Photo: Mike Macklin/WBZ NewsRadio
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — The Freedom Trail Foundation is celebrating Pride Month with a new tour about Boston's historic LGBTQ+ figures.
The Rainbow Revolutionaries Tour is a mile-long trek to "illuminate the lives, loves, and fights for liberty of Boston’s LGBTQ+ community, and explore how queer individuals have been making history for centuries," the foundation states on its website.
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Leading the tour is the sixth generation great grandson of Capt. Nathaniel Hutchins, a Revolutionary War officer who fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
"These people, they lived during this time period when depending on their class and their status and they had to hide who they are, a lot of them we don’t know how they actually lived their lives," the guide told WBZ NewsRadio Saturday.
The tour highlights figures such as military leader Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, whose training reforms turned the Continental Army into a proper fighting force against the British; 1800s actress Charlotte Cushman, who played both men's and women's roles and had a string of female lovers; and Elaine Noble, the first openly LGBTQ+ candidate elected to a state legislature.
The tour also covers historical sites that figure prominently in the history of LGBTQ+ rights.
"We cover the State House, which of course Massachusetts the first state to allow gay marriages in 2003, later it becomes national in 2015," the guide said. "We cover historic houses [like] the George Middleton House where two free Black men lived together. We don’t know the nature of their relationship, but they were major social activists."
The tour departs from the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial at 10:45 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
WBZ's Mike Macklin reports.
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