President James Buchanan and the gossip pages

Another June, and pride was bustin' out all over, and not just on Market Street and Fifth Avenue. Allentown, Pennsylvania and Santa Fe, New Mexico both sponsored parades featuring dancing bears and Dorothy Gales. Rainbow flags are now a June tradition, right up there with graduations, weddings and the NBA finals. Corporate-sponsored floats proclaim to shocked, shocked, crowds that department stores and airlines have gay employees. There's nothing like a pride parade to prove gay people can be every bit as disorganized as the Irish.

Pride day is also a bittersweet reminder of how much the country and many of us in it have grown up since I attended the Colorado State Democratic convention in 1976. The joke going 'round among the assembled hacks, peaceniks, tree-huggers, bra-burners and corpulent trade unionists was "Q: What do you get when you cross Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown? A: The Tooth Fairy!" The following spring a delegation from the National Gay Rights Task Force was invited to the White House on a Saturday when there was no press around. The president wasn't around either. Its audience with Carter aide Midge Costanza got as little media coverage as possible because the Democratic president wanted it that way.

America's social growth is illustrated by the fact this is the first June an openly gay candidate is running for president and nobody except Mike Pence gives much of a shrug. After all, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is one candidate among 23, or roughly the same percentage (according to the Guttmacher Institute) as the overall gay population. In addition to an unpronounceable name, he doesn't exactly have a front-runner's resume. He is the mayor of a city with a population smaller than the capacity of America's fifth largest college football stadium and he looks like he works for the caterer. His chances are remote, but thankfully he is not being counted out for moronic reasons. Mayor Pete's milestone candidacy will also hopefully serve the cause of history by cashiering the unfounded and logically empty speculation that we've already had a gay president: James Buchanan. This bowl of historical thin soup was cooked up right about the time reliable survey research produced consensus that about 3% of the adult American population is homosexual and probably always has been. Thus, the theory: If 44 fellows have held the job, arithmetic commands that at least 1 was gay, so we might as well peruse the roster, narrow it down, and declare a winner. Even though this school of statistics also compels a finding that the Harlem Globetrotters are 77% white, conclusion jumpers embraced it and Newsweek legitimized it with a cover story.

It shouldn't be overlooked that putting Buchanan on the three-dollar bill is unlikely to evoke swells of gay pride. Historical consensus ranks him a stinker. He closed his own memoir with the words "...and whatever the result will be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country." The only recognition he's earned in my lifetime is they named the school after him in "Welcome Back, Kotter."

Our juridic calling commands the only way of proving or disproving anything about anyone is to put them on trial for it: So here goes. Ladies and gentlemen, the people will endeavor to prove that James Buchanan was a boring version of Oscar Wilde because, (1) he was a lifelong bachelor, (2) his girlfriend killed herself, and (3) he was friends with another bachelor. Oh my!

Buchanan's lifelong bachelorhood proves absolutely nothing. He was also the only president from Pennsylvania and the only president who was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. No one suggests that means he liked pretzels and was cockeyed. This non-sequitur overlooks the blatantly obvious. What was true in the 19th century remained true well after Rock Hudson married his agent's secretary in 1955: Marriage was the key to the closet. If you wished to survive in a homophobic world the best strategy was to allay suspicion by pretending to be something else. Moreover, this overlooks the Victorian understanding of homosexuality. In Buchanan's world everyone was straight. For some reason some guys would veer off, only to return to hearth, home and normalcy. Making the most of bachelorhood, Buchanan was rarely without female company, because from the time he arrived in Congress he was considered a good get, in no small measure because of his unrequited engagement to the deceased Anne Coleman.

The prosecution graduates from non-sequitur to tautology invoking Anne's alleged suicide. The argument goes like this: Buchanan was gay because Anne Coleman killed herself -- no doubt because she found out he was gay. In addition to assaulting logic, this argument assumes facts not in evidence. Historians aren't sure Anne's death from "hysterical fit" was caused by a deliberate overdose of laudanum, though circumstances make it a plausible guess. Anne's father Robert was the wealthiest man in Pennsylvania and was convinced that Buchanan, like all her previous suitors, was only after his money. That didn't do much to boost Anne's sense of self-worth, and at the time of her death she was approaching what was then considered the dawn of spinsterhood. Buchanan was working on a big case, Bowman v. Konigmacher and was out of town frequently. Rumors got back to Anne that Buchanan was seeing another woman and after a lovers' spat, she broke off their engagement. Mr. Coleman blamed Buchanan for his daughter's death and returned his request to attend the funeral unopened. Had there even been credible rumors afloat about Buchanan's unconventional urges, Mr. Coleman no doubt would have circulated them when Buchanan ran for Congress less than a year later, but he didn't. Buchanan put his version of events to paper, and kept it his whole life, directing in his will that it be destroyed. If anything, the Anne Coleman tragedy explains his reluctance to marry was born of a desire to avoid repetition of heartbreak, and not the imaginings of rumor hawks.

The last article of phantom proof is Buchanan's friendship with Senator William Rufus De Vane King of Alabama, who by all accounts was a bit of a fop. So was President Martin Van Buren, who was accused by Congressman Davy Crocket of wearing a corset, but then again, Van Buren had been married and had four sons. King and Buchanan lived at the same boarding house, which was the shelter of choice for Washington part-timers. They were not, as many describe them, roommates. Arguing that living down the hall from each other makes them lovers is like claiming John Lennon and Lauren Bacall were doing the wild thing because they both lived at The Dakota. Buchanan and King were members of a small fraternity of 68 senators and they tended to ally on things political, meaning their friendship only made sense. Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin have shared a senatorial crash pad for years, and nobody throws gay shade at them. When King became ambassador to Spain, he and Buchanan exchanged florid letters, but overwrought prose was downright common in those days. King was one of the last politicians to shed his wig and he was a flashy dresser. This spurred folks like Andrew Jackson and Senator Aaron Brown to refer to King as "Aunt Fancy" and Buchanan's "better half." That's not the stuff of history; that's the stuff of high school. During my days on the debate team the wrestlers called us the "speech fags." Sure, we wore suits and ties on Saturdays, but after the trophy ceremony we didn't shower together. And don't forget that the first wrestling coach to become Speaker of the House was Dennis Hastert.

Like his bachelor counterpart Jerry Brown, Buchanan became engaged later in life, twice in fact. Little is known about the first engagement, to a Philadelphia widow. The second betrothal was to Anna Payne, Dolly Madison's niece, who was young, pretty and 22 years his junior. Buchanan broke it off, writing her a self-deprecating letter saying she deserved better than being stuck with an old fart: "A match of age with youth can only bring the force of winter dancing with the spring." Gossips had him canoodling with former first lady, widow Sarah Polk, but the prosecution, like Newsweek, gives more cred to "guess who's gay?" gossip than it does to "guess who's straight?" gossip.

Professor Jean H. Baker of Goucher College offers an interesting tidbit of expert defense testimony. Among Buchanan's long list of onlys is the fact he was the only president who didn't have to shave. His Scottish heritage was a hirsute one, evidencing that Buchanan may have suffered from what the pharmaceutical ads politely call "low T." His altar avoidance may very well be explained by the fact he was a wallflower. But there is no reason for the defense to call Professor Baker, or any other witness.

Nonsuit. 