Famous/Highly Visible Queers

[Nat]

Was going to put this in the breaking news section, but it just cannot compete with the creation of anti-matter in a lab(!), but since our friend Eleanor was family, I thought I'd post this here:

'Franklin And Eleanor': A Marriage Ahead Of Its Time from NPR

Both Franklin and Eleanor also "gave each other space" to cultivate romantic friendships outside of the marriage. Whether or not these relationships were physical is still up for debate, but the language of existing letters shows there's no question they were passionate. In Eleanor's case, those romantic friendships were with men, like her beloved bodyguard Earl Miller, as well as with women, like the journalist Lorena Hickok. It was no secret to her colleagues in the press corps that "Hick," as she was called, was a lesbian; nor was it a secret that she and Eleanor seemed to be deeply in love. A few months after FDR's first inauguration, Eleanor wrote to "Hick" about their open secret: "And so you think they gossip about us ... I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little about what 'they' say." By the way, Rowley can quote those fearless words because Lorena Hickok preserved almost all of the 3,500 letters she and Eleanor wrote to each other from 1932 until Eleanor's death.

The Roosevelt's nonconformist love lives, as well as their expansive impulses to turn the White House into a World War II-era hippie crash pad, have been recounted by other superb biographers, notably Blanche Wiesen Cook and Doris Kearns Goodwin. What distinguishes Rowley's chronicle is her focus on the evolution of the Roosevelt marriage from a standard-issue high-society alliance of its day to a ... what? We don't even have a term for such an unconventional relationship — certainly "open marriage" sounds too naughty, although "open" is what the Roosevelts clearly became.

Of course, they didn't transform their marriage out of mere happy whim. There was the harrowing tragedy of FDR's polio and his rehabilitation, which naturally forced the couple apart. During the late 1920s, Rowley points out, Franklin was away from home for 116 weeks: Eleanor was with him for four of those weeks; his secretary, Missy LeHand, was with him for 110.

And then there were the failures that loosened both the marital and family ties: FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer; Eleanor's rather strained style of parenting the couple's six children. Eleanor, an eternal daddy's girl, sadly confessed later in life that: "I do not think that I am a natural born mother. ... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father." Rowley doesn't excuse these flaws but traces how the hard times helped the couple achieve what she dubs "one of the most interesting and radical marriages in history."