keyword "aversion" title "steuben's charge" in misc. flash fiction

Friedrich von Steuben. Friedrich von Steuben, that’s a foreign name, isn’t it? The kind of scary immigrant kind of name that’d make Trump the Lame’s last three hairs stand on end. The name Friedrich von Steuben.

In Utica, his statue is there still, look on the Parkway sometime, though I figure few will. The immigrant Steuben, one of those scary refugee men, also one of the greatest military minds in Europe, in his time, maybe one of the greatest ever. He was also proudly gay so, even though he was the most brilliant commander many had ever seen he kept getting hustled out of anywhere he had been, because in those seventeens they were almost as homophobic as Pence, despite his skill they told him to get the hell hence, time and time again, Friedrich von Steuben.

The last time America was illegally ruled by a madman with more cash than God and a terrible wig, they were trying to fight back hard as hell. They tried to resist but it wasn’t going well, an army of irregular hicks who mostly knew guns from hunting turkey in the sticks, tenant farmers who couldn’t spell their own names and a knowledge of tactics much the same. But Benjamin Franklin did not care if Steuben wanted to sleep with two or three men, Franklin had laid three hundred women that year, he wouldn’t judge he just needed a genius, he didn’t care what you did with your penis. Franklin talked Washington into phoning a friend, fund-raised a boat they could send, they’d no aversion to his being was born that way or if he was foreign, liberty was failing. They needed Steuben.

The immigrant Friedrich von Steuben, the refugee Friedrich von Steuben, the tactical genius oppressed for his choice in lovers, stepped off that boat, brother, with a few of his lovers, his pampered pet dog and a gaudy fir cape and he whipped the Resistance right into shape. These farmers with blunderbusses using bayonets to cut up their lunches, drilled them on formation, taught them their positions and if those were double-entendres, the Revolt didn’t care because, well, he was here and the soldiers all listened. He trained Washington’s honor guard on how it was to be resisting. Then they taught others and those others taught others and we beat all those bastards back, we beat the rich man in the bad wig until he quit, blue-and-black, for a while, we were freer than anyone has ever been because of the immigrant refugee Steuben.

He got a house in Remsen because he was the best, who cares about accents or that he loved other men, he’s buried just north of Utica, the revolution’s hero Friedrich von Steuben. Drive to the Parkway, salute him tonight, then go hug an immigrant because the oppressed and displaced are who we all are tonight, they’re why we fight and why we’ll win again because whatever you happen to be, now we’re all Friedrich von Steuben.