Gay Pride and the American Revolution??

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What does Queer Theory have to do with our founding fathers and the American Revolution? Nothing, as it turns out. But if you aren’t familiar with accurate history, you could be easily convinced that there was a secret war waging against homosexuals in colonial America.

That’s the goal of Pride month at the Museum of the American Revolution

For many years, I’ve been writing about how it’s hard to get accurate history without primary sources. When I first began publishing the Knowledge Keepers collection, it was in response to just this sort of thing. The internet serves up a wealth of opinion that’s often questionable (but not often questioned). But I’ve also warned my readers about museums playing fast and loose with the facts of history. Critical theory (race theory, climate theory, and queer theory) have all infiltrated academia, primary education, public libraries, and even our beloved museums.

So it should be no surprise to see the Museum of the American Revolution advertising Pride Month each June. But what, exactly, do they have to tell us about homosexuality in the American revolution?

Speculation. Period. Unicorns and rainbows, literally.

The museum website states clearly that “primary source evidence relating to gender roles, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ identity in the Revolutionary era is lacking.” No kidding, Sherlock.

According to Dr. Tyler Putman, Gallery Interpretation Manager at the Museum,  in this YouTube video,

“Sometimes one of the challenges of the Revolutionary Era is we don’t have all of the evidence we’re looking for”…he admits that they have to “hunt for evidence.”

Or make it up.

On the MOAR website, there are several precariously weak examples of gay pride in the American revolution:

1. The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic by Richard Godbeer A book that supposes that strong male friendships were romantic or sexual, and that Puritans were cool with same-sex attraction based on their belief in the role of Christ as bridegroom and male Christians as the bride (tell me you don’t understand metaphors without telling me you don’t understand metaphors).
2. A sculpture of the Baron von Steuben flying the pride flag, created by gay artist John Y. Wind, who freely admits to putting his own spin on the revolutionary heroes.
3. A book about Deborah Sampson, a woman who enlisted as a man in 1781 served in the Continental Army. She first served in a scouting party and eventually went with the army to take part in the Siege of Yorktown Progressives want you to believe that she “used he/him pronouns” and that she was transgender because she donned a man’s uniform. Friends, Throughout the centuries, women have disguised themselves as men to fight in wars:

• Joanna, Countess of Flanders in Hundred Years War
• Hannah Snell, the earliest known British Royal Marine. Her husband went missing, so she joined the military, dressed in disguise, to find him. 
• Joanna Zubr,  in The Napoleonic Wars
• Once the war erupted, Frances and her husband enlisted together — with Frances in disguise — in the Union Army.
• Dorothy Lawrence in 1915, joined the British army to write a firsthand account of WW1
• American Civil War: Sarah Edmonds, sarah Wakeman,
• A book about Jemima Wilkinson, a mentally deranged woman who became an “androgenous prophet and preacher” after a serious illness, renaming herself Public Universal Friend.
• An evening with John Gilbert McCurdy, the gay author Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh, a book about a supposed gay British officer who goes on trial for his behavior (before the Revolution, by the way).
• Hanna Catherall and Rebecca Jones Quaker yoke mates: “They were co-workers, co-laborers in this place, in a school, for the good of the young people of Philadelphia.”

Guys, I can’t find any information at all about a Hannah Catherall besides the Museum’s website and the Erie (PA) Gay News. The author of this article states:

“On my recent visit to the museum, when Mead showed this to me, my response was, “What you’re going for is inclusion of the entire American family.” He smiled and responded, “Correct, the revolution belongs to all of us.”

He pointed out other LGBT exhibits.

One features a scene of two Quaker women visiting American prisoners of war at Independence Hall, then known as the Pennsylvania State House. The exhibit was based on the diary of a Quaker woman named Elizabeth Drinker, who wrote about the “two Hannah Catherells.”

“Now there’s ambiguity in this scene,” Mead noted. “It’s possible that this refers to a niece and an aunt who were both named Hannah Catherell in the Quaker community. It’s also possible that it refers to Hannah Catherell and Rebecca Jones, two women who lived together who were described at the time as ‘yolk mates.'” (their misspelling, not mine)

When I inquired what “yolk mates” means, Mead explained, “They were co-workers, co-laborers in this place, in a school, for the good of the young people of Philadelphia. So some historians speculate that this may have been a same-sex couple. While we may not be able to prove that, we thought some of these displays were useful in getting people to think about the presence of the gay community here in Philadelphia in the 18th century.”

This “pride” exhibit is all supposition. They really really want there to be rampant homosexuality in the American colonies.

Now, homosexuality has been a practice since the beginning of recorded history. In the bible, it’s one of the sins the Isrealites were told not to commit. In fact, God called it an abomination in Leviticus 18:22.

How do we know it wasn’t rampant in the colonies? Primary sources.

The colonies were largely Protestant settlements. Even the non-professing Christians lived under the Judeao-Christian ethic, with societal norms drawn from the Holy Bible. (Contrast that with the ancient Roman empire, who freely and publicly practiced homosexuality, which is well documented by the writers of the day.)

What the museum is practicing is a form of cultural Marxism

The long march through the institutions: During the 1930s, Marxists from Europe sought for a way to impose the Marxist ideology in America. But they recognized that the United States of America could not be conquered by communism in the way that Russia had been. Americans were free to choose their destinies, and were entrenched in a decidedly western civilization undergirded with biblical principles and a unique constitution.

They needed a softer, more approachable tactic: the long march through the insitutions. If a large group of likeminded radicals could organize and infiltrate society at every level, they could slowly (the long march) influence all of culture through government, education, and entertainment (the institutions).

The idea belonged first to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist and atheist. According to Gary DeMar of American Vision, “Gramsci considered Christianity to be the “force binding all the classes—peasants and workers and princes, priests and popes and all the rest besides, into a single, homogeneous culture. It was specifically Christian culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important things about human life transcend the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal lives.”[2] Economic policies, threats of violence and loss of property and position, and expulsion to gulags for retraining were used to compel the masses to conform to the new ideology.” Later, Herbert Marcuse would take that idea and coin the phrase, “long march through the institutions.”

The long march through the institutions signified in the words of [Herbert] Marcuse, ‘working against the established institutions while working in them’.

According to Gramsci “[T]o capture the West, Marxists must first de-Christianize the West.”

One of the hundreds of ways the progressives have accomplished this is through academia, and academia is ruthless toward the biblical worldview. Every single aspect of the Christian Bible is attacked and questioned, including the Bible’s stance on homosexuality.

Which brings us to Queer Theory

Queer theory: According to the website LGBTQ Nation, “Queer theory is a field of study that challenges existing traditional ideas about identity, sexuality, and gender – particularly that of heteronormativity, or the belief that heterosexuality is the natural, moral, or “normal” expression of sexuality. For queer theorists, heteronormativity permeates various aspects of society, is reinforced by institutions (think the Church and the legal realm), and is ultimately a way to yield power and control.”

James Lindsay, who is an expert on all forms of Marxism, adds this:

Queer theory also offers the opportunity to rethink or reimagine normative or dominant dis- course “queerly.” Intellectual labor of this sort requires scholars to transpose queer ideas of identity formation and social relations to texts that might otherwise be taken for granted as part of the dominant sex-gender-sexuality matrix. For instance, one might imagine that two women in a mainstream magazine advertisement are lovers and then consider the social and political import of such a reading.

Or, create a lesbian relationship between two obscure colonial school teachers.

Gay Author John Gilbert McCurdy is a perfect example of Queer Theory and the Marxist long march through the institutions. He is a professor of colonial and Revolutionary American history, gender, and LGBTQ+ history at Eastern Michigan University, has authored multiple books and papers on both topics, and presented a special event at the Museum of the American Revolution in 2024 on his book Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh, mentioned above.

You should question the historic claims of museum displays. Primary sources are our best resource, and you should take them as they were written.

When you hear phrases like “hidden history,” or “rethinking’ or “reimagining,” sit up and pay attention. Look for the source material, and look for the truth.

Museums (and their websites) are full of reimagined history and suppositions. They seriously need to be fact-checked.

College professors and public school teachers need to be monitored and fact-checked. Better yet, homeschool your kids and choose your colleges carefully. The Long March Through the Institutions has been extremely successful, and our children and grandchildren are the unfortunate recipients of reimagined history.

Before I go, I want to point you to my project, Knowledge Keepers Bookstore, which is where I publish old, out of print American history books that were lost to the archives. They include diaries, journals, autobiographies, letters, and eyewitness accounts of everything from Columbus to the Wright Brothers. There’s nothing reimagined or “hidden” in these texts; just the original words written by the people who were there. There are more than 20 books in the collection, with more on the way. These are the books that every American should own and read, and should pass down to their children and grandchildren. They are not written by gay historians, but by Columbus, William Bradford, Robert E. Lee, John Marshall, and lesser known average Americans who were cowboys, slaves, missionaries, and explorers. There is no need to reimagine anything when you have the truth.

Visit Knowledge Keepers and shop the books on Amazon.