# Richard Nixon's secret gay lover!!! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 27, 2011, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553 "2011-12-27T19:27:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/21 "2011-12-28T06:01:47Z")
Bipartisan, was she? ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/22 "2011-12-28T13:00:55Z")
Ike had had a lot of friendships like Nixon’s and Rebozo’s: Ike preferred to hang out with rich self-made men (as opposed to men who’d been born into wealth). If he hadn’t gone to West Point, Ike would probably have been one himself; as was his older brother. When Ike was in charge at Fort Lewis WA, his main pal was his brother, who’d founded the law firm of Eisenhower & Carlson in nearby Tacoma. But with Ike, the friendships were famously based on golf. With Nixon and Rebozo, it was based on “letting his hair down” (a euphemism for getting his dick wet). Nixon came from a similar background, the significant difference was that Ike’s dad was a principled, unsuccessful man while Nixon’s was a bitter, unsuccessful man. Nixon couldn’t be friends with as many men as Ike could, even though he’d be more accessible to self-made millionaires since he hated the Kennedy & WASP elites. It’s not surprising he’d limit his friendship to an ethnic outsider like Rebozo. Rebozo would line up trips out on his yacht, which made it easier for the Secret Service to insure privacy than on a golf course. Rebozo always had a few professional bimbos on board. Now, if you think that getting your buddy laid via hookers that you’ve selected and paid for him is a form of surrogate homosexuality, well then maybe there is something there. ---
**Author:** ![Gagundathar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a183cd/32.png) [@Gagundathar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gagundathar)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/23 "2011-12-28T13:26:41Z")
As much I hated Nixon, I never thought his relationship with Rebozo was anything other than that of a crony and a boss. Or a boss and a crony. OK… whoever is on top today. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/24 "2011-12-28T14:21:57Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > …Rebozo always had a few professional bimbos on board. Now, if you think that getting your buddy laid via hookers that you’ve selected and paid for him is a form of surrogate homosexuality, well then maybe there is something there. For all his many, _many_ faults, I’ve never read any authoritative source that Nixon cheated on his wife. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2011, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/25 "2011-12-28T18:02:32Z")
Must be a crap book if they’ve got to bring out weak shit like this to publicize it. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/26 "2011-12-29T01:08:35Z")
BTW, I’ve read [_Nixonland,_](http://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/0743243021) by Rick Perlstein, which is mainly about political America in the 1960s through '72, but includes some pretty in-depth biography of Nixon, with lots of fascinating insights. But nothing at all about any hints or rumors of homosexuality. (Nor anything else about his sex life, that I recall.) Some I do recall: When Nixon was in the Navy, he supplemented his income by winning at poker consistently. He kept the skills throughout his life. When he was at Whittier College, he founded a club for the not-quite-in-crowd called the “Orthogonians,” the name emphasizing it was not “below” Whittier’s shiny-happy “Franklins” club, but ran in a different direction. Nixon seems to have spent his whole life overcompensating for a sense of social inferiority – the overprivileged Kennedys, whose Daddy could buy them elections, embodied everything he was fighting. **(That’s** the real “Napoleon Complex,” BTW. Napoleon himself was not short, that was just British propaganda, but he was only marginally wellborn, and spent his whole life striving to prove himself better than his snobbish blueblooded schoolmates at the military academy he attended on scholarship.) Nixon did have a certain integrity, a sincere commitment to the public good and the national interest as he understood them (which was usually pretty well, dude was also kickass smart). But his integrity never included honesty. He never seems to have believed, even in theory, at any time in his public life, that politicians or public officials in a republic have any duty to tell the people the truth. His attitude always was that the ones running things, who have access to the inside information, will know what’s best, and “The public will be told what the public has to be told.” And he had a lifelong persecution mania – which came into full flower when he took office as POTUS. He communicated this attitude to his staff, and they were not about to leave the 1972 election to the chances of politics. The Watergate break-in was only the tail end of a set of criminal operations CREEP had been working since not long after Nixon took office. The goal was to sabotage the priimary campaign of every Democratic presidential contender but McGovern, who was judged easiest to beat. It worked. According to Perlstein, Nixon **personally prolonged the Vietnam War** by sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 from behind the scenes (even as a private-practice lawyer who had not held public office in eight years, he still, apparently, had the pull and connections to do that), **just so the war would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November.** On the next-most-divisive issue of his day, race relations, Nixon – although he was the most vulgar kind of racial bigot personally – mostly kept that out of his public life, and actually had no emotional investment for or against the Civil Rights movement; which left him always free to take whichever side would be most useful to him at the moment. (Furthermore, he always believed that foreign policy is the principal responsibility of a POTUS and domestic policy a secondary concerrn.) All in all, a figure out of Greek tragedy, mixing noble qualities with finally-fatal flaws – only, in Nixon’s case, far too many **ig** noble qualities in the mix to qualify as a hero. Anyway, Perlstein obviously researched Nixon in depth; any gay stuff would be a big thing to miss. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/27 "2011-12-29T02:51:35Z")
> [@Eve](#): > > I hear Nixon used to watch gay porn films very attentively, but only because he wanted to get it down pat. I don’t get it. Why gay porn in particular, and not straight porn? ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/28 "2011-12-29T02:54:03Z")
Here are a few men, some real and some fictional and some a matter of dispute, that I know for a fact you can find biographies in which the writer speculates they may have been latent homosexuals or otherwise had homosexual affairs: Friedrich Nietzsche H.L. Mencken Jesus Christ Mr. Spock Henry VIII Sherlock Holmes Gandhi George Washington James Garfield St. Paul Winston Churchill Adolf Hitler Napoleon Mark Twain Sigmund Freud In fact I’ll stop there because famous historical figures, just like unmarried movie stars, without gay rumors would probably generate a shorter list. History was basically a floating Fire Island if you believe every “maybe” biographer. For some men, like Cary Grant (who I’m convinced was at the very most bicurious and most likely just straight), it’s become common knowledge even though there’s no basis other than “he was roommates with Randolph Scott for years and was widely known by unnamed and or unreliable sources to be…” to back it up. I’ll admit there’s evidence enough to at least say “if not gay he missed a damned good chance” with some men in history for whom there can be no proof (Hoover, Alexander Hamilton, Joe McCarthy, and James Buchanan come to mind), and there are some like Lincoln who there’s enough evidence to make it a possibility but it’s not remotely a certainty and there’s a better than good chance it’s nonsense, but with Nixon, if he did have gay lovers I seriously doubt he’d have left a shred of evidence. Having admittedly read nothing that wasn’t directly linked to in this thread, my usual default to “new bio claims \_\_\_\_\_\_ was (something you’d never guess \_\_\_\_\_ was)” is “biographies of the much written about need a hook” buzz. > [@Maserschmidt](#): > > I don’t get it. Why gay porn in particular, and not straight porn? Capitalize one of the words in Eve’s sentence for one of the best presidential sex life puns in a very long time. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/29 "2011-12-29T03:03:40Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > Capitalize one of the words in Eve’s sentence for one of the best presidential sex life puns in a very long time. Yeah, I got the ‘Pat’ part. But Pat was a woman, so why gay porn? Sorry if I’m being dense. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/30 "2011-12-29T03:29:46Z")
**BrainGlutton** , _Nixon Agonistes_ by Garry Wills is a good exploration of what was really going on between Nixon’s ears. As you say, a deep-seated inferiority complex and a particular rancid variety of paranoia. He really was his own worst enemy. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/31 "2011-12-29T04:01:09Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > All in all, a figure out of Greek tragedy, mixing noble qualities with finally-fatal flaws – only, in Nixon’s case, far too many **ig** noble qualities in the mix to qualify as a hero. Oh hell. I just hope someone remembered to drive a stake through his black heart before they screwed the lid down. ---
**Author:** ![Lochdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/edb3f5/32.png) [@Lochdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lochdale)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/32 "2011-12-29T05:07:33Z")
Seems like it’s just made unto publicize a book. Nit the first time it’s been done and sadly not the last. ---
**Author:** ![Lochdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/edb3f5/32.png) [@Lochdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lochdale)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/33 "2011-12-29T05:08:40Z")
😕 > [@Lochdale](#): > > Seems like it’s just made up to publicize a book. Not the first time it’s been done and sadly not the last. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/34 "2011-12-29T06:45:48Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > Yeah, I got the ‘Pat’ part. But Pat was a woman, so why gay porn? Sorry if I’m being dense. I think Eve just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to use such a witty rejoinder, gay sex conflicting with it or not… ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/35 "2011-12-29T13:41:21Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > I don’t get it. Why gay porn in particular, and not straight porn? I think the joke (if you need to think past the pun) is, if Nixon had a same-sex orientation, he might’ve needed a bit of gay-stim to perform for his wife. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/36 "2011-12-29T14:01:46Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I think the joke (if you need to think past the pun) is, if Nixon had a same-sex orientation, he might’ve needed a bit of gay-stim to perform for his wife. Ah, I can see that. That joke has been around (at least) since “Deep Throat” became famous, but I do admire attempts to introduce a new twist to old jokes. ---
**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2011, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553/37 "2011-12-29T14:44:00Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#): > > Ah, I can see that. That joke has been around (at least) since “Deep Throat” became famous, but I do admire attempts to introduce a new twist to old jokes. My favorite newspaper headline of the era was **NIXON STANDS PAT ON WATERGATE TAPES**. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/richard-nixons-secret-gay-lover/607553.md?page=1)