Did you know that there were queer people before 1868?? Experts don't seem to have realised! But thank goodness that Anthony is here to single-handedly reveal this unknown hidden history that no one until now has even considered investigating (just ignore all the secondary sources...).
Still, Delaney makes the point his prologue to assure his readers that he's only including real and proper queers, and not any of those fuzzy edge cases. You can trust him, all right? He's been to all the archives (apparently) and he's not apologising for it.
But âď¸ he also needs to set the record straight (pun very much intended). Baron von Steuben is used as a case study for the contrary position where previous historians have overreached on the whole gay thing. It's a cautionary tale, a misunderstanding by folks who apparently don't have any conception of period sensibilities or behaviours. Men just wrote I love yous to each other and kissed in the streets and it was totally heteroplatonic.
Maybe it's a fundamental ontological difference, but I find this line of thinking painfully reductive; if anything, it feels like a ploy to cater to normative standard of "straight until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt". But also, I feel like Delaney's conclusion falls short of his own standard of understanding the context, because 18th century queerness was fundamentally ambiguous, designed to hide between the lines of letters and social norms. The cult of friendship was both platonic and a space in which deeper affections could thrive. Letters expressing love could be innocuous or subversively meaningful. Queer folks could marry and yet remain queer (like, seriously, he pulls the "they had wives" line unironically). Et cetera. And once again, you don't need proof or suspicion of fucking to confirm queerness.
Steuben was lifelong friends with Prince Henry of Prussia, perhaps the most openly same-sex attracted man at the time. He was accused in a letter of sodomitical acts and fled Europe at least partly because of it. He became very emotionally close with William North and Benjamin Walker, corresponded intimately for decades, lived with them, and formally adopted them for inheritance purposes â a common way to create legal bonds between queer partners who had no other mechanisms to form families. Like... I don't know, man. None of these points are definitive, sure, but I think there's enough potential there to entertain a queer interpretation. I don't think previous scholars have been ignorantly misled by their supposedly ahistorical wishful thinking.
Delaney makes no mention of the adoption or the crossover with other queer figures, dismisses the letters as, y'know, just how they wrote back then (âin the context of the late eighteenth century, men openly declared their love for one another, as North did in his letter, without the slightest implication of same-sex desireâ), and fixates at length and without good reason on the pantsless-flaming-shots party (yeah... we know the pantsless thing wasn't literal...). Delaney states that he hasn't found any definitive evidence of Steuben's queerness â but that seems to be because he doesn't consider whatever the loving triad of Steuben-North-Walker was to be in any way queer, platonically or otherwise.
Which, frankly, boggles my mind.
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