BETWEEN THE SHEETS

A Look At Some Of America’s Gayest Presidential Sex Scandals

Happy Presidents Day!

We couldn’t think of a better way to honor all 44 of our nation’s top leaders than by digging up some of their old gay sex scandals.

To date, voters in the United States have never elected an openly gay president. But if, statistically speaking, 1 in 10 people is gay, then that means there’s been at least three, possibly four, same-sex loving U.S. presidents.

So who were they? Let’s put on our detective caps and do some sleuthing…

Barak Obama-United States-Politics

Barrack Obama

Who can forget the story about Obama’s clandestine gay life cooked up by conservatives back in 2012? Rumor had it, before he was elected to the oval office, Obama used to hang out at gay bars and bathhouses in Chicago on the DL. More specifically, he would frequent them on Wednesdays, according to blogger Kevin DuJan, and he had a particular fondness for “older white guys.” This was all in addition to an alleged marriage to an anonymous Pakistani man and an affair with his personal assistant, Reggie Love.

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Abe Lincoln

Tongues started wagging about the 16th President of the United States sexuality in the late twentieth century. To date, Honest Abe has been romantically linked to two different men: Joshua Fry Speed, who he lived with (and shared a bed with) for four years in Springfield, Illinois, and Captain David Derickson, who served as Lincoln’s bodyguard and bedmate (when Mary Todd wasn’t around) from September 1862 and April 1863. Whether or not Lincoln actually engaged in any tawdry behavior with these fellas is doubtful, but that hasn’t stopped gossipy historians from creating an entire Wikipedia page dedicated solely to the subject of the Great Emancipator’s bedroom shenanigans.

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Richard Nixon

In his 2011 biography Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, veteran Washington reporter Don Fulsom claims that America’s most notorious president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, was more than just a liar and a crook. He was also a closeted homosexual. Fulsom alleges that Nixon carried on a decades-long affair with Mafia-connected Floridian Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, one of the 37th U.S. President’s closest allies. Rebozo often vacationed with the President in Key Biscayne, sometimes with Dick’s wife Pat, sometimes not. During their men-only visits, the twosome reportedly frolicked together in and out of the water, gushing over their shared passion for Broadway musicals.

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Alexander Hamilton

Okay, technically he was never President, but he still sorta falls into that category. He was a founding father, after all, and he likely would have been elected eventually had he not been killed prematurely in a duel by Vice President Andrew Burr in 1804.

Though he married Elizabeth Schuyler and fathered a total of eight children, some historians believe Hamilton carried on a romantic relationship with fellow solider John Laurens while both men were aide-de-camps to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. The evidence is found in a series letters written by Hamilton to Lauren in 1779, in which he says mushy things like “I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you” and “You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent… Like a jealous lover, when I thought you slighted my caresses, my affection was alarmed and my vanity piqued.”

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James Buchanan

The general consensus among historians is that James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, was, indeed, a big fat ‘mo. He was never married (though he did briefly court a woman before she inexplicably broke it off, then died), nor did he ever express much interest in members of the opposite sex.

But that doesn’t mean the guy wasn’t without love.

Buchanan has been romantically linked to his close “friend” William Rufus King, who he shared a home with in Washington from 1834 until 1844, when King moved to France. The two “roommates” often attended social functions together, with King describing their comradery as a “communion.” Andrew Jackson was rumored to have called the dynamic duo “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy.”

After King departed for France in 1844, Buchanan scribed a letter to Cornelia Roosevelt, in which he professed: “I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.”

Poor guy.

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