Just because Ronald Reagan couldn’t talk to America about gays (and more specifically his fumbling silence over the national health crisis that AIDS posed) doesn’t mean he was in complete denial over gay people.
Case in point? He was mighty fearful that his son Ron “played for the other team.”
Ron dropped out of Yale to pursue a life in the — gasp — arts! And not the butchy arts like woodworking or sculpting. No, the ballet was young Ron’s jam and it put the fear of Mary in the most powerful man on Earth.
In a recent Q&A published in the Lincoln Center Theater program for the play “The City of Conversation,” Christopher Buckley, the novelist son of William F. Buckley, discussed Reagan Sr.’s doubts and fears over Ron’s potential queerness.
“My father and Reagan were close, and my dad had always acted as a kind of godfather to the Reagan children, so Reagan called up my dad and expressed to him his worry that this meant that his son played for the other team,” Christopher said.
My dad ventured the opinion that all people in the arts might not be gay, but there wasn’t much he could really say about this, and, of course, we now know Ron’s not gay.”
In other news, all professional athletes aren’t straight and some people are, get this, bisexual.
h/t NY Post
Roan
Ron Reagan is not gay?
jmmartin
Ron was so cute back then, some speculated. One str8 conservative of my acquaintance said it was a foregone conclusion that Ron was gay. One suspects it could have been guilt by association; after all, he was struggling to become a premier danseur, and as everyone knows all men in ballet are gay.
Dwight
This isn’t really new. I recall the question being raised when Reagan was either running for President or first elected. He denied his son was gay and his comment was to the effect of “We made sure of that.”
Kenover
Ron’s not gay. He just married a lesbian and they live on separate coasts. It’s a very happy marriage by all accounts.