A generation of scholarship has uncovered numerous such intimate and mostly platonic friendships among men (though some of these friendships certainly included an erotic element as well). My findings suggest that theirs was an intimate male friendship of the kind common in 19th-century America. My research led me to archives in 21 states, the District of Columbia, and even the British Library in London.

My new book, Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, aims to answer these questions and set the record straight, so to speak, about the pair. The premise raises many questions: What was the real nature of their relationship? Was each man “gay,” or something else? And why do Americans seem fixated on making Buchanan our first gay president? It doesn’t take much longer to discover that the popular understanding of James Buchanan as our nation’s first gay president derives from his relationship with one man in particular: William Rufus DeVane King of Alabama. Google James Buchanan and you inevitably discover the assertion that American history has declared him to be the first gay president. The problem, of course, is that James Buchanan, our nation’s only bachelor president, had no woman to call his “better half.” But, as Brown’s letter implies, there was a man who fit the bill. Buchanan looks gloomy & dissatisfied & so did his better half until a little private flattery & a certain newspaper puff which you doubtless noticed, excited hopes that by getting a divorce she might set up again in the world to some tolerable advantage.” In a “confidential” letter to future first lady Sarah Polk, Brown savaged Buchanan and “his better half,” writing: “Mr. A recent spat in the Washington Daily Globe had stirred his political rivals into full froth-Aaron Venable Brown of Tennessee was especially enraged. At the start of 1844, James Buchanan’s presidential aspirations were about to enter a world of trouble.

Gay brave williams