It Think I Know What They Will Say.

There is an article in Out Traveler about our “gay” history in colonial Williamsburg…

Colonial Williamsburg is Uncovering America’s Hidden Queer History
It turns out we were always here and queer, we were just kept out of the history books.
By Donald Padgett
August 11, 2021


Colonial Williamsburg was a lot queerer than we were led to believe, and new efforts are underway to make sure this ignorance of LGBTQ+ contributions to American history is soon a thing of the past.

The popular living museum and restored colonial era community in Virginia is renowned for bringing the past to life, and the folks at Colonial Williamsburg are also working hard to include the stories previously ignored or hidden due to a historical bias against the LGBTQ+ community.

Now the Republicans will probably call this Critical Race Theory (CRT) in this case Critical Queer Theory but in reality it is just our history that was buried.

The efforts to unearth our hidden history in Williamsburg began several years ago when a gay male couple asked Aubrey Moog-Ayers, a queer weaver in full costume at the living museum, about the LGBTQ+ history of the area and era. She told Atlas Obscura the question left her stumped and sent her on a quest to “tell the whole story.”

Moog-Ayers met with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and soon the Gender and Sexual Diversity Research Committee was formed to conduct research and uncover the hidden history and personal stories of queer Williamsburg and other colonies.

There is a whole “Who’s who” in the colonies.

The most notable early gay American at least somewhat familiar to the modern reader is Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben, better known as Baron von Steuben for those who are bad with long names. Celebrated in the history books as the Prussian military expert hired by George Washington to turn an undisciplined and demoralized Continental Army into an effective fighting force, he was also openly gay according to many modern scholars.

Oh gee… the history books seemed to left that fact out. In all fairness I don’t think his sexual orientation should be discussed but at the same time it should not be buried.

“Long before Stonewall, people with nonconforming identities existed and sought companionship, community, understanding, and love,” Tolson wrote on the Colonial Williamsburg blog. “People who we would now classify as gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, nonbinary, and intersex existed and strove to express themselves and be acknowledged by those around them.”

The thing is there were people who would be likely to stone them.

Tolson told the Daily Press one particular story he learned from his research to demonstrate this point. He came across two marriage certificate requests from the era for a landowning Virginia woman of some wealth and influence. The first request was denied, because she was a woman seeking to marry another woman and there was no marriage equality in colonial times. But a second request the following day was granted because she had applied while dressed in the manner of a man at the time. The eye-opening discovery proved LGBTQ+ folks existed at the time and, apparently, enjoyed some tolerance from the greater community.

If you don’t look for it you will not find it and that seems to be the case

“It’s not that the information isn’t there, it’s that it hasn’t been properly researched and a lot of other groups are overrepresented in the historic record,” Tolson reiterated to the Daily Press.

The researchers hinted that there is more to come.

We also cannot forget that a future president represented a trans person in a legal case in colonial Boston, John Adams defended a crossdresser in 1771 in the case of Gray vs. Pitts. Assault and Battery.