you: Silver is straight and he didn't love Flint.
Jonathan E. Steinberg, writer/creator/producer of Black Sails: It was a complicated relationship with a lot going on under the surface. Starz gave us the freedom to allow some of these relationships to exist without specific labels and to embrace that people don’t always say what they’re feeling and exist in the space that people don’t even know about themselves. [...] They became singular to each other. And maybe the person who they had the closest and most personal relationship with. [...] We knew how we wanted it to feel. We knew we wanted to bring these two guys as close together as they’ve maybe ever been with anybody in their lives, and have it end tragically. [...] They should be the most important person – each to the other – that you can imagine. If there was never anything there then there’s no tragedy. [...] we were constantly aware that the cop-outs would be easy and sort of trying to avoid the cop-outs, but also trying to embrace how complicated it would be for Flint to be in that relationship. Sort of… the first true partner for whom – I don’t want to say that sexuality was complicated, because it was complicated across the board... [we] just wanted to own that and let a lot of things live in subtext. I think the moment you make them text, that’s the cop-out. Like, the cop-out is making it seem like it would be easy for him to address this. [...] We had to embrace the fact that there would have to be things that were left unsaid and were going to have to exist in subtext and performance and context in order for it to be honest. That felt right. There is, at least to me when I watch it, a significant amount happening between the two of them that is all under the surface. We relied on the audience a lot to fill in those blanks. [...] That relationship is meaningful to both of them. It is singular, for both of them. We’ve never seen Silver invest in someone, in this way. So for him, it’s very new. It’s the first one of these relationships that we are aware of. We’ve seen Flint invest in people before, but not in this way, where he has allowed himself to be both Flint and McGraw, openly, and found some measure of comfort in that state. So for him, it’s new, also. I would argue that it’s not a contest, as to which of them felt it more deeply, but I think it was definitely meaningful. Personally, there wasn’t ulterior motives in their affinity for each other. It is genuine and it is complicated, in the way that it’s always complicated when you love someone.
