Venerating Our Queer Ancestors: Resilience and Rebellion

This essay appeared as an article in the March/April/May 2020 issue of CoffeeTable Coven.

Thomas/Thomasine Hall - Virginia, 1629

Thomas, or Thomasine, was assigned female at birth in in England. At age 24 they cut off their hair to fight against France as a man. After returning from combat they again presented as a woman and worked as a seamstress before emigrating to Virginia in 1627 as a servant. While in the colony they claimed to be both a man and a woman. 

Hall’s first master and local authorities repeatedly attempted to determine their “true” gender. Working under the assumption that Hall was female, they would have groups of women check their body to verify their genitalia. Had they considered that Hall might be a man they would not have let a group of women strip-search them. To the authorities surprise, however, they found enough evidence to determine that Hall was a man. Even after this evidence, Hall’s master and the authorities held that Hall should identify as a woman. 

Hall was eventually employed by a new household and this second master called for another inspection of their anatomy. The women could once again not conclusively verify female genitalia, so this master decided Hall should dress as a man. This continued uncertainty eventually saw the matter taken to the Jamestown General Court, who decided that Hall should wear men’s breeches and a woman’s apron and cap. 

The issue of sexuality only arose when rumors started of a tryst between Hall and a maidservant. This was compounded by Hall’s testimony that they would also sometimes dress as a woman to attract male sexual partners. As far as we can tell, no legal ruling or punishment was ever levied against Hall. They seem to have existed in their society as a constant enigma to their peers, some who sought to fix their gender based on physiology, others who sought to base their gender on skills and mannerisms. 

***

Growing up I did not have much exposure to LGBT folks, at least not directly. As I grew older I would come to learn that my uncle is gay, and the “friends” he brought to holidays and family events were actually his boyfriends. As a child, however, this was never openly discussed around me. I also grew up in a time where representation of LGBT characters in the media was confined to R-rated movies and late night cable. The few characters that did make it into prime time shows that I saw were either older, campy, harmless bachelor uncles or someone on their deathbed - usually from HIV/AIDS. One of the earliest exposures I had to what life as a gay man in this country would be was when the murder of Matthew Shepard became national news, and the picture that painted only served to reinforce that whatever I was feeling was dangerous and wrong. 

Coming to terms with my burgeoning sexuality was a very lonely experience, especially pre-internet. Even when my family got our first computer when I was in middle school the early dial-up internet only framed being gay in the lens of sex that was considered subversive, deviant, and risky. Convinced as I was that there were no other gay boys in my swamp this information wasn’t entirely helpful. I was still looking for an example on what it meant to be gay outside the bedroom. 

The turning point for me, and a lot of other queer folk my age, was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Willow Rosenberg came out it was a revelation. I was in high school, just like her. I was also beginning to identify as a pagan, just like her even if no one really knew. While on the outside I tried my best to not seem too interested, internally I was freaking out. Watching Willow navigate conversations with her ex-boyfriend, reevaluate the crush she had on Xander, find more comfort in just being herself, and ease into a relationship with Tara was revelatory. When events conspired to turn her into Dark Willow I was right there with her, even if for my own reasons. How dare the world take away this one role model! I wasn’t done learning! I still needed a guide! 

After Willow there was no turning back. The world had shown me that LGBT folk could be like me. They didn’t have to be campy or “flaming” - a sentiment that, at the time, I hadn’t yet parsed out was deeply rooted in internalized homophobia and a deep, deep desire not to be outed. They weren’t all old, unmarried aunts or uncles. They could be quirky bookworms like me!

***

Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben - The American Revolution

Von Steuben was originally employed with the Prussian army where he distinguished himself and earned the title of Baron. He was approached by Benjamin Franklin to help the fledgling Continental Army, but he originally turned Franklin down. However, in August of 1777, a letter to the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen denounced von Steuben for “…having taken familiarities with young boys which the law forbids and punishes severely.” While nothing was definitively proven at the time, the letter was circulated and von Steuben accepted Benjamin Franklin’s offer to assist in organizing the American troops.

Von Steuben was instrumental in teaching the essentials of military drills, tactics, and discipline to the Continental Army. He was also very popular with the soldiers due to his frequent use of profanity in several different languages. One of von Steuben’s lasting contributions to the Early Republic was the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, written during the winter of 1778-1779 and commonly referred to as the “Blue Book”. It was based off the training plan he had implemented at Valley Forge and distributed throughout the Continental Army. It remained the official U.S. military guide until the War of 1812. 

At Valley Forge, Steuben became very close with two young officers many decades his junior: Benjamin Walker and William North. Walker had introduced himself to von Steuben in French and offered to act as an interpreter, a moment which the older man recalled “If I had seen an angel from Heaven I should not have more rejoiced.” Steuben was very clearly attracted to both Walker and North and it seems the two younger men were romantically and sexually involved with each other as well. 

While the war was going on, the three men shared affection – among other things – but after the war was over, several things hampered their relationship. Steuben – who had expected a great compensation for his services – was only offered a small sum and, unable to adjust to living frugally, ended up living on an isolated farmstead in New York state. In Steuben’s final years, he had a companion named John Mulligan who lived with him. The Baron had adopted Walker and North as his heirs, and on his death in 1794 he divided his property between those two men as well as John Mulligan.

***

Willow’s character sparked in me a need to find other queer characters. When I went to college I searched everywhere for shows I could get my hands on - Queer As Folk, The L Word, Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple In All The World - and devoured the work of other queer artists like John Waters, RuPaul, and Margaret Cho. I started to become marginally aware of the history of my community as far back as Stonewall, but the mainstream message I was seeing would have me believe the LGBT community sprang up out of the soil in the 1960’s. 

On some level I knew our community had a deeper history. We had studied Greek and Roman mythology when I was in high school and despite attempts to straight-wash it my teachers had to at minimum acknowledge the sexual fluidity of those old gods. I was able to ignore that need for a deeper connection, however, because I was too busy enjoying the freedom of being on my own as an adult in my first big city and testing the boundaries of my sexuality. The turning point for me was the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016.

It’s important for me to claim the privileges I hold when navigating the world. While I identify as Hispanic, I navigate this world in white skin. I’m also a cis-gendered male, and a fairly large one at that that. Additionally, until I made the conscious decision not to it was fairly easy for me to adopt “straight camouflage.” There have been very few instances where I felt unsafe in a public setting unless I was expressly participating in something “gay.” Because of this I was sheltered from the political realities of many marginalized communities for a very long time. 

The Pulse Nightclub shooting will forever be one of the defining moments of my life. I transferred to the University of Central Florida in 2006 and lived in Orlando until the end of 2012. Orlando will always be home to me. Its where I came out, where I felt I had the freedom to start figuring out who I was, where I first had to lean into my independence, and where I built my first social and support network that knew and supported me as a gay man. Pulse was one of the first gay clubs I ever went to. Before I left Florida I owned a home just a few blocks away from the nightclub, and would pass by it every day. The Wendy’s across the street, the parking lot where they dragged the wounded, was my “comfort food” on the way home from bad days at work. By the time of the shooting I was living in Maryland. I spent that day desperately checking in on friends hoping they were okay. As the repercussions played out in the ongoing presidential election I internalized for the first time how many folks just don’t care about us or actively wish us harm. 

I felt powerless from 900 miles away. I desperately felt like I needed to do something, but I didn’t know what. I sat in that feeling through the election and in 2017, my husband and I found a chapter of PFLAG that was offering space for LGBT adults to come together to support each other in what was sure to be an uncertain and scary time. It was in these meetings that I realized what I needed to do. 

***

Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus - The Civil War

Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus are two African-American women whose relationship begins and ends in Hartford, Connecticut. In the fall of 1865 Rebecca travelled south to open a school for ex-slaves in Royal Oak, Maryland. She worked there for four years and the community named the school the Primus Institute. She wrote home often about the verbal abuse and physical harassment freed blacks often faced, but she held her own. In one letter she wrote “[these] white people want all the respect shown them by the col. people. I give what I rec. & no more.”

A letter from Addie to Rebecca in 1859 reads as follows:

You are the first girl that I ever love so and you are the last one. Dear Rebeca, do not say anything against me loving you so, for I mean just what I say. O Rebecca, it seem I can see you now, casting those loving eyes at me. If you was a man, what would things come to? They would after come to something very quick. What do you think the matter? Don’t laught at me. I not exactly crazy yet.

Both women spent the majority of their lives in Connecticut, and Rebecca’s family was a well-respected one within the black community of Hartford. They had been there for several generations, her father was a grocery clerk and her mother a dress-maker, and they owned their home. Records from 1850 show the household claimed $1,200 worth of real estate, which was well above the average wealth of free blacks in the North. Throughout her life, Rebecca’s family remained a strong and important community and social support system for her. Rebecca also obtained a high school education and eventually became a teacher. 

Addie, however, was an orphan and five years younger than Rebecca. She had no familial support we can find record of, and her letters often expressed a certain jealousy of Rebecca’s abundance of family. She lacked a formal education and worked mostly as a domestic servant. Addie’s letters frequently focused on this social disparity between her and Rebecca - the difference in their education and employment - and was a source of frequent anxiety for her. She often questioned her right to love, or be loved by, Rebecca.

The correspondence between these two women also highlights how their friendship, intense and romantic as it was, was recognized and assisted by their community - specifically Rebecca’s family. One example, highlighted in a letter from Addie to Rebecca, concerns an exchange in the Primus household shortly after Rebecca went south the Maryland. Addie visited the Primus family and was told they had recently received a letter from Rebecca, at which point a neighbor, referred to as Mr. James, inquired if it was a “gentleman’s letter” - insinuating he believed the letter was addressed to Addie, and was of a romantic kind that would be written from a gentleman to a lady. Addie recorded in her letter that Rebecca’s sister came to her defense:

She said I thought of you if you was a gentleman. She also said if either one of us was a gent we would marry. I was quite surprise at the remark. Mr. James & I had quite a little argument. He says when I find some one to love I will throw you over the shoulder. I told him, never.

Eventually, both Addie and Rebecca married men. These courtships were facilitated, for both women, by Rebecca’s family. While the community acknowledged the primacy of their attachment to each other, it was not seen as something that should be incompatible with heterosexual partnership. Another of Rebecca’s family, her Aunt Emily, went so far as to counsel Addie on how not to let her relationship with Rebecca get in the way of her relationship with her fiance, Joseph Tines, as recorded in another letter to Rebecca:

How I have miss you. I have lost all; no more pleasure for me now. Aunt Emily ask me last eve if I was going to carry that sober face until you return. She also said if Mr. Tines was to see me, think that I care more for you then I did for him. I told, I did love you more then I ever would with him. She said I better not tell him so. It would be the truth and most else.

Addie married Joseph Tines in 1866. She moved to Philadelphia to live with him and his family, at which point the correspondence between her and Rebecca ends. She died two years later of tuberculosis.

Rebecca taught in Maryland until 1869, at which point she returned to Connecticut. She married a man named Charles H. Thomas, her former landlord in Maryland and an ex-slave, in 1872, and lived in Hartford. Charles suffered a severe head injury in the late 1880’s which left him destitute until he died in 1891. Rebecca moved back into the family home until her mother’s death in 1899. She then moved to a boarding house, where she lived until 1932 when she died at the age of 95. 

***

The ages of the attendees in the support group ranged from early-20’s to late-60’s, but it was evident none of us had a clear understanding of the history of our community pre-Stonewall. Some of the older folks in the group had interesting stories to share about the underground bars, what cruising was like when getting arrested would result in losing your job, and some local stories but I needed more. I turned to the same place I always go for comfort: books. Little did I know this path would quickly intersect with changes that were occurring in my own spiritual practice, and how all these things would spur me into the types of activism I would have never expected myself to participate in. 

Around this same time I was experiencing a spiritual reawakening of sorts. I was coming out of a very long fallow time and was distinctly aware that some of my old practices just weren’t filling the same needs. Through a connection with a friend we had in common I began working with a local shamanic practitioner. I participated when I could in bi-weekly journey groups, and eventually began attending ancestral healing circles. These healing circles provided me with what I felt the previous support group was missing. In addition to dialoguing around a particular theme - trauma, the environment, personal boundaries - we would also journey to try to connect with our ancestors. We discussed ancestral trauma and patterns that can be carried through generations, and how to set about healing them. 

While this was happening I was also diving headlong into the history of the queer community on North America. I mined libraries, podcasts, and bookstores both online and physical for anything I could find. I was amazed at how much was out there. Working my way back from Stonewall I learned about groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. I learned more about the earlier lives of folks whose names I already knew, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. I uncovered new folk, like Edyth Eyde a.k.a. ‘Lisa Ben’ the publisher of “Vice Versa” the first magazine for lesbians in 1947. Each new name lead me further back until suddenly I found myself in the 1800s reading very graphic love letters between Southern congressmen, and then in the American Revolution with gender-nonconforming soldiers, and even further back into the colonies with trial records clearly showing the prevalence of male-male sexual relationships. 

As a deeper history and appreciation for my queer community presented itself to me the impact of the ancestral healing circles began to shift. Driving home from these gatherings I began to take our discussions and move them out of the personal, individual realm and think of them more broadly in terms of community trauma, patterns, and ancestors. I may not be related by blood to Marsha or Matthew Shepard or Thomas/Thomasine but it was indisputable that the work they did in their lives, and the legacies of their deaths, shaped the space I occupy in this world as a gay man. On my own I began practicing ancestral journeying, seeking a deeper spiritual connection with those I would come to refer to as Queer Ancestors. Through them I wanted to find a way to more deeply connect with and understand what it means to navigate my life as an openly gay man, what responsibility do I have to my community and those that will come after me, and how can I keep the work moving forward. 

I also turned to them as a source of strength and resilience. The attacks on my community were coming quickly: my trans brothers and sisters being kicked out of the military, courts beginning to codify the right to discriminate against the LGBT community for “sincerely held religious beliefs”, my country turning a blind eye to purges of queer communities in Eastern Europe, conservative politicians laying the groundwork to roll back my marriage, my own government arguing that it should be legal to fire me for being gay, and the stacking of courts with anti-LGBT ideologues which will haunt my community for at least a generation. I was finding it hard to stay positive and find ways to fight back. 

I realized I needed a focal point for my work with the Queer Ancestors, so I began working on a shrine in my backyard. I landed on something simple, a large ceramic basin planter elevated on a few bricks. I buried a small ceramic pot in front of it and filled it with sand as a place to light incense and around the larger basin I placed a Pride flag and a small wind chime. I filled the larger basin with plants, including irises for their association with wisdom and hope. The word for the flower also comes from the Greek word for “rainbow”, which I found to be fitting. This shrine became the center of my work with the Queer Ancestors. I began lighting incense for them whenever I had questions or needed strength to get me through a particularly vicious news-cycle, and would envision the smoke from the incense taking my petition to them. Without entirely realizing it, my spiritual practice had quickly morphed to one in which ancestor veneration plays a central role. 

From a purely academic perspective, my work in researching queer history in my country provided me a framework in which to understand that we’ve always been here. The term “homosexual” may not have come into use until the late 19th century but folks who did not conform to the expected sexual or gender norms of their time existed. However, the books don’t adequately capture the struggles and fears of living as a marginalized person at any point in history and the strength it takes to thrive or survive in communities that seek to redefine or erase you. Incorporating Queer Ancestor veneration provided the spiritual means to fill in the gaps in the academic record - the fear of being discovered, the moments where your strength fails you and you doubt your ability to go on, the small compromises you make for safety, the lines you won’t cross, the things you won’t give up, the deep reserves of passion and authenticity you didn’t know you had, the ability to stand up and demand respect - in a way that enhanced the lessons I felt I was learning. 

It’s hard to put into words how cultivating this relationship with Queer Ancestors has helped me, so I’ll provide an example. In 2017 white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia and proceeded to hold the city in a state of fear for their Unite the Right rally. There were several instances of violence between them and counter-protesters. The most deadly incident occurred when a white nationalist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer. One year later another Unite the Right rally was scheduled to occur not far from me in Washington, D.C. Both me and my husband, and several friends, committed to participating in the counter-protest. 

As the date of the rally grew nearer and the rhetoric coming from the organizers and those planning to attend escalated I grew more and more fearful. I was relatively new to the world of activism, and most of what I had done up to that time was show up in local government meetings to voice concerns or get folks on the record with their commitments. The only other experiences I had that came remotely close to this were the few times I turned the wrong corner growing up and stumbled into a small Tea Party protest in the early years of President Obama’s first term. In those instances I was able to keep my head down and skirt around them - like I said, white skin and I’m a big guy. 

My anxiety was beginning to get the best of me and I didn’t know what to do. I thought about backing out, knowing my friends would understand. Before I could I felt called to the Queer Ancestor shrine I had built earlier that year. I lit incense and stood in front of the shrine, giving my anxiety to the smoke that was rising. I felt like there was a message I was supposed to be receiving so I went back inside and set a space for me to journey. During this journey I was overcome with a variety of feelings - fear, panic, anger, a bittersweet sense of joy, stubbornness - but under it all was a constant sense “I’m doing this because it needs to be done” that provided the sense of a solid foundation, of having a large crowd amassed behind you in solidarity. It was clear to me that I was feeling what those who have come before me in our community had felt when standing in the face of oppression, erasure, and the threat of harm. The message they had for me was “It was always scary. It was always dangerous. But it needed to be done.” The Queer Ancestors took the anxiety and in return told me “You aren’t weak for feeling afraid. We were afraid, too.”

I attended the counter-protest with my husband and friends. We purchased first aid kits in advance and both of us being large men, my husband and I committed to stepping forward to shield folks if a confrontation were to break out. The anxiety had diminished, but I was still scared and worried. Underneath it all, though, was the lesson I had received a few days earlier: “It is scary. It is dangerous. But it needs to be done.” Without exactly knowing how, I ended up at the front of one of the contingents in the protest march helping to carry a large Pride flag. My husband was next to me, and my friends were scattered throughout the crowd, but behind me I had that same sense from the journey of a large crowd amassed behind me in solidarity. Yes, there were other marchers and contingents, but there was something more. 

Our Queer Ancestors were there. With me. With my husband. With all of us. Giving us the strength to continue moving forward. 

I would like to end by explicitly noting that my research only goes as far back as exploring queerness, both romantic and sexual, in the European colonies of North America. Many of us in both queer communities and pagan communities are familiar with the concept of ‘two-spirit’, an idea or social role that exists in some - but not all - indigenous communities. As I am not a member of an indigenous community I don’t feel it is my place to dissect, explore, and share those stories and roles. Many indigenous communities still exist, albeit severely diminished and displaced, and I encourage you to listen to their stories. For example, where I live local representatives for the Piscataway offer lectures and community outreach to share their history and specifically discuss the meaning and role of two-spirit people in their community.

***

Newport, Rhode Island - 1919

The investigation of the gay subculture at the Newport Naval Training Station in 1919 led to the arrest of 20 sailors and 16 civilians, at which point the chairman of the court ordered the chief investigator to curtail the investigation, warning “If your men [the decoys] do not knock off, they will hang the whole state of Rhode Island.”