PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — A recent archaeological study commissioned and funded by the United States Army has yielded a surprising discovery just east of Front Street in Philadelphia, Penn. Some military historians are calling this the most astonishing military-themed find since the unearthing of the Terracotta Army in rural China.

The dig has uncovered evidence suggesting that Tun Tavern — the beloved institutional Mecca of the United States Marine Corps — was an active gay bar when the Corps’ first officers used it to recruit the original Continental Marines in 1775.

“This find has confirmed what many of us suspected for years,” said the study’s NCOIC, Army Sgt. 1st Class Craig Mangas. “It’s apparent, regarding the nature of current Marines, that they’ve evolved from some sort of ultra-queer genome.”

The original Tun Tavern burned down in 1781 and the space is now shared with Interstate-95 where it passes along Penn’s Landing. The initial goal of the dig was to locate any physical clues that could tie modern Marines with the past.

Mangas told Duffel Blog about the origins of the study.

“Many of the Army personnel who were stationed with Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan noticed a lot of primordial homo-erotic tendencies within their lower enlisted ranks,” he said. “The way they would casually smack each other’s asses, their brazen displays of nudity amongst their comrades, it was incredible to see. Plus there was that time I saw two dudes going down on each other behind a port-o-shitter on Camp Leatherneck. That was pretty fuckin’ gay.”

“We became obsessed with tracking down the root cause of this behavior,” he added. “So we decided the best thing to do was dig up their ancestral homeland.”

The dig, which started in early May, saw little progress until recently when archaeologists stumbled upon the tavern’s outhouse in the cellar.

“That was some of the gayest shit I’ve ever seen,” said Dr. J. Becifius Vanderford of Penn College, an archaeologist on the dig. “We feel like we’ve unlocked a historical treasure-trove of gaydom that will help the modern Marine Corps better understand who they are.”

The site has not been opened to the media yet, but members of the excavation team have given us some details about their discovery.

“We found walls that had ‘WAGNER COVETS THY PHALLUS’ written all over them,” said Specialist Nathan Bules of Tuscaloosa, Ala., a soldier who was on the dig as part of a mandatory working party assignment. “Somebody even carved ‘SEMPER SEMEN’ near an old dartboard. I mean, that daggone nonsense was everywhere. We also saw a bunch of pewter martini glasses everywhere and it seemed like you couldn’t move five feet without stepping on a doody-laced, wood-carved dildo. It’s like these guys were in some sort of gaymosexual heat.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy find was a decaying book pulled from behind the bar.

“The book had the owner listed as Josiah Wagner,” Bules told us. “It’s pretty clear that he was the ringleader of the entire orgy. But the most astonishing part was the fact that the records showed the bar was listed as ‘Fun Tavern.’ It appears there was a misprint sometime ago and the ‘Tun’ part stuck. This guy knew exactly what he was doing by naming it that.”

Dr. Vanderford offered his hypothesis on why the location was chosen as the Marines’ first recruiting center.

“It would make a lot of sense that Maj. Samuel Nicholas chose that spot because of the tremendous amount of men willing to do anything for a good time,” he said. “Once the eighteen-wheeler arrives to haul off these dildos, we’ll be able to get a better understanding of this site.”

“It’s more than just a great historical find,” added Mangas. “It gives an entirely new meaning to being in the ‘City of Brotherly Love.’”