Pirates Had a Form of Gay Marriage

To be sure, there was a certain amount of situational homosexuality that occurred among the all-male crews of buccaneer ships back in the golden age of piracy, much like there is in modern-day prisons.
But it's not as though those super grizzled, hyper-masculine throat-slitting machines engaged in same-sex coupling, right? It's a fiercely divisive subject even today, so 400 years ago it must have been absolute insanity to even suggest two men getting married, much less two pirates.
On the contrary, some historians claim that the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" (pirate crews who docked, traded, and intermittently lived in port towns in the West Indies during the 17th century) had entire communities where homosexual couples were considered perfectly acceptable.
You see, pirates had a form of civil partnership called matelotage, a marriage-like institution wherein two male pirates shared all of their loot.
Additionally, each would name the other as his sole inheritor. While this makes a good kind of economic sense, in as much as it was essentially the only kind of financial security a pirate could hope for, some commentators argue that these relationships were also romantic in nature, possibly because matelots could routinely be observed having sex with each other.
In 1645, the French government of Tortuga decided to import thousands of prostitutes to try to neutralize the rampant homosexuality, because this was the type of response that governments had to things. Not that it's likely to have made a great deal of difference, though -- pirates in a matelotage shared everything, including wives. Adding mixed threesomes to the gay love-in was probably not the outcome France was going for, but, France being France, we can never truly be certain.