Comment from @therevwriter:
I'm intrigued. Where does Mr. Bi Disaster come from? Everything I've read paints him as constantly obsessed with women. I'd be interested to explore some other sources, because the JPJ in my head is a womanizing asshole and I'm always open to having my opinions altered through new info.
There is potentially a lot to explore here. I’ve discussed some of these things at varying lengths on my blog in the past, but it’s been like 3-4 years ago at this point so I figure it wouldn’t hurt to have a more somewhat comprehensive overview on the topic of John Paul Jones, the evidence that he may have been bisexual, and his complicated relationship with trust, women, sex, and depression and how those all tie together into the well-deserved imagining that JPJ could be perceived as a womanizing asshole.
I’ll ramble a bit.
The fastest point to address here would be the bisexual one. I had never face palmed harder in my life than when I read Evan Thomas’ biography on John Paul Jones and he said that there was no evidence that Jones was Bisexual immediately after including an explicitly bisexual poem Jones wrote in Latin simply because there was ‘no concrete evidence that Jones actually slept with any men.’ (Thomas, 232.) After having repeatedly speculated the entire book that any women Jones so much as looked at, he also fucked with zero evidence to back up any of those wild claims. He couldn’t fathom the idea of a man being friends with a woman who named him the godfather of her child and him actually loving his god child. He basically said that the only way this was possible is if Jones was actually somehow the real father and I rolled my eyes so far back in my head it hurt. Sure Jones was kind of a slut but jesus. I thought about it more later and laughed so hard because Thomas on the subject was just the living embodiment of ‘a guy could write down in a diary that on x date at x time he had sex with another man’ and straight white male historians would still find a way to say “Well...” I counter, do we really need more evidence than the poem (linked here if you want to read a clunky translation of said semi-erotic poem) to speculate that there was a very real chance that Jones was Bisexual without dismissing it outright immediately as impossible?
(an aside: when you have a reputation for womanizing, no one would suspect a thing about you sleeping with men as well. Unfortunately his womanizing reputation made him easy to target and for people to believe the crime for, re: his time in Russia where he was framed by his political enemies for assaulting a young girl, a crime punished by beheading, the plot for which was just barely uncovered before Jones killed himself instead and then also the time Ben Franklin told Jones that while he was at sea a maid stole Jones’ clothes and assaulted another lady during a festival while dressed like him and the lady’s sons went on a man hunt looking for him.)
It’s unfortunate that historians can easily explain any mlm tendencies at sea on just that: being at sea. But I do have to acknowledge that reality. As someone who is asexual I am well acquainted with the idea that action =/= attraction. And Jones, very explicitly, wrote that he’s just as comfortable being on both the giving and receiving ends of sex with men as he is with women (and I mean that, the poem also possibly suggests he’s down with getting pegged).
On top of that, the poem was written in Latin. I’ve mentioned before that the likelihood that any of the people on board Jones’ crew would be in anyway well-versed in understanding Latin is... extremely unlikely. Most men who set out to sea were generally uneducated. he wrote a bisexual poem in the language of the gays that no one around him at the time would ever be able to understand should they have come across it.
When it comes to Jones and women, things get complicated. John Paul Jones is a tragic figure. He was his own worst enemy and on top of that, his life was a string of endless betrayal after betrayal by those he thought he could trust. He was paranoid by nature and that reinforced it, to the point of serious health complications caused by lack of sleep because he was too afraid of mutiny happening in his sleep. Ironically, he was also a terrible judge of character and easily blinded by flashy displays of wealth and empty flattery from attractive men, which burned him. People often used him and then tossed him aside. He suffered greatly for it. One of the examples of this that hurts me the most is that the man Jones trusted most during the AmRev was actually a British Spy. Jones considered Edward Bancroft to be his closest and most intimate friend and confidant. Jones never suspected Bancroft was feeding the British all of his plans and had even come up with a cipher for the two of them to communicate. The Battle of Flamborough Head that won Jones his fame was only possible because, just once, Bancroft... for some reason... decided not to snitch. Maybe he’d gone soft on Jones? Who knows. The reveal of Bancroft’s ultimate betrayal after the war was definitely one of the final straws for Jones, though. He never trusted again.
The reason why this is important to note is that one of my favorite quotes from Jones is one that’s revealingly honest about why it’s easy to see him as a womanizing asshole. A female acquaintance of his later in life confronted him on the matter, calling him out on how he prefers taking lovers over making friends. Jones then admitted “sad experience generally shows that where we expect to find a friend, we have only been treacherously deluded by false appearances.” (quote pulled from Thomas 303 because I can’t access the JPJ papers these days). As a very social man, Jones was probably starved for human contact but he isolated himself from people and refused to make friends he believed would inevitably betray him, settling for attempting to satisfy what was probably a deep seated longing for genuine human connection with strings of shallow dalliances (never able to trust enough to fall in love) that never filled the endless yawning void of his spiraling depression. (catch me crying in the club for the umpteenth time about Jones saying “I would have faced death a thousand times, but today I desire it” [quote pulled from the memoirs of diplomat Comte de Ségur]).
Jones is a thoroughly complex and intriguing disaster of a human being to study and he fascinates me to no end for that reason and I love reading about him and trying to peer between the lines at the shattered man underneath all of the peacocking and unsatisfiable ambition.
