What Memorial Day owes queer soldiers

Little American flags on graves appear uniform from a distance, but closer inspection reveals differences in names, relationships, and the lives people were denied. Some soldiers were discharged for being who they were, including Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, whose headstone records a medal for killing and a discharge for loving. Memorial Day is framed as owing recognition to queer soldiers. The American army is described as queer-built from the beginning, including Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, exiled for sexuality, who trained the Continental Army at Valley Forge and helped it defeat the British. His drill methods and training structure remain embedded in modern U.S. military training. Courage and unafraid presence are presented as the test of American masculinity.

"Walk closer, though, and you'll find the spaces between. The names without dates of marriage. The men buried beside other men. The soldiers whose pictures stayed in their footlockers because home wasn't yet a place where they could be themselves. Walk to Section 66 of Arlington National Cemetery, and you'll find the headstone of Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich - discharged in 1975 for the unspeakable crime of telling the truth - which reads, in his own words: "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.""

"That is what Memorial Day owes the queer soldier. The American army has been queer-built from the start. At Valley Forge in the freezing winter of 1777, a Prussian general arrived who had been exiled from his country for his sexuality. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben rode in with his Italian greyhound Azor walking by his side. Benjamin Franklin had recruited him in Paris. George Washington put the dying Continental Army in his hands. Within three months, Von Steuben turned it into a force that could beat the British."

"His training methods - the rank, the order, the Blue Book drill manual - are still embedded in how the United States military trains soldiers today. A man widely believed to have been gay. The reason there is an American republic to celebrate at 250 years. He stood in the mud with the soldiers. He did not hide. That is the greatest test of American masculinity - a willingness to be unafraid, and to risk it all."

Read at Advocate.com