I Read a Book about America's Founding Daddy, Baron von Steuben, and I Have Thoughts

Baron Von Steuben statue at Valley Forge, October 2024

Washington's Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben by Josh Trujillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baron Von Steuben and the issue of his queerness has been one of my Special Interests for a while. This biography is accessible, interesting, and brings up one of my related Special Interests, the impossibility of understanding sexuality, particularly queerness, in any historical context, along with the importance of trying to bring forth, discuss, and interpret historical queerness anyway.

One of the many complicating aspects of writing a biography outing von Steuben is that historical expressions/perceptions of homosocial relationships aren’t our contemporary expressions/perceptions. It’s a great example of the fact that gender, sexuality, and really even sex identity are cultural constructs. And because a certain cultural concept of heteronormativity was prescribed and assumed in all of the cultural contexts that von Steuben experienced, nobody thought it necessary to put into writing (that has survived, at least) exactly what the rules were for maintaining that heteronormativity, nor what rules could possibly be bent/broken and still maintain one’s heteronormativity. And because of the prescriptive nature of heteronormativity, people certainly weren’t writing down what rules they transgressed and exactly what that looked like and the extent of the transgression in terms of their contemporary society! So while I think it’s pretty clear that Baron von Steuben would have met our current contemporary society’s definition of gayness, there’s no evidence that he, himself, ever put it into words in such a way that we know for a fact that’s how he saw himself. And although it’s FAR more likely than not that his personal assistants/adopted sons Walker, North, and Mulligan, in particular, had some sort of sexual/romantic relationships with him, and in some cases some of them with each other, as well, Walker and North, for one, went on to have completely heteronormative marriages, and we have no idea how their male-male relationships impacted their self-concepts, nor how these relationships would have been viewed within whatever unwritten rules of sexuality that we also know nothing about.

AND our current concept of power dynamics and the taboo of power differentials within a relationship are very correct, but also very contemporary to us, so there’s no way to evaluate the morality of von Steuben’s strongly implied relationships with subordinates within his own contemporary culture. He absolutely had some relationships that we’d all consider criminal today… but were they then? We know there must have been some concept of some way to misuse the power dynamic between authorities and their subordinates and between older and younger people, because that gossip was used to discredit von Steuben back in Prussia… but did von Steuben’s behavior really meet that definition of misuse, or was the gossip about his relationships with teen boys back in Europe simply lies to discredit him? And later in America, when he did the same types of things and it was apparently fine… was it really fine, or did nobody simply care to protest? What were these younger assistants’ feelings about these relationships, and how did they experience them within their own contemporary views of work and emotional life? How would these experiences compare to, say, the experience of an underage wife to a higher-class husband, or really any wife to any husband, considering that women had no legal, property, or monetary rights, and sexual assault wasn’t an act considered possible between a husband and his wife, since the husband always had the “right” to sex with his wife? I haaaate strings of rhetorical questions in essays, and yet here I am, because we have no way of knowing what the reality really was, and it’s so frustrating that we don’t have time travel yet!

All that is to say that’s why tl;dr I’m distraught that this graphic novel biography doesn’t have a bibliography or even endnotes/footnotes. I want the sources that give the first-person statements that led the authors to their conclusions, and not even so I can try to argue with them, but so I can enjoy them, build context, and delve more deeply. Like, Baron von Steuben held a dinner party using his own funds for the entirety of the Valley Forge encampment, including the poorest, lowest-class soldiers, and the only cost of admission was that everyone had to be in their undies or naked? Please tell me where I can drink that tea straight from the source, please! The book notes that “John Mulligan’s written recollections and cataloging of von Steuben’s papers inform the first full biography written about the baron in the 1800s, after his death.” So… what is the title of that book?!? What would be some other authoritative but more current biographies to read? Or articles, even? Something peer-reviewed, perhaps? Hell, I’ll even take a PhD thesis! Since the book does bring up the problem of defining historical sexuality, I’d also expect to see some references or a bibliography or a recommended reading list for this. I did find a Valley Forge program (“The General Von Steuben Statue: Interpreting LGBTQ+ Histories of the Revolution”) in which Dr. Thomas Foster of Howard University drops a number of relevant book titles--The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Sex and the Founding Fathers, and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity among others--so I’ve got a few to look up, but I’d rather have gotten relevant resources in an Appendix in this book.

Tangentially, but in light of that NPS program that thoughtfully discussed von Steuben and the relevance of interpreting LGBTQ+ histories, I was super disappointed when I went to Valley Forge earlier this year and did not see a single display, note, exhibition label, sign, icon, or ANYTHING that referred to von Steuben’s sexuality. Obviously, I get that the problematic nature of how sexuality was perceived in the 1700s makes it problematic to define von Steuben’s sexuality one way or another, but we all know that if you don’t bring up the possibility that a historical figure was queer, you’re basically giving everyone the impression that they definitely weren’t. And it’s not even just that they didn’t have signage, but I didn’t see any books on any kind of LGBTQ+ histories in the gift shop. I’ll even let you omit Washington’s Gay General from the shelf, since it has no bibliography, but there was nothing! I was so sad for all the queer young people dragged to Valley Forge as yet another boring stop on their boring family vacation who would have been SO excited to see some representation. Hell, I’m a 48-year-old bisexual woman in a heterosexual relationship, and *I* would have been excited to see some representation! 

I would have bought the snot out of a T-shirt with Baron Von Steuben’s face on it and the slogan “America’s Founding Daddy” and I would have put it on and worn it out of the store.

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

You Should Read Glitter Up the Dark

Because there is so much new music to be discovered, and so much old music to look at through a different lens.

Glitter Up the Dark is a history of some of the musicians who have used music to subvert the cultural gender binary. It shouldn't be surprising that music is often a tool of transgression and progression, but we so often don't think deeply about what we enjoy, and it's easy to simply bop along to the pleasant beat of what we like without putting any thought into the cultural work that music is doing. 

I spent a lot of time in grad school studying how various artists and writers in the medieval period, in particular, subverted gender roles in their works, so this subject is always something that I'm interested in reading more about. And I love music, but I'm not terribly thoughtful about it, so it was interesting to see how some of my favorite music is contextualized through the lens of gender.

Starting with... okay, did anyone else read Cry to Heaven during a weirdly impressionable time in their young life? 

This book was SO weird, and blew my little mind at the exact same time and in the exact same way that Flowers in the Attic also blew my little mind.

WHY did we all end up reading Flowers in the Attic by the age of twelve, by the way? Like, I know nobody was supervising me and that's how I read and watched an absolute ton of inappropriate media, but wasn't somebody supervising YOU?!?

Anyway, that's where I first learned what a castrato was (and I learned a LOT more than that, ahem, although that's neither here nor there), that very specific form of non-consensual body modification and genital mutilation that Italy was obsessed with between the mid-16th century and 1900 or so. So for nearly 500 years, Italians surgically created a distinctive third gender expression just so their music would sound pretty.

Or, just let women sing in your church choirs?

Spoiler alert: they didn't even do that. Eventually, Pius X just said that they could start letting boys sing in their church choirs instead. Sister Act would have been so much better!

I was monologuing all this to Will, and showed her the 1902 or 1904 recording of Alessandro Moreschi, to date I think the only castrato whose voice we have:

1902 is VERY old for a recording, so reasonably, Will asked about the first ever voice recording. We both sort of thought that it's Thomas Edison, but it's NOT! It's inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who in April 1860 tested out his phonoautogram by singing a French nursery rhyme into it. The device wasn't ever even intended to have an audio output, but the recording was re-discovered in 2008 and sent to a lab that was able to construct an audio output for it.

The first recording using one of Edison's devices that still exists wasn't made until 1878!

This hour-long segue seven pages into the book's Introduction is perhaps why it takes me so long to get through non-fiction books...

I mostly picked this book up to read about artists I didn't already know, but I was also really interested to read about artists like Elvis and the Beatles, who many of their contemporary critics saw as effeminate. Contemporary accusations of subversion have long been subsumed by their popularity over time, although I can sort of see it if you focus on the artists as objects of the female gaze; once upon a time, it was only women who were looked at and objectified. Other subversive works are hidden in plain sight, or clumsily redacted--the original lyrics to Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" were "Tutti frutti, good booty."

Speaking of music that was subversive to its cultural contemporaries but is considered canonically classical now, my teenager is currently a few months into a huge David Bowie kick, which has gotten me interested in all things glam rock. I've had Marc Bolan's "Cat Black" on some kind of obsessive repeat--

--after discovering it through this book, even though I've long had several T. Rex songs on my favorites playlist. "Cosmic Dancer," in particular, is on heavy rotation in my favorites, but I always assumed the singer was female. 

But he's not! Check out the outfits in this T. Rex Top of the Pops appearance:

The pants! The vests! The go-go boots! The dancers!

And then just a year later, we've got our own beloved Starman also playing Top of the Pops:

What a time to be alive!

Glitter Up the Dark's author, Sasha Geffen, claims David Bowie developed his overtly androgynous look in consultation with the gay and trans artists in Andy Warhol's circle, especially trans punk musician Jayne County. County also says that Bowie peppered his work with uncredited bits of her original lyrics and music, which. Damnit, Bowie. But Geffen also baldly reminds us that County's work could never have blown up on her own merits: "the industry settled on a man who could do the best impression of a trans person while staying tethered to relative normalcy" (Geffen 33). 

I do think you can hear the connection, though, between County's mostly underground performances and Bowie's international superstar persona. Here's Jayne County and the Electric Chairs performing in the late 1970s-early 1980s in NYC:

And here's a short bio of Jayne County created by one of my favorite YouTubers:

I'm going to skip past all the punk, goth, synthopop, disco stuff (except to brag to you that I now know the origin of the term "house music"), because I'm too revved up about this chance to once again gush about Kurt Cobain and think about how sad I am that he died. In college, I met someone from Aberdeen, Washington, and was all, "DID YOU KNOW KURT COBAIN?!?" and she was all, "Sigh, everyone I meet asks me that. No."

If I still had all my grunge-look plaid flannel shirts, I could pass them off to Syd now, because apparently they're cool again. Hopefully they've always been cool, ahem, because all I've done over the past thirty years is occasionally upsize my own plaid flannel shirts.

Nirvana's music video for "In Bloom" actually works well in conversation with those glam rock Top of the Pops performances:

Cobain and Courtney Love did a lot of the emotional labor of defying the constraint of the culturally-imposed gender binary, and that had a lot to do with how cool I thought they were, and how much I loved their music, and how I felt at the time about his suicide. I sort of wonder now if the weight of that emotional labor didn't have something to do with his mental health struggles, and if he wouldn't have done better if he could have been plopped here thirty years into the future, where he could just create art and enjoy much of the fruits of that labor.

But then where would we be now if today's 40-somethings hadn't had him and Love as their teenaged role models?

As if that isn't sad enough, the epilogue to Glitter Up the Dark starts with a tribute to SOPHIE, how awesome her recent concert was, and how fucking epic her latest album is. Geffen expresses a desire to share in SOPHIE's "impossible optimism," and the book ends with that hope. 

Damnit, Geffen. I understand that you obviously didn't know that SOPHIE's life would also be tragically short, but still. You made me sad in front of an entire class of bored Health Science students that I was subbing for; one kid literally asked me, "Um, Miss, are you okay?" and when I lied and told her that I was allergic to something in the room, she was all, "Yeah, it smells in here. Can I have a hall pass?"

This is my favorite song and video by SOPHIE:

You're definitely not playing it loud enough to get the correct effect, but that just lets you appreciate the gymnastic choreography. 

Here's a Spotify playlist for Glitter Up the Dark:

It doesn't have all the songs and artists referenced in the book, but it probably has all the ones that are easily findable and on Spotify, so, you know, the musicians can earn themselves a whole penny every time their song gets a million or so plays. I'd definitely support artists better if I knew how (AND if it was as easy as using Spotify and YouTube, which is how I listen to all my music these days. I also use Chrome for browsing, which yesterday literally reduced Will to furious tears, she hates my lack of online best practices so much).