What if America's most patriotic song was a queer love story? On July 4, 1895, Katharine Lee Bates published a poem called "America" in a weekly newspaper. We know it today as "America the Beautiful." And the woman who wrote it was a lesbian who lived for twenty-five years with the love of her life - and whose queerness was systematically erased from popular history for over a century. This Fourth of July episode gives Katharine Lee Bates her full story back.

Katharine was an English professor at Wellesley College who essentially created the first American literature course in the country and wrote the first textbook on the subject. In the summer of 1893, she traveled west with her partner Katharine Coman - the first American woman to teach statistics, co-founder of the American Economics Association, founder of Wellesley's entire Department of Economics. They visited the Chicago World's Fair, that gleaming "alabaster city," and then continued to Colorado Springs, where Katharine climbed Pikes Peak by prairie wagon and mule and came back to her hotel room to write the poem. The "alabaster cities" she described were the ones she and Katharine Coman had just seen together.

The two Katharines lived together for twenty-five years in a home they called The Scarab. They were known around campus as The Two Katharines. Bates wrote to Coman: "You are always in my heart and in my longings." They described themselves as one soul together. When Coman died of breast cancer in 1915, Bates published an entire volume of love and grief poetry dedicated to her. And then, like so many queer people throughout history, she destroyed most of their correspondence - a common act of self-protection, burning the evidence, erasing the trail to protect the person she loved most.

This episode sits with the meaning of all of that - the longing in those lyrics, what it means to love a country that doesn't fully love you back, and the choice to stay and keep singing anyway. When queer Americans are being told they don't belong, this episode is a reminder: the woman who wrote the song that defines what America aspires to be was one of us. She loved deeply. She saw beauty everywhere she looked. If that isn't American, nothing is.

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