Photo Media artist Scott Lawrence Angus explores the American Civil War through the untold stories of “Forgotten Heroes”. The exhibit challenges the history of military service and gender roles in the Victorian Age.

Angus has discovered eight portraits of women who lived, dressed and fought like men in the War. These portraits put a face and a story to the early pioneers of the feminist, gay and lesbian, and transgender equal rights movement. The exhibit showcases appropriated images of women who served in both Union and Confederate Armies as men.

Long before the horizontal identities of a lesbian, gay man, bisexual person or transgender person were constructed, people who did not fit into the roles assigned by their gender identities transgressed against society rules and cross gender lines. They did not dress as the other for the entertainment of it, but as an act of absolute free will.

It is thought that there might be hundreds of women who served as men in the Civil War. However, with source material only a handful can be proven to have existed. Woman who wanted to be men were thought at the time as either immoral or insane. Further more homosexuality was thought to be only a behavior (a illness or a sin), but not an identity. Out of the eight woman in this exhibit only few might today identify as a lesbian, two of them for a fact would be transgender and most would be straight feminists. No matter what sexuality they hold it is fact that America long before a gay or straight woman was allowed to serve in the military the United State Government by act of Congress and the President our nation recognized the service of two transgender soldiers that the government knew where born to be females, but lived, served and died as men.

Angus has reworked the images of eight soldiers with the colors of the contemporary transgender rights movement in order to provide a hinge between the past and present struggle of those who cross gender lines to live with absolute free will. The collection celebrates the sacrifice and bravery of the true pioneers of the transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual and woman’s equal rights movements. The American Civil War defined that America was a nation of equals and free will and this thread of history cannot be forgot.