LGBTQ rights and priorities are crucial to an understanding of the Confederacy, according to a leading authority.
The Civil War, generally described as having been fought over slavery and/or states’ rights, also deserves to be viewed as a conflict over the Confederacy’s advocacy of LGBTQ lifestyles, according to Grayson Priddy III, professor of American history at St. Sebastian College in Front Royal, VA.
“The Civil War is a wonderful example of scholars being in bondage to accretions of conventional thinking,” Priddy said. “Sometimes, in academe, we’re not good at grasping what’s right in front of us, and I hope to rectify that in my forthcoming book, The Boys Are Marching.”
Priddy said the war was bookended by events that provide clues to previously overlooked dimensions of the struggle.
“Consider that the first shot of the war was fired by a Confederate officer named Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard–dear me–and that the Confederacy ended with that old so-and-so Jefferson Davis being captured while wearing women’s clothing,” Priddy said. “Mon dieu, only the prejudice against LGBTQ influence on historical scholarship could have blinded so many people for so long.”
He also noted that the famous spy Belle Boyd, a Front Royal resident, sometimes wore men’s clothing.
Priddy said the very foundations of Southern culture were redolent of LGBTQ priorities and aesthetics.
“What could be more camp than all those perfumed, plumed, pistol-packing cavaliers and their precious Cult of Southern Womanhood?” Priddy said. “And let’s face it: Nothing is more strikingly queer than all those barefooted common soldiers in homespun garments shrieking across an open field on their way to an almost certain death by some form of perforation. It just gives me shivers. Why, the Old South appears to have been created by the Village People and The Lawrence Welk Show.”
Priddy acknowledged the ugliness of slavery’s centrality to Southern society.
“Absolutely unacceptable. There are always rowdy elements who go overboard with the shackles and whips,” Priddy said. “The lack of consent is deeply disturbing. Chattel slavery is like having a nude parade in a school zone: There are some things that a decent person doesn’t do, and those things have to be against the law, even though some very dear friends of mine were in that parade.”
Priddy said that the George F. Root song Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (The Boys Are Marching), a favorite of Confederate prisoners of war, spoke eloquently of the true nature of Southern society among all classes:
In the prison cell I sit, thinking, Mother dear, of you
And our bright and happy home so far away.
And the tears they fill my eyes, ‘spite of all that I can do,
Though I try to cheer my comrades and be gay.
“I think what we have in the Civil War is intolerance on one side aggravated by flagrantly outré behavior on the other,” Priddy said. “The mayhem could have been avoided, but instead it led to resentments that reverberate through our entire society down to this very day.”
Priddy said there is still hope.
“I mean, Sherman shelled the everliving snot out of Atlanta, but look at it now. Mon dieu.”
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