By BoJenn
George Washington
George Washington: Break the Idol, Free the Man
America has a bad habit: we worship our founding fathers like saints, scrubbing away their humanity until nothing remains but marble. And chief among these hollowed-out idols is George Washington. The problem is, marble doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t desire, it doesn’t doubt, and it certainly doesn’t tell the truth.
Washington, we are told, was the ultimate man’s man—tall, commanding, stoic, broad-chested, noble on a white horse. The masculine archetype incarnate. We’re spoon-fed this myth in every painting, every monument, every coin. But mythology is a narcotic, and Americans are hooked. The reality is far more interesting—and far more dangerous to the fragile sensibilities of people who cannot imagine their founding hero outside a narrow script of heterosexual virility.
Larry Kramer, that volcanic gay-rights activist who refused to flatter America’s hypocrisies, dared to suggest what timid historians won’t: that George Washington was not only surrounded by men, but emotionally entangled with them in ways that shred the marble lie. He scoured thousands of letters, the barren marriage to Martha, the conspicuous lack of children, the battlefield intimacies, and Washington’s almost shocking tolerance of homosexual soldiers at a time when the law demanded their deaths.
And Kramer said it plainly—“a big queen.” Not with academic hedging, not with the safety of footnotes, but with the kind of fearless bluntness that makes polite society clutch its pearls. Why? Because sometimes the only way to wake a culture from its coma is with dynamite.
Let’s be clear: the evidence is suggestive, not definitive. But the panic his suggestion provokes tells us everything. People aren’t afraid Washington wasn’t gay—they’re terrified he might have been. Because the American project has always depended on manufactured idols of perfect masculinity. Break that idol, and suddenly the marble shatters. Suddenly our heroes look human—complex, contradictory, and dangerously real.
So let’s ask the forbidden question out loud: what if the father of our country desired men? What if the marble general carried secrets in his breast pocket as carefully as dispatches from the battlefield? Would that unmake the Revolution? Would it undo Valley Forge? Would the republic dissolve because Washington may have found comfort not in Martha’s bed but in the presence of men he loved more deeply than history admits?
Of course not. The republic stands, and Washington’s greatness remains. What collapses is the fantasy that greatness requires conformity to a heterosexual script of power. What falls apart is the childish belief that to honor a man, we must first amputate his truth.
If George Washington was gay—or bisexual, or simply more fluid in his affections than 18th-century language could capture—then let us say it, boldly. Let the marble crack, let the idol fall. Because real honor is not built on myth. It is built on truth.
And the truth is this: Washington’s humanity—not his sanitized legend—is what makes him immortal.
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