A Letter to Baron Friedrich von Steuben (September 17, 1730 – November 28, 1794)
Dear Drillmaster,
In 1776, “homosexuality” did not exist.
At least not as an identity.
There were no categories like:
gay,
straight,
bisexual,
queer.
Colonial America did not generally imagine sexuality as a stable internal identity defining a person’s entire social existence.
Instead, society focused almost entirely on acts.
Specific behaviors.
Specific sins.
Specific violations of religious and legal codes.
And same-sex intimacy between men fell under terrifying labels inherited from English common law:
“sodomy”
or
“buggery.”
Crimes against nature.
Biblical offenses.
Capital crimes on paper across all thirteen colonies.
Technically punishable by death.
And yet…
actual executions remained surprisingly rare.
Colonial courts demanded extremely high evidentiary standards, often requiring eyewitness testimony nearly impossible to obtain for private acts.
Which created strange contradiction:
severe laws existed,
but enforcement remained sporadic,
uneven,
and often reluctant.
America in 1776 publicly condemned same-sex intimacy…
while quietly tolerating far more ambiguity than later generations sometimes assume.
And there you stood, Baron von Steuben:
Prussian military officer,
brilliant drillmaster,
architect of Continental Army discipline,
widely rumored to prefer the company of men.
A man whose talents proved so essential to the Revolution that many leaders, including George Washington, largely looked the other way regarding whispers about your private life.
History gets complicated quickly when competence enters the room.
And same-sex intimacy absolutely existed throughout colonial America.
Court records,
military documents,
diaries,
letters,
and gossip all reveal people navigating attraction, affection, and desire quietly beneath rigid public morality.
Women’s same-sex relationships existed too, though often differently.
Female intimacy frequently escaped scrutiny because society viewed women as less sexually autonomous altogether.
“Romantic friendships” between women could involve:
shared beds,
intense emotional letters,
lifelong partnerships,
physical affection,
domestic companionship.
As long as relationships avoided overt public sexual framing, society often tolerated them under guise of friendship.
Meanwhile gender nonconformity surfaced occasionally in startling ways.
Figures like Deborah Sampson disguised themselves as men to serve militarily.
Cross-dressing appeared periodically for survival,
work,
mobility,
or personal expression.
Colonial America enforced rigid gender roles…
yet human beings kept slipping through cracks anyway.
Because people always do.
Then came the 19th century.
And same-sex intimacy remained visible…
while becoming increasingly categorized.
Early in the century, intense same-sex friendships flourished openly within “homosocial” culture.
Men spent enormous amounts of time with other men through:
military life,
boardinghouses,
universities,
trade work.
Women often lived and socialized primarily among women.
The emotional language of the era feels startlingly intimate by modern standards.
Men wrote passionate letters to male friends.
Women formed lifelong domestic partnerships.
“Boston marriages” became well-known arrangements where financially independent women lived together long-term in emotionally committed households.
Many contemporaries interpreted these relationships as respectable companionship.
Others quietly understood more.
And importantly:
same-sex desire still lacked modern identity framework.
A man could engage in same-sex intimacy without imagining himself fundamentally different category of human.
Behavior mattered more than orientation.
Meanwhile the law evolved gradually.
States increasingly replaced death penalties for sodomy with imprisonment.
Punishments remained severe.
Stigma remained enormous.
But legal systems shifted away from execution toward criminalization and institutional control.
And as cities expanded during the late 19th century, underground queer subcultures began forming more visibly.
Urban anonymity created possibility.
Men recognized one another through:
coded language,
fashion,
behavior,
meeting places,
theaters,
bathhouses,
parks.
A hidden social geography emerged.
Meanwhile literature quietly encoded same-sex longing too.
Walt Whitman published the Calamus poems in Leaves of Grass celebrating male affection, comradeship, and emotional intimacy with language many later readers recognized as unmistakably queer.
America’s queer history often survived first through subtext.
Then medicine intervened.
And everything changed.
Late-19th-century psychiatrists and sexologists began categorizing same-sex attraction scientifically.
European figures like Richard von Krafft-Ebing labeled homosexuality psychological inversion or pathology.
This shift mattered enormously.
Before:
same-sex acts were sinful behaviors.
Now:
homosexuality became perceived innate condition.
A person could now BE homosexual.
Ironically, medicalization simultaneously created modern queer identity…
and modern institutional stigma.
Once society defines something medically,
it also gains tools to diagnose,
treat,
control,
and institutionalize it.
The 20th century began under profound repression.
At the turn of the century, same-sex acts remained criminalized almost everywhere.
Police raids targeted bars and bathhouses.
Public scandals destroyed careers.
Psychiatry classified homosexuality as mental illness.
Employers fired suspected gay workers routinely.
And yet queer communities flourished underground anyway.
Harlem drag balls during the 1920s exploded with music, performance, and coded freedom.
Greenwich Village developed bohemian enclaves.
Queer social networks spread quietly through cities.
Prohibition accidentally helped too.
Speakeasies blurred social boundaries and created hidden nightlife cultures where same-sex interaction became somewhat easier beneath general illegality.
Apparently once everyone is already breaking one law, social categories loosen slightly.
Then in 1924 came the Society for Human Rights in Chicago:
the first recognized American gay-rights organization.
Tiny.
Short-lived.
Raided quickly.
But foundational.
Then World War II changed everything again.
Military mobilization brought millions together in same-sex environments.
People discovered others like themselves.
Urban migration accelerated.
And afterward came backlash.
The Cold War unleashed the Lavender Scare.
Government officials portrayed homosexuals as:
security risks,
moral degenerates,
susceptible to blackmail.
Thousands of federal employees lost jobs.
The U.S. government effectively treated queer identity as national-security threat.
Imagine fearing both nuclear war and brunch simultaneously.
Still, resistance organized quietly.
The Mattachine Society formed in 1950.
The Daughters of Bilitis followed in 1955.
These “homophile” groups pursued cautious assimilationist strategies:
education,
respectability,
incremental acceptance.
Then came Alfred Kinsey.
The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) shocked America by revealing same-sex experiences far more widespread than society publicly acknowledged.
Human sexuality turned out dramatically messier than rigid moral categories suggested.
Then came June 28, 1969.
Stonewall riots.
Police raided the Stonewall Inn routinely as they had many times before.
This time people fought back.
Drag queens,
trans women,
street youth,
queer patrons,
marginalized communities.
Days of protest followed.
And modern gay liberation exploded outward.
The 1970s transformed visibility:
Pride marches,
coming-out movements,
queer newspapers,
activist organizations.
Then in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM as mental disorder.
A seismic shift.
Yet progress remained uneven.
Openly gay politician Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978.
Anita Bryant launched anti-gay campaigns.
Religious conservatism intensified.
Then came AIDS.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated queer communities during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Thousands died while government response lagged horrifyingly.
Families abandoned loved ones.
Hospitals overflowed.
Funerals multiplied relentlessly.
And stigma intensified because many Americans initially framed AIDS as “gay disease.”
Yet from catastrophe emerged radical activism.
Groups like ACT UP forced national attention through disruptive protest, demanding:
research,
drug access,
medical urgency,
human dignity.
The crisis transformed queer political organization permanently.
Then came the long legal battles.
1993:
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Serve quietly or not at all.
1996:
Defense of Marriage Act restricting federal recognition of marriage.
1998:
the murder of Matthew Shepard reminding America violence remained brutally real.
Then the tide shifted.
Lawrence v. Texas struck down sodomy laws nationwide.
Suddenly same-sex intimacy itself became constitutionally protected.
And finally:
Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationally.
A relationship once punishable by death now received constitutional recognition.
That arc alone feels astonishing historically.
And now…
we arrive in 2026.
Where homosexuality exists simultaneously as normalized and contested.
Nearly 10% of American adults identify as LGBTQ+ according to Gallup polling.
Among Gen Z, the numbers rise dramatically higher.
Visibility transformed American culture:
gay athletes,
politicians,
teachers,
parents,
executives,
characters in media,
public marriages,
Pride celebrations.
What once survived through coded whispers now appears openly across mainstream society.
And legal protections expanded too.
Bostock v. Clayton County extended federal employment protections.
The Respect for Marriage Act codified federal recognition for same-sex marriages.
Open military service became normal after repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Yet backlash intensified simultaneously.
State-level legislative battles erupted around LGBTQ+ rights broadly.
Some queer Americans report feeling less safe publicly than a decade earlier.
Online harassment and political polarization remain intense.
Regional differences matter enormously.
A gay couple holding hands in one city might feel utterly ordinary.
Elsewhere, the same gesture still requires careful calculation.
And invisibility persists strategically for many people:
at work,
within families,
inside religious communities,
or certain geographic regions.
Which means queer life in America still involves ongoing mathematics of safety and disclosure.
Some equations changed.
The calculations remain.
Baron, if you could walk through America in 2026, you would likely stand astonished watching:
same-sex weddings celebrated openly,
Pride flags hanging from churches and city halls,
gay politicians serving publicly,
streaming shows featuring queer teenagers without coded euphemism,
and entire corporations suddenly becoming extremely rainbow-colored every June.
You would marvel at the visibility.
But We suspect you would also recognize something deeply familiar beneath all the progress.
Because queer Americans still navigate ancient questions:
When is it safe to be fully seen?
Who gets accepted?
Who gets protected?
Whose love counts publicly?
Whose identity remains negotiable politically?
Those tensions did not vanish.
They evolved.
With hidden diaries, ballroom lights, protest chants, chosen families, and one discreet revolutionary wink carried across centuries,
—The Radical Left 🏳️🌈🖤
And dear reader, perhaps this is the deeper question homosexuality asks us after 250 years:
Why have human societies so often feared forms of love, intimacy, and identity that fall outside cultural expectations?
Why does difference become threat so easily in the eyes of power?
Because the history of homosexuality in America is not merely a story about sex.
It is a story about visibility.
About loneliness.
About coded language.
About found families.
About survival.
About deciding when it is safe to speak honestly about oneself.
It is a story about people existing long before society possessed vocabulary, laws, or courage sufficient to acknowledge them openly.
And perhaps most importantly, it is a story about how human beings continue insisting upon love even when governments criminalize it, religions condemn it, medicine pathologizes it, and neighbors fear it.
From whispered colonial romances…
to Harlem ballrooms…
to Stonewall…
to AIDS activism…
to Pride parades glowing beneath city lights…
LGBTQ+ Americans have spent centuries proving something remarkably stubborn:
Human identity does not disappear simply because society refuses to recognize it.