America the Beautiful: A Patriotic Note In LGBT History

Ah, Fourth of July! The fireworks! The barbecues! The parades!

While I’m not really into patriotic music, I do love the community spirit of a good local parade, John Phillip Sousa and all. One other patriotic tune is close to my heart, though, but for a different reason: Katherine Lee Bates (1859 - 1929), author of “America the Beautiful,” lived for 25 years with fellow Wellesley College professor Katherine Coman, in what is commonly called a “Boston marriage.”

It may be ahistorical to call her a lesbian in a modern sense; we don’t have evidence of any sexual relationship between the two women. One only need read Yellow Clover, the volume of poetry Bates wrote upon Coman’s death, however, to know that their bond went beyond mere friendship.

In the poem, "If You Could Come," Bates says:

My love, my love, if you could come once more
From your high place,
I would not question you for heavenly lore,
But, silent, take the comfort of your face.

I would not ask you if those golden spheres
In love rejoice,
If only our stained star hath sin and tears,
But fill my famished hearing with your voice.

One touch of you were worth a thousand
creeds.
My wound is numb
Through toil-pressed day, but all night long
it bleeds
In aching dreams, and still you cannot come.

That’s good enough for me to claim her as a spiritual lesbian foresister.

Something to think about while you’re watching the Boy Scouts and the Knights of Columbus — organizations plagued by homophobia — march by behind the band that’s blaring out “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies.”

And that scene in itself reminds me of the song’s little-sung second verse, which takes the lyrics out of the realm of pure patriotic adulation and injects a note of realism: “America! America!/God mend thine every flaw.”

It may not be a perfect country, but there’s always room for hope. That alone is reason to celebrate.

Photo credit: Jeff Belmonte