Lesbian historical fiction gives lesbian readers what we want but can’t have, depictions of lesbians in history. While the term “lesbian” is troubled in reference to the past, when it didn’t exist or wasn’t used, contemporary lesbian identity requires a past in order for lesbians to thrive and to imagine a future, even if that past is speculative. Lesbians find peril and promise on the high seas in a subgenre of historical novels set in the Atlantic World of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A very few protagonists are part of the European colonialist enterprise, others are emigrants (Jewish, Irish, and English) escaping violence and poverty, and the vast majority are pirates. Taking their cue from radical scholarship that depicts the pirate enterprise as a diverse anti-capitalist working class that disrupted the slave trade, pirate novels make the seafaring life a subversive backdrop for lesbian historical fiction. The historical existence of cross-dressing women pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read open the door for numerous fictional lesbian pirates who, like so many immigrants in historical novels, make good role models for rebellious heroism.