What Memorial Day owes queer soldiers

The little American flags on the graves at Charles Evans Cemetery in Reading, Pennsylvania, look the same from a distance. A grid of red, white, and blue running between the headstones in the May light, the lilacs dried up on the south corner where the older immigrant families that built this nation are buried. From the parking lot of every American cemetery, it's all the same flag — the same country thanking the same dead.Walk closer, though, and you'll find the spaces between. The names without dates of marriage. The men buried beside other men. The soldiers whose pictures stayed in their footlockers because home wasn't yet a place where they could be themselves. Walk to Section 66 of Arlington National Cemetery, and you'll find the headstone of Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich — discharged in 1975 for the unspeakable crime of telling the truth — which reads, in his own words: "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."That is what Memorial Day owes the queer soldier.The American army has been queer-built from the start. At Valley Forge in the freezing winter of 1777, a Prussian general arrived who had been exiled from his country for his sexuality. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben rode in with his Italian greyhound Azor walking by his side. Benjamin Franklin had recruited him in Paris. George Washington put the dying Continental Army in his hands. Within three months, Von Steuben turned it into a force that could beat the British. His training methods — the rank, the order, the Blue Book drill manual — are still embedded in how the United States military trains soldiers today.A man widely believed to have been gay. The reason there is an American republic to celebrate at 250 years.He stood in the mud with the soldiers. He did not hide. That is the greatest test of American masculinity — a willingness to be unafraid, and to risk it all.Between Von Steuben and Matlovich, there a