Pete Buttigieg: America’s Second Gay President? | The American Spectator

Former Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris caused a stir the other day when she was quoted thusly in her new book. Fox News headlined:

Harris faces backlash for saying Buttigieg was not viable running mate due to being gay

The New York Post headlined the story this way:

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow confronts Kamala Harris over sidelining Pete Buttigieg ‘because he was gay’

There were similar headlines and stories throughout the media. The problem?

In fact, American history reports that, yes indeed, America has already had a gay president. And, as just seen, it almost never gets a mention.

Does the name President James Buchanan ring a bell? Buchanan is, famously, usually known to history as “the one before Lincoln.” Which is to say, Buchanan, a Democrat, was the 15th president. And not a very good one at that.

A Pennsylvanian (and to this day the only president to be produced by my own, proudly advertised “Keystone State”), Buchanan ran the gamut of prepresidential offices. He served successively as a state representative, U.S. congressman, U.S. ambassador to Russia, U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, secretary of states and the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom before being nominated by Democrats for president and elected in the turmoil-ridden 1856 election as America teetered on the edge of civil war. A teetering that finally did explode in 1861 into the almost four full years of the blood-drenched Civil War between North and South, Yankees and Confederates.

The curiosity?

Buchanan was the only president in American history who remained a bachelor throughout his life, living much of it in the south central community of Lancaster.

A close study of Buchanan’s life tells of a tragic love affair with a beautiful young lady, Ann Coleman by name, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Once betrothed, Buchanan soon found his intended deeply unhappy with his obsession with the business world. She broke off the engagement and sadly died soon after of what her physician diagnosed as “hysterical convulsions.”

And here is where the gossip of Buchanan’s sexual preference began. Writing in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, historian Thomas Balcerski headlined:

The 175-Year History of Speculating About President James Buchanan’s Bachelorhood

Was his close friendship with William Rufus King just that, or was it evidence that he was the nation’s first gay chief executive?

Balcerski has also authored a book on the subject:

Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King

Balcerski writes in his article of Buchanan and his relationship with Alabama’s Senator and U.S. diplomat King. He reports:

Google James Buchanan and you inevitably discover the assertion that American history has declared him to be the 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. 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?

In this corner? No idea. Like Buchanan, I spent my share of time in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in my case attending Franklin & Marshall College for four years. Lancaster is treasured in local lore as Buchanan’s home. His actual, physical residence, Wheatland by name, is a decided local historic landmark, carefully preserved not far from the beautiful park adjacent to the F&M campus — that being, but of course, Buchanan Park.

Until now, the eternal questions usually swirling around Buchanan were — are — just how good or bad a president he actually was. Alas, Buchanan does not fare well in these rankings. He is usually seen as the guy who, presented with the growing sectional furies over slavery, was simply incapable of calming — much less resolving — those furies.

It is not an accident that the majestic memorial at the other end of the Washington Mall from the founder’s Washington Monument is the Lincoln Memorial — devoted to Buchanan’s immediate successor, Old Abe, who is treasured by millions in America as the guy who won the war for the Union and freed the slaves. There is no such thing in Washington as the “Buchanan Memorial.” It’s Lincoln on the $5 dollar bill and the penny. Buchanan is nowhere to be seen on any American currency.

All of which is to say, America’s 15th president is in an eternal battle in history over his not-so-good reputation as president.

But there’s more to that battle than a focus on the issues of what was then the brewing Civil War.

The question that periodically surfaces? As, effectively, it just did with Kamala Harris’s remark on Pete Buttigieg. Was James Buchanan America’s first gay president?

Now, in this the 21st century, there is the rise of Democrat star Pete Buttigieg. A decidedly out-in-the-open gay man, Buttigieg, who has served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and U.S. secretary of transportation, gets attention on his being openly gay every time his name is raised as a potential national candidate.

Clearly, former Vice President Harris was all too aware of this, and she forthrightly addresses the issue of why she decided not to put him on her ticket. Which is to say: She believed a ticket of a black woman and a gay man was not a political winner.

Somewhere down the line, one suspects, there will be an openly gay man or woman on a national ticket.

But it is worth remembering/reminding that the historical debate has many insisting that, in fact, America has already had a gay president. Elected 169 years ago.

His name was James Buchanan.

Ya gotta love history!