Did you know……..
* Benjamin Franklin was the first U.S. military recruiter who enlisted a gay man into the Revolutionary Army.
* George Washington in all probability was the first American to offer domestic-partner rights. He gave housing to a known homosexual couple when housing was a premium at Valley Forge. And when faced with a homosexual scandal at Valley Forge, he took the least harmful course of action and embarrassed the officer accused of sodomy rather than giving him the death sentence as Thomas Jefferson demanded.
* An African-American gay man, George Middleton, lead a troop of black men in the Revolution.
* Several women dressed as men to enlist in the Revolutionary Army. After the war, when they could have taken off the drag, some chose to live out their lives as men.
* A lesbian, Katharine Lee Bates, wrote one of the country’s most patriotic songs, “America the Beautiful.”
* The director of Wheatland, the home and presidential library of President James Buchanan, admits for the first time that it can’t be refuted that Buchanan might have been gay. In an effort to allow historians the opportunity to fully research this, the library has taken down the portrait of Ann Coleman, the one woman Buchanan ever romanced.
* It might also surprise many Americans that the father of the United States military was a gay man: Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. He wrote the “Revolutionary War Drill Manual” and introduced drills, tactics and discipline to the rag-tag militia, which resulted in victory over the British.
So think about that today everybody when you are stuffing a footlong in your mouth.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE GAY TO EVERYONE!
The memories come swelling to the surface. Greenwich Village, The Gay Alliance of NY. Those were some of the best days of my life. I really wish there were pictures of those times. Just memories, but that’s what counts.