by Larry Kramer
Alex dares to broach the matter with the general.
“Sir, there is in all this something greatly askew.”
Washington will not discuss it.
Hamilton is accustomed to this silent Washington. He boldly takes his George’s hand. He holds it without letting go. George does not remove it, but he will not look into Alex’s eyes.
The mighty general is mightily moved. Would he not cry if he knew how to? There has never been a moment when George Washington has not wanted to take Alexander Hamilton into his arms and into his bed exclusively and, yes, faithfully.
Turbulent experiences of intricate male intimacies are not unknown to either of them. Alex had his cock sucked by an older man when he was—how young he was he can’t recall, but he was very young. George, as an infant and throughout his earliest years, had his cock sucked and fondled by his old queen neighbor, Lord Thomas Fairfax, who couldn’t keep his hands off him. Neither boy had a father he could love. George hated his, and Alex was never sure who his was. Alex quickly learned that he was handsome enough to cause men to want him physically. George learned that his pockmarked face required powder in public, as did his peculiarly reddish unflattering hair, and that his sagging body required increasingly elaborate corsets and tailored adornments of disguise. Each learned that handsomeness is a commodity. Each knew which of them had it and which did not. Great playwrights such as Euripides and Racine wrote great tragedies about this. Alex knew these plays. Did Alex know that sadness was the incorruptible foundation of his life, that his life was even tragic? Did George? No one has ever considered George tragic, much less sad. These are muddy waters that biographers of the truly great men won’t inhabit, lest “their” men appear less manly. How could anyone as poor as both Alex and George have been—the one in background and birth, the other in self-knowledge and regard—not have felt some indefinable hunger along their journeys, George from his primeval wilderness and Alex from his impoverished tropical islands, to the very sleeping quarters of this soon-to-be-first president of the United States? Is this the stuff of tragedy? It is when it informs such harsh inequities of the heart that disallow the man to be the man he wants to be. It is doubtful that George Washington ever experienced a fully happy day in his own skin. But he didn’t want the moon and Alex did, and that he could never have it hurt, which in turn hurt George.
Once there, once so instructed by life, what is there to do with a love like this?
Alex will go and fuck his Jack once again. He will fuck men and women throughout his short life. He will have a scandal or two along the way, usually because of a woman; scandals with men are never reported, of course. Sometimes, as with George, he will manipulate these encounters to guarantee his own devices. His vision of America is not everyone’s, and it is his that will prevail, in the process winning him the enmity of Thomas Jefferson, who wants the states to run the country instead of letting the country run itself, and who is a complicated and most expert and manipulative politician himself, claiming to be Hamilton’s friend while in fact his enemy.
It is Alexander Hamilton’s America we live in today, much more than Washington’s or Jefferson’s. Or any Adams’s. Or Madison’s. Or even the great Lincoln’s. Alex gave us banks and money and international trade, commerce, and solid national credit, and America über alles. He talked his George into everything he wanted, Alex did. When he dies it will prove to be an impressive list, such that one wonders what George—or America—would have done without him.
THE TWO ALTE MARIAS
The general is having tea. He looks up to see before him the other “old Mary,” the baron, Frederick Steuben, who is older than George’s forty-four, but only by a couple of years.
When they first meet he announces himself as “Lieutenant General Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin Baron von Steuben” and declares that he held high rank under Frederick the Great, “who really was an Alte Maria.” And just in case, he adds, “An old queen.” And then he dares to add, “Just like us.” George actually laughs.
“Dat is vat we are called in Austria. Alte Marias. It is blasphemy, naturlich.”
Yes, Washington laughs. This silly old poofter makes him laugh. They understand each other at once. Why does George put up with him for so many years? Because the baron has made his army a joy to behold! He has taught the platoons of rough stragglers how to coalesce and operate in unison. No one has seen such an accomplishment before. So this is how they do it over there.
“Will this make my men fight with more skill and attention, and of course, success?” George had asked the baron.
“Naturlich. Did I not do this for Frederick the Great?”
The baron, this queen, this poofter, this sodomite, this bugger, this hushmarked, will write “Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States,” the drill manual still in use today. He understands the male body completely. He particularly understands how asses and crotches will look all aligned in the tight and tailored and effusively bedecked uniforms designed of course by George. George and the baron are creating America’s first love affair with drag. They are creating what the historian Charley Shively has called “the masculine equivalent of the female chorus line.” Go to West Point or Annapolis and watch them march. Yes, they understand each other immediately, these two Alte Marias.
“Naturlich. Dat is vhy it is done. To make men march together in all ways. Dat is my gift to you.” The baron is learning the vocabulary he believes essential for his own maneuverings. He is grateful to this man for taking him in. He has been thrown out of his own country, his own army, and other armies and countries too, ignobly, no gratitude for the scores of young men, generations of them, that he trained into the precision and perfection so prized by Germans and Austrians. He, too, has been caught in acts of love. He, too, would have been hung had he not escaped from Europe. George Washington knows all this.
“What should I do?” Washington asks him now, setting down his teacup.
“You do not hang them, naturlich.”
“It is the law. John Winthrop made this the law in Massachusetts, and it has been followed everywhere with alarming speed.”
“Vhy ist diss alarming? Komm into das … world. You are prepared to hang until dead Hamilton and Jack Laurens? You are prepared to hang until dead the child warrior Frenchman Jeel-bert with his own private army? More important to attend to your Baron. I am not paid since I arrive here. I am given no contract as promised. I live and eat here with you and at your command. I am grateful. But I am not so very grateful. Please to keep your promises.”
“I am pleased to note the great improvement in your ability to speak my language.”
“Alex has taught me. Jack has taught me. They are so sweet. They flirt with each other in Greek and Latin and French.” Hamilton will look after Steuben’s financial affairs until he dies. The baron is a spendthrift, and his business of decorating the homes of the wealthy is an idea before its time. “But tell to me, do you have just for yourself a special close and tender tie and not one but two?” Washington says nothing and the baron wonders if he has overstepped himself.
That is more or less that for this late afternoon. Steuben realizes it’s time to leave. He does know that George wants time to consider and select the young men who will sleep near him, in this place, in whatever place, be it a tent or an actual warm room with a fire, as here. Both know the boys are waiting to hear who the lucky ones will be this evening. What does he do with them? Steuben always wonders. He is certain that he, and they, do something. No, George will never be hanged.
Enough, enough. George gets up to remove his uniform and his underwear and his corsets, and make certain that there is still sufficient powder on his pockmarked skin to disguise him. His hair? His teeth? It is an ordeal, dressing and undressing. He is behind on sending to London his own new designs and his new measurements. He is putting on more weight. He has spent a great deal of time and thought on what new buttons and braiding and laces
and buckles he desires, and whether gold or silver. The lanterns have been brought in, and the candles lit. He’s had his bite to eat and his warm milk. He will waddle around in this nightshirt that is now a bit too tight for waddling, although he had it cut particularly full. He will go to his bed or to the portable sleeping cot he’s designed for the field, and watch the four or five men he’s selected enter his presence, watch them in the lantern light as they remove their own uniforms and lay them out neatly by the sleeping mattresses on the floor beside him.
He will watch them as they strip down. Some take off more than others. Some even sleep naked. They know this pleases him most of all, to see them naked. It has been discovered that he sometimes promotes the naked ones faster. Indeed, he himself has noted that more of them are now sleeping in the buff. Too bad it will soon be much too cold for taking off anything at all. Then they will all begin to smell from never taking off anything. Some of them are already sweating too much.
They know, these fellows, that George is watching them from his bed. They doze off, but not so much as to be unaware of which of them George summons to his side and what sounds might then be forthcoming.
It is all quite electric, this gay mess. This college fraternity before there’s such a thing. They are all in a pageant and George is the leading man. He lives every day as if he were the lead in a dramatic play of great moment. Which indeed he is. How does he look? Are his pockmarks showing? Blow out a candle or two if they are. But then he will not be able to witness fully their naked chests, their young skin, their sexual organs, which one has hair on his chest. He has heard that Benjamin Franklin has invented eyeglasses with which to see better. But how does one wear them in bed?
By now he is seeing the world in his own image, just as the world, in a few years’ time, will say that it visualizes a country based on him, and be completely wrong. Herein lies his greatness, this pretense, of which only the best actors are capable, although no historian would parse his life like this. For the need to look up to him in glory will eviscerate the much stronger need for the truth about him, which The American People do not want to grasp.
Yes, he does think about his men, his other men, the enlisted ones, the ones dragooned into service, the soldiers he sends out first to be killed in battle. In his first years he has nightmares about young men being run through by bayonets and blown up by muskets. He has seen heads severed from their bodies and has done the same. He is not so self-centered and uncaring as not to be affected by his doses of actual battle, when he does step into one. But these bad dreams pass. He knows there is criticism that he is too often an absentee leader. He knows he is accused of attending balls and parties and foxhunts and gambling at cards with the rich when he should be with his troops. It offends his sensibilities to see so much bloodshed and ripped flesh, and yes, so much mussing up of his beautiful uniforms.
Where in the world did this general come from? How has his life led him into this? To slice off heads. Not much is written about swordplay and the slicing off of heads, as if somehow killing a man this way is more sacrosanct (or repellent?) than via shooting him. Swords hold a talismanic spell, though, possessing an impressive lineage. He and Alex and the baron have studied warfare as waged by not only Frederick the Great but Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and Sweden’s Charles XII and the Duke of Marlborough. The baron has pointed out that all of these were Alte Marias too. “Is it not interesting,” Alex once said, “that we who love men so much should become such fervent murderers of our own?” George does not like to think like this. And so he doesn’t. All his men use swords, carrying their dangling weights into battle until the baron convinces him they are too clumsy and bayonets do the job more efficiently. “Let your boys run free mit bayonets. Dey kill besser mitout swords.” So swords come to be used mainly for dueling. And bayonets run through many an enemy’s body.
He always lies awake long after his boys, including the one nestled beside him, have gone to sleep. He will look down on them from his bedstead for many hours more. He would like to lie beside every one of them. Even the smelly ones. Perhaps especially the smelly ones. He would like to lie among them all in some sort of fevered mass orgy such as he has heard occur in those increasingly popular religious convocations. He wonders what to do with that unpleasant Punic. With luck he will be killed in action. But George knows it is never the disagreeable ones who get killed. They are too busy hiding behind the other soldiers.
No, he is not lying in bed thinking about his life, as so many might do, or about the days just past or the days to come. There will be few thoughts about the long, awful months at Valley Forge when 2,500 of his army of 10,000 die from disease, or his losses at Long Island, Manhattan, White Plains, Brandywine, and Germantown (Monmouth was a draw) or the victory at Saratoga, or even the aftermath of Yorktown, when the British can finally leave and the killing can stop. His dreams are not riddled with the faces of his boys under fire, or of Cornwallis or Burgoyne or Howe or Gates, or of Braddock, the handsome Braddock, who had made such a mess that he should have been discharged; George was smitten with the older man and anyway was under him. Truth to tell, there have been so many battles both won and lost that he can’t keep track of them all. Alex can. Alex does. Alex catches him in his mistakes before he makes them.
Indeed, if George managed to keep his army alive, it must have been for other reasons. He loved them, or he loved the ones who counted, his officers, and they knew it, and were happy to accept it, like the young men waiting in their cots now to see who is on tonight.
JEEL-BARE
The time comes, the date, the evening, when George can no longer abide his loneliness in this midst of so much desire, when he wants more than just a naked nameless officer’s body beside him. When he reaches out, actually reaches out, to pluck a fresh one for himself, caution be damned (no, that is not correct, there will be only the two of them in camp tonight), it is young Lafayette he chooses to let fuck him, after he has tried to fuck the lad himself. This latter has never been easy for him, for some reason he cannot fathom. It was the same with the Indians. Fucked he could be, but rarely the reverse. He chooses Gilbert Lafayette because, yes, it is time. The boy has been after him since his arrival. He has already bundled up the lad like a young puppy dog inside his great coat in the cold and slept side by side with him on the battlefield at Monmouth, where the young man kissed his face from side to side and up and down. “I am most happy when I am with you!” Gilbert says effusively yet again. He worries constantly for his general’s safety, and the kisses are for good luck in anticipation of another battle’s successful outcome, which is far from guaranteed.
They dine alone in a civilian home that has been billeted for the general on the eve of what will be Lafayette’s first battle commanding a brigade by Washington’s side. He is hardly past twenty years old and has been begging for this chance (Which chance? The battle or the bed? Both of them!) since his arrival. Can you imagine a nineteen-year-old arriving with his own army and his own ships? Who is also the richest man in France? (He has a yearly income of $800,000.) He is in love with the idea of America and with George years before he gets here, longing for a major piece of this action; he has been in the military since he was thirteen and his family’s military service to the king goes back seven centuries. Barely months after his arrival he is living in George’s house; weeks later he is riding at George’s side on parade; another month and he is riding with him into battle; and now at twenty he is to become one of George’s generals. At last the general has given Jack and Alex and Gilbert battalions beside him against Cornwallis, whom they will trap into defeat in the coming days. The candles on the table, beside the food, beside the wine, flicker and reveal to Gilbert the encroaching intimacies that he hopes the general is now considering.
Neither of them is a physical prize. George seems “to be composed of damaged spare parts, a nose too large for his pockmarked face, eyes too small for their sockets, a mouth slammed shut over decayed teeth, enor
mous hands and feet and outsized hips” (Gaines). Gilbert, already losing his sandy red hair, with a long pointed nose, a bad chin, has “a certain birdlike aspect” (Gaines again). And yet, and yet, as even Douglas Southall Freeman, George’s multivoluminous chronicler of his not-quite-every burp, writes, “Never … was there so speedy and complete a conquest of the heart of Washington.”
It is the youngster who, sensing this change in the general’s temperature, is the aggressor. Frenchmen know about these things, and George has counted on this because his own inexperience troubles both him and his erection. The casual touch of fingers as they both reach for bread and butter. The wine and the toasting as they hold each other’s eyes. Gilbert cannot believe the good fortune awaiting him, and his impatience leads him to hasten the outcome. He practically jumps George before the roast is eaten. He puts his hand over George’s mouth so words will not mar the moment.
George takes this hand into his mouth. He clumsily licks it, then kisses it and holds it to his cheek, hoping the powder doesn’t rub off. They are on the bed in no time, Gilbert peeling off his general’s commodious wardrobe down to his pale and lumpy nakedness. He has many layers to remove, many buckles and belts and strings to disengage. Gilbert tries to perform these activities with a flourish that will accentuate their ardor. George’s body is not so beautiful to behold as, say, Alex’s, or Jack’s, both of which Gilbert has seen, and celebrated as well. Was it not a night of nights when the three of them did it all together! (It is of note that both Lafayette and Laurens left pregnant wives abroad and years later had still not seen wife or child.) Gilbert then strips his own skinny body bare. He makes a lame joke about his being covered with freckles. Each notes the other’s amplitude, or lack of it. The French lad is skinny, too, in his member, though it is certainly hard. George momentarily wonders when a bigger cock will fuck him. George’s balls are huge, and his dick large and soft. It is such a waste, but he will do his best to work around it. Just as he will do his best to work around Jefferson’s growing enmity for his Alex. There are so many considerations to juggle all the time.
