a male prisoner on the show, it's pretty explicitly about power and not because he just wants a piece of ass that bad, and what research I've done into the subject suggests this is how it generally works in the real world. Naturally, I strongly suspect that scenarios like this are far more common in prisons than on slave plantations.