5fish
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I found this story of a Prussian. Who joins the Union Army and made a queer relationship with a fellow soldier. Homosexuality was not a word or thing at the time of the war. It came along 30 years later... It's a love story... Its a good read...
activisthistory.com
Alphons Richter was a German immigrant, a volunteer in the 56th New York Infantry, a decorated Civil War hero, and a man who formed an intimate relationship with another man. As an immigrant, he was not unusual, as nearly half a million freshly minted Americans would serve in the Union army over the course of the war. His courage under fire stands out as exceptional, but certainly not unique, and similar stories of valor have long been part of the Civil War narrative. But as a man who found intimacy with another soldier, in a relationship that outlasted the war, Richter’s story is queer to modern readers. Untangling the strangeness of the emotional, Richter provides insight into the queer history of the United States. Tracing this narrative, as will be seen, requires an entirely new vocabulary of queerness because of the vast divide in sexual thought between Alphons’ day and the present.[1]
Put simply, the words homosexual, bisexual, gay, and queer were not available to Civil War soldiers to describe their eros. Union and Confederate soldiers did not think of a sexual world inhabited by straight and gay men, because that way of ordering the world had not yet been constructed. Men were men and the sexual binary of the Civil War era separated genders, not orientations: Men were carnal and perverse, women pure and holy.
Charles Becker shared an important place in Alphons Richter’s life, even in the way he imagined life after the war. Richter praised him in a letter home to his family. “I couldn’t have found a better and braver man and friend among all the Germans in America.” He hoped that circumstances would allow the two of them to “both come home for a visit together.”
To label Alphons Richter as gay or bisexual misses the complexity and queerness of his actual relationships. In a time before the invention of homosexuality as a concept, Richter and Becker could celebrate both their manliness as soldiers and their intimacy to family and friends.
A Queer Civil War Soldier’s Story
As a man who found intimacy with another soldier, in a relationship that outlasted the war, Alphons Richter’s story is queer to modern readers. Untangling the strangeness of the emotional, Richter …
activisthistory.com
Alphons Richter was a German immigrant, a volunteer in the 56th New York Infantry, a decorated Civil War hero, and a man who formed an intimate relationship with another man. As an immigrant, he was not unusual, as nearly half a million freshly minted Americans would serve in the Union army over the course of the war. His courage under fire stands out as exceptional, but certainly not unique, and similar stories of valor have long been part of the Civil War narrative. But as a man who found intimacy with another soldier, in a relationship that outlasted the war, Richter’s story is queer to modern readers. Untangling the strangeness of the emotional, Richter provides insight into the queer history of the United States. Tracing this narrative, as will be seen, requires an entirely new vocabulary of queerness because of the vast divide in sexual thought between Alphons’ day and the present.[1]
Put simply, the words homosexual, bisexual, gay, and queer were not available to Civil War soldiers to describe their eros. Union and Confederate soldiers did not think of a sexual world inhabited by straight and gay men, because that way of ordering the world had not yet been constructed. Men were men and the sexual binary of the Civil War era separated genders, not orientations: Men were carnal and perverse, women pure and holy.
Charles Becker shared an important place in Alphons Richter’s life, even in the way he imagined life after the war. Richter praised him in a letter home to his family. “I couldn’t have found a better and braver man and friend among all the Germans in America.” He hoped that circumstances would allow the two of them to “both come home for a visit together.”
To label Alphons Richter as gay or bisexual misses the complexity and queerness of his actual relationships. In a time before the invention of homosexuality as a concept, Richter and Becker could celebrate both their manliness as soldiers and their intimacy to family and friends.
