Moreover, Robert E Lee V, the general’s great-great-grandson, made a similar request this summer.Īfter riots flared over Charlottesville’s plan to remove his ancestor’s statue, he talked about the various Lee symbols across the South: He said displaying them as a form of defiance would be an act of treason. In fact, Lee asked followers to put their flags away. Well, if John Kelly knew his Civil War history he would know that when the war ended Robert E Lee refused to be buried in his Confederate uniform. And I found they were not only slaughtering each other – many were also loving each other. I have combed through Civil War records of Confederate and Union soldiers. The words ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ weren’t part of the American lexicon until thirty years after the Civil War ended. We know in particular that three pairs of Navy sailors did go to court-martial for ‘improper and indecent intercourse with each other’. Using modern day calculations of the LGBTI population, we can estimate 325,000 gay and bi soldiers joined the 3,250,000 on the battlefield.
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Queer Civil War buffs say the deafening silence around LGBTI Confederate and Union soldiers suggests their very presence.Ĭonfederate and Union soldiers didn’t have the infamous Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, or Trump’s now rescinded ban on transgender service members. Today they are fictionalized in the literary works of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Courtney Milan’s The Pursuit of, Alyssa Cole’s That Could Be Enough, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to name a few.īut seeing he does, he should start with LGBTIs who lives are seldom mentioned. These stories, however, are gradually coming out of the closets of African American oral histories. So the suffering of enslaved LGBTI Africans has long been invisible. Slavery was a brutal history of deliberately debasing and dehumanizing enslaved blacks.īut even now the horrors of slavery are told mostly from a white and/or heteronormative perspective like Kelly’s. Even many of our venerated Founding Fathers were wealthy slaveholders.
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‘If I say slavery is bad, and you say it’s good, let’s compromise, and you be a slave.’ The secret gay history of slavery in America But he is wrong.Īfrican American gay activist and CNN political commentator Keith Boykin was one of the first to challenge his absurdity. Kelly’s moral relativism suggests there’s no absolute truth about the war, only truths a particular individual or culture upholds. Kelly also suggested ‘the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War’.Īnd with these words, President Donald Trump’s second-in-command only deepened the divide in this country about slavery.īoston-born Kelly made the remarks, perhaps unsurprisingly, on Laura Ingraham’s new Fox News show on 30 October. Nobody is more in need of a queer history lesson on the Civil War than White House chief of staff John Kelly who recently described Confederate General Robert E Lee as ‘an honourable man’.