Stolen Nightshirts, A Poem About Gay Marriage and Burned Love Letters: A Very Gay Presidents’ Day

Happy Presidents’ Day, West Hollywood. While the rest of the country sleepwalks through mattress sales and hangovers, we figured today was as good as any to revisit an age-old question, one historians have argued about for decades and many queer folk have treated as settled for even longer: what are the odds that at least one American president was gay or bi? Grab your cup o’joe; this Presidential briefing is kinda wild.

Burned love letters. Stolen presidential nightshirts. Andrew Jackson calling a fellow senator “Miss Nancy.” And a future president writing openly about trying to woo other men. All of it documented. None of it in your high school textbook.

The Bachelor President With a “Better Half” Named William

James Buchanan, the 15th president, never married. He’s the only one in the history of the office to hold that distinction, and the queer community claimed him long ago for good reason. For more than a decade before his presidency, Buchanan lived in a Washington boardinghouse with Alabama Senator William Rufus King. Fellow politicians openly mocked the arrangement, and let’s just say, they weren’t being friendly about it.

Andrew Jackson called the pair “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy.” Aaron Brown, a prominent Democrat, wrote to the wife of President James K. Polk and referred to King as Buchanan’s “better half” and “his wife.” That kind of language from political rivals in the 1840s wasn’t meant to wound, it was meant to kill. Has anything really changed?

There’s an infamous letter Buchanan wrote after King left for a diplomatic post in France that has fueled the fires of the gossip mills ever since. He described himself as “solitary and alone” with “no companion in the house” and said he had “gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.” Even by today’s standards that’s quite something to actually put in writing. In the 1840s it was rather bold, some would even say extraordinary.

The fact their nieces burned most of the personal letters after both men died tells you all you need to know. We’ll never know what was in the letters of affection, but the decision to destroy them speaks volumes on its own.

Historian Thomas Balcerski, who literally wrote the book on the relationship called “Bosom Friends,” considers it an intimate friendship shaped by a very different era’s understanding of male bonds. Others, like historian James Loewen, have said flatly that Buchanan was gay. One thing nobody disputes is that no woman ever replaced King in Buchanan’s life. He died a bachelor at 77.

Honest Abe and the Nightshirt Sitch

Abraham Lincoln is the name that seems to get a lot of people fired up and the debate going. And no, we aren’t exactly talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates here.

Facts are facts: men sharing beds was normal in 19th-century America, hotels were limited, beds cost money, and if you were working the frontier you slept wherever you could. But Lincoln shared a bed with at least 11 different men over the course of his life, and some of those situations don’t fit neatly into the “no vacancy” excuse.

As the story goes, Joshua Speed owned a general store in Springfield, Illinois; Lincoln walked in looking for bed supplies in 1837, but couldn’t afford them. Speed offered to share his double bed upstairs. Lincoln grabbed his saddlebags, went up, came back down and said, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.” They slept in that bed together for four years. By then Lincoln was earning solid money as a lawyer and could’ve gotten his own place easily. A friend even offered him a bed. He turned it down and stayed with Speed.

The letters between them are something else. Lincoln wrote to Speed after Speed’s wedding night with what he called “intense anxiety and trepidation” about how it went. Ten hours after reading Speed’s reply, Lincoln said he still hadn’t calmed down. Carl Sandburg, writing Lincoln’s biography in 1926, described the friendship as having “a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets.” He wasn’t being generous.

Before Speed, there was Billy Greene. The two shared a cot for a year and a half at a general store in New Salem. Greene later talked about Lincoln’s body in a way that caught historians off guard, telling Lincoln’s biographer William Herndon that “his thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.”

It wasn’t just what others said about him, either. Lincoln himself penned a poem that described a marriage between two men, featuring the lines: “For Reuben and Charles have married two girls / But Billy has married a boy… All was in vain, he went home again / And since that he’s married to Natty.” The poem appeared in the 1889 biography by William Herndon but was so controversial it was scrubbed from editions for over 50 years until it was finally restored in 1942.

Then there was Captain David Derickson, Lincoln’s bodyguard during the Civil War. When Mary Todd Lincoln was away from their cottage at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, Derickson would sleep in the president’s bed. He was also spotted wearing Lincoln’s nightshirts. This was the President of the United States during wartime. He had plenty of beds available.

Virginia Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln’s naval aide, wrote in her diary about hearing the gossip. “There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him,” she recorded, and then added, “What stuff!” Historians still debate whether she found the report ridiculous or the situation itself scandalous.

A 2024 documentary called “Lover of Men” and multiple books have laid out the case that Lincoln’s relationships with men went well beyond what was typical even by the more relaxed standards of his era. We will probably never know the full truth. But the evidence is a lot more extensive than most people realize.

The Ones Who Get Whispered About

Buchanan and Lincoln get the most attention, and it’s not hard to see why, but they are not the only presidents or presidential figures surrounded by the goss and speculation.

Eleanor Roosevelt is widely believed to have had a long romantic relationship with journalist Lorena Hickok. Their letters are passionate and intimate, with Eleanor writing things like, “Never are you out of my heart.” Historians who have studied the correspondence largely agree the relationship was romantic. The Roosevelts had a complicated marriage, and that is putting it mildly.

JFK’s lifelong best friend was a gay man named Lem Billings who met Kennedy at boarding school in Connecticut. Historian Fredrik Logevall wrote that Billings had fallen in love with Jack. The two remained close until Kennedy’s assassination, and their emotional bond ran deeper than any Kennedy had with another man.

Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 in 1953, banning gay and lesbian Americans from federal employment as supposed security threats. Some historians have noted the irony, pointing out that Eisenhower seemed to value his bonds with men during wartime far more than his relationship with his wife Mamie. LBJ’s most trusted aide, Walter Jenkins, resigned a month before the 1964 election after being caught with a young man at a YMCA. Jenkins had been at Johnson’s side for 25 years. Despite the political damage, Johnson reportedly wanted to keep him on staff.

The Math Matters

Pete Buttigieg told Axios during his 2019 presidential run that he figured America “probably had excellent presidents who were gay. We just didn’t know which ones. Statistically, it’s almost certain.”

Hard to argue with the math. Forty-five people have held the office over nearly 250 years. At least 43 of them served at a time when being openly gay would’ve ended their political careers and possibly a lot more than that. The chances that every single one was 100% straight is kinda absurd when you really think about.

Historians will tell you that modern ideas about sexual identity don’t translate cleanly to the 1800s. A man sharing a bed with another man in 1840 wasn’t making a statement the way it would read in 2026. The word “gay” as an identity category didn’t exist yet. But people had desires and attachments and relationships that went beyond friendship, and they found ways to live with those feelings even when the culture gave them no language for it and absolutely forbade it.

Forty-five presidents. Nearly two and a half centuries. At least one of them shared a bed for four years with a guy named Joshua, wrote anxious letters about his friend’s wedding night, and turned down other sleeping arrangements when he had every reason to take them. Any thinking person would have to accept that one (and probably more) were at the very least bi.

Happy Presidents’ Day, West Hollywood. The White House has always been more colorful than they told you or want us to believe.

For what it’s worth, rumor is the current President’s wife doesn’t even stay in the White House or sleep with her man. He may not have burned any letters (that we know of), but gurl, he sure has flushed some documents down the toilet and stashed a sh*t ton of “stuff” at Mar-a-Lago. Buchanan’s nieces would be proud. I’m just saying.