They sure seemed like a gay couple—and they sure amused their fellow confederate prisoners of war
By Martha K. Baker
Photograph from Dreamstime.com
Keith Boykin, President Bill Clinton’s openly gay press liaison, disagreed with his boss’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Boykin once said in an interview, “Everybody knows, and Clinton knew, there were already gays in the service. Why make a big to-do about it?”
According to the journals of Capt. Griffin Frost, there was no to-do in Mess Number 3, comprising seven men detained in Gratiot Street Prison—St. Louis’ Union prison—in 1864. Pretty obvious references to two gay men, both named Joe, are written with only the slightest of judgments—certainly not with the prejudice levied against blacks, whom Frost calls “Ethiopians,” among other epithets.
Frost served as a loyal pro-slavery Confed-erate before being arrested in St. Louis (he was in prison by his 29th birthday, March 14, 1863). He wrote four books, 680 pages, which he arranged to be smuggled out of prison to his wife. “I was fortunate to out-Yankee [the inspectors],” he wrote in his preface to Camp and Prison Journal Embracing Scenes in Camp, on the March, and in Prisons, published in 1867 and now stored in the Missouri Historical Society library. “In placing this Journal before the public we claim no merit save strict regard for the truth....”
The theory goes that there have always been gays in the military. Specifics are harder to pinpoint, which is why diaries can matter so much to history, especially to offset “official” history as written by winners. Careful conjecture also plays a role: On May 9, 1861, for example, Capt. Nathaniel Lyon did reconnaissance at Missouri’s Camp Jackson while seated in a carriage and wearing a bombazine gown and veil belonging to a pal’s mother-in-law (Lyon hid two pistols in his skirts). Lyon seems to have been a situational cross-dresser, whereas the officers described by Frost seem simply to have been gays in the military—or, at least, gay POWs.
Confederate men and, occasionally, women were held within the stone walls of Gratiot Street Prison. Ironically, Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a rabid Southern sympathizer, had built the medical school that was taken over by Union officers to house Southern prisoners. Though grungy, the prison was no Andersonville, where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died. Life at Gratiot Street included the occasional meal and bedding brought in from the outside, plus visits by family and good women of the Confederacy (in 1862, several men escaped by wearing women’s clothes).
Frost’s refrain is “Prison life is dull and disagreeable at the best.” He describes bedbugs blackening sheets and reddening inmates’ bodies with bites. He gripes about mosquitoes and the St. Louis heat. He often pines in loneliness. He agrees that his group is the so-called poor mess: “We acknowledge the poverty and are bound to admit the hunger.”
On July 8, 1864, he lists his mess’ rules and regulations, which include cooking and washing up, sweeping and cleaning twice a day, “especially the cupboard and the mantelpiece.”
After that entry, Frost writes that he feels compelled to tell of “one eccentric genius”: “We style him ‘Feminine Joe.’ He is quite good looking, medium size, has blue eyes and glossy black hair, which he curls; embroiders like a lady, and has a great fondness for teasing his fellow prisoners by catching them and hugging and kissing them: one of them in particular, who he calls ‘My Joe’ and declares himself in love with.”
Frost writes that Feminine Joe flirts with My Joe by following him to get a drink and by “clasping him in the loving arms” whenever he lies down. “We all get provoked sometimes,” adds Frost, “and read the offender a genuine scolding lecture. It’s a waste of words.”
As for My Joe, when he is exasperated, he “deals out a severe tongue lashing, which ‘the feminine’ accepts in a regular, lover-like, pouting manner.” After having words, the two Joes do not speak or sleep together for several days while Feminine Joe worries over the feud, reports Frost. “We are all fond of him, and he is a noble, generous fellow, but his feminine ways are often very provoking.”
Before drawing this vignette of Feminine Joe, Frost mentions him on June 13, 1863. Frost is gossiping about two prisoners (one of whom is the married Capt. C. from Illinois), who vie for the affection of “a certain young lady who sends boquets [sic].” Feminine Joe knows of the rivalry and, Frost writes, proclaims it “the best hit of the season. I am expiring to witness the denouement.” Frost records comments by Feminine Joe on the poetry of their suits: “What a wonderful place this is for unearthing talents.” Feminine Joe names four men, then “last but not least stalks forth my Joe, whose muse assumes the comic mask....”
Feminine Joe appears again in the entry for July 25, 1864. Frost notes that a new man has moved into the prison, the prison’s doctor was called out for examinations and “Feminine Joe is very busy knitting a tidy [an antimacassar to keep furniture clean]; he has finished one which is quite handsome. He can do nearly everything that ladies claim as their work.”
Less than a month later, Frost notes that the mess has hired “a big Dutchman” to cook. “We will now have ample leisure for all the calls and duties of the social circle,” Frost writes in the same arch tone he uses when describing Gratiot Street Prison as a “hotel” and the inmates as “boarders.” More seriously he adds, “The ‘lady of the house,’ our incomparable pet, ‘feminine Joe,’ will have nothing to obstruct the free course of his embroidery and crocheting while his ‘lover’ will receive more devoted attention than ever.”
Frost concludes the entry for August 18, 1864: “Our two Joe’s [sic], with their odd conceits [fanciful ideas] and witty sallies are the life of our mess.”
Frost seems surrounded by Joes in prison: He writes about Confederate officers Joseph Green, Joe Soward, Joseph Lanier, Joe Leddy, Joe Elliott and Joseph Boyd. Eventually it becomes clear that Feminine Joe is Elliott and My Joe is Soward.
By October 18, 1864, Frost has been moved to a prison in Alton, Ill., where he receives word from a friend of Capt. C. She tells Frost that Gratiot appears “rather gloomy.” Frost writes that the prison still holds “several of our old friends in the lock-up—Joe Elliott and Joe Soward among the number, they are a gay couple, and if there is any sweetness even in a lock-up, they will extract it, and work it into honey.”
On November 25, Frost receives a letter from Soward, “my young friend,” who writes about a trial and other events, then adds that he and “our little feminine favorite, Joe Elliott, are getting along about as usual, though the old quarters are not so lively as they have been.”
After that, Frost’s account of the star-crossed lovers takes a positively Twainian turn. Soward is released January 1, 1865, rearrested across the river at Alton House, then “honorably released” again on January 29. Responding to this scuttlebutt in his diary, Frost offers Soward “heartiest congratulations” with hopes that “warmest good wishes are with him wherever he may be.” “As a man,” Frost adds, “[Soward] is a perfect gentleman, as a prisoner, he was eccentric, original and generous, almost to a fault. His versatile talent, ready wit, and queer conceit, were an inexhaustible fund of amusement for old ‘mess No. 3.’”
Then, shockingly, on February 1, 1865, Frost notes Soward’s death. Subsequently, a friend sends Frost Soward’s obituary from the St. Louis Republican newspaper, dated January 21, 1865—more than a week before Soward’s supposed honorable rerelease. It reports that Union soldiers tried again to arrest Soward, but he resisted and was shot. Frost adds that Soward was “about 22 years of age, five feet eight inches high, and had light hair and blue eyes.” According to the death notice, he was a citizen of Missouri.
The next month, Frost, awaiting his own release, receives a letter from Elliott, sent from Beardstown, Ky. Elliott assures Frost that Joe Soward is “there and well.” Frost decides that Soward’s obituary must have been placed as “a blind, to secure him from annoyance of future arrests, as he probably slacked [sic] his thirst for prison life.”
On April 11, 1865, two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Va., Capt. Griffin Frost, late of the Confederate Army, boards the steamer Warsaw. The next day, he reaches his home, in Palmyra, Mo., where he is met by his wife and daughter.
His military journals describe two Joes, but he never asked whether they were homosexual, and they never told.
