The documentary "The American Revolution" erases & defames gay men - LGBTQ Nation

"After a friend informed me a few weeks ago that Burns' documentary portrayed Revolutionary War General Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben in a disingenuous and harmful way, I promptly reached out to both Terry Gross of NPR and the Museum of the American Revolution, who both had scheduled events with Burns, and soon after got a call from Burns' team, led by Burns' co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. We met on Zoom, they shared the relevant clip with me (which was, indeed, disingenuous and harmful), and I explained why their portrayal of von Steuben was historically thin and reinforced harmful tropes."

"It is often difficult for heterosexual historians to fully appreciate how LGBTQ people have been labeled throughout history. From my conversation with Burns' team over the last month, it seems we agreed that most credible historians now accept that Baron von Steuben would be considered a gay man by today's understanding. That is never mentioned in the documentary. They risk erasing the fact that a gay man played a significant and indispensable role in founding this nation."

"Years later, that mission to show the public who we were expanded to another arena we'd long been written out of: American history. Just as television producers ignored us, so too had historians. Sadly, such erasure is happening again today, this time because of both the glaring absence and defamatory framing of LGBTQ people in Ken Burns' new PBS documentary The American Revolution. How can LGBTQ people be both omitted and defamed in the documentary? Simple: the use of age-old stereotypes."

A 1970s campaign sought to end LGBTQ invisibility on television and later expanded to address LGBTQ erasure in American history. Ken Burns' PBS documentary The American Revolution omits explicit acknowledgment that Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben would be considered a gay man by today's understanding while including only a single line that 'he took familiarities with boys.' Meetings occurred between von Steuben advocates and Burns' production team, who acknowledged historians' consensus about von Steuben's likely sexuality. The documentary's portrayal remains historically thin and relies on age-old stereotypes, risking erasure of a gay man's significant and indispensable role in founding the nation.

Read at LGBTQ Nation