Gay founding fathers
Tea Party leaders possess taken a revisionist view of preceding 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 word 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 reveal that they were more unseal to what would be considered a “modern,” 21st-century perspective on life, like and sexuality than might be presumed in the stodgy, post-Puritan 18th-century colonies.
This was particularly factual of Washington, whose stance on homosexuality, which at the time was punishable by imprisonment, castration
Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben – Trujillo and Hastings Request Questions of How History Remembers Gender non-conforming Voices
PRIDE MONTH 2024! The erasure of key LGBTQ+ figures and/or their queerness from history is a very deliberate and calculated use. It’s designed to enforce a rigid heteronormative view of the past; to perpetuate the othering of the same-sex attracted community. In Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben, writer Josh Trujillo and designer Levi Hastings display a graphic biography with a twofold mission. Firstly to explore the experience of the largely forgotten von Steuben – the “soldier, immigrant and flashy homosexual” whose role in the Revolutionary War cannot be underestimated – and secondly to watch 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 excellent consideration and nurture in these 180-plus pages.
Baron von Steuben’s story is a fascinating one in its own right. Washington’s Gay General follows von Steuben’s life starts with its subject’s being in 18th century Prussia, his notable military achievements, lavish lifestyl
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 amazing 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 culture America would become.” It was Franklin who edited the Declaration of Autonomy 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 browse “self-evident” because, he argued with Jefferson, the recent democracy could not be predicated on the aged 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 Proceed -- known also as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- a lengthy and ugly history of aggression and hate based on sexual orientation may finally approach an end. The legislation was stalled for years in Congress, but with Democrats now in supervise it passed the House of Representatives and will be voted on by the Senate this summer.
What few people realize is that the culture of terror that has long affected gays and lesbians also threatens heterosexuals. Though the hate-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 garnered national attention, too many other offenses go largely unreported in mainstream media. Some would challenge that to focus on barbaric killings obscures the run-of-the-mill overuse that gays and lesbians undergo. Such a climate of detest, backed by the ever-present threat of violence, keeps gays and lesbians from holding hands in public, embracing at an airport, or from being comfortable in workplaces where heterosexual family photos are ubiquitous. Such strictures also harm heterosexuals by enforcing restricted norms of how to operate in public as men and women.