Gay founding fathers
Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben – Trujillo and Hastings Ask Questions of How History Remembers Queer Voices
PRIDE MONTH 2024! The erasure of key LGBTQ+ figures and/or their queerness from history is a very deliberate and calculated exercise. It’s crafted to enforce a rigid heteronormative view of the past; to perpetuate the othering of the queer community. In Washington’s Same-sex attracted General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben, writer Josh Trujillo and artist Levi Hastings present a graphic biography with a twofold mission. Firstly to explore the life of the largely forgotten von Steuben – the “soldier, immigrant and flamboyant homosexual” whose role in the Revolutionary War cannot be underestimated – and secondly to view at his exploits in the context of historical queerness and how we perceive it. It’s an ambitious remit but it’s one tackled with superb consideration and care in these 180-plus pages.
Baron von Steuben’s story is a fascinating one in its own right. Washington’s Queer General follows von Steuben’s life starts with its subject’s life in 18th century Prussia, his notable military achievements, lavish lifestyl
Tea Party leaders have taken a revisionist view of early American history, insisting that the Founding Fathers were not revolutionaries and radicals, but arch-conservatives.
Delving into the Founding Fathers’ own papers indicates something altogether different. Some of the Founding Fathers leaned right, but the majority were anti-monarchists, Freemasons and atheists who held what modern historical language would term a secularist and globalist view. In some cases — like George Washington’s — this included a strong gay-friendly attitude.
Among the Founding Fathers were definitive class biases. Most of these men, like Washington (1732-99) and Thomas Jefferson, were wealthy land- and slave-owners who led aristocratic lifestyles and were elitist toward the “lower” classes. Socialists these men were not. Yet some of their personal ethics and standards show that they were more open to what would be considered a “modern,” 21st-century perspective on experience, love and sexuality than might be presumed in the stodgy, post-Puritan 18th-century colonies.
This was particularly accurate of Washington, whose stance on homosexuality, which at the time was punishable by imprisonment, castration
Benjamin Franklin: Writer, inventor, statesman and friend to gays
Benjamin Franklin. (Cortesy Library of Congress)
There is no more fascinating character among the Founding Fathers than Benjamin Franklin. An intellectual powerhouse credited with an exceptional number of inventions and writings, he also was one of the three most pivotal players in the solidifying of the new colonial government, along with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Historian Walter Isaacson, author of the definitive biography of Franklin, described him as “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of population America would become.” It was Franklin who edited the Declaration of Self-determination as Jefferson wrote it, making significant changes, which altered the course of history. (For example, Jefferson had originally written “we hold these truths to be Sacred,” but Franklin altered that to examine “self-evident” because, he argued with Jefferson, the novel democracy could not be predicated on the vintage divine right of kings, like the monarchy they had just won release from. Thus “self-evident” — coming from the people, not “Sacred,” coming via a kingly condu
Even the Founding Fathers Had to Worry About Gay-Baiting
If the Senate passes the Matthew Shepard Act -- known also as the Local Law Enforcement Detest Crimes Prevention Act -- a long and repulsive history of violence and hate based on sexual orientation may finally approach an end. The legislation was stalled for years in Congress, but with Democrats now in governance it passed the Dwelling of Representatives and will be voted on by the Senate this summer.
What few people realize is that the culture of terror that has drawn-out affected gays and lesbians also threatens heterosexuals. Though the hate-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 garnered national attention, too many other offenses move largely unreported in mainstream media. Some would reason that to focus on barbaric killings obscures the run-of-the-mill abuse that gays and lesbians suffer. Such a climate of detest, backed by the ever-present threat of violence, keeps gays and lesbians from holding hands in widespread, embracing at an airport, or from being easy in workplaces where heterosexual family photos are ubiquitous. Such strictures also hurt heterosexuals by enforcing limited norms of how to act in public as men and women.
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