# Was Washington 'Really' Gay? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 17, 2014, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538 "2014-02-17T13:42:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Hollow\_mask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Hollow\_mask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hollow_mask)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/42 "2014-02-27T00:29:02Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Am I the only person here who can say that she really doesn’t give a shit if he was gay straight or confused? Since I am not planning on sleeping with him at any time soon [as he has been dead a couple hundred years now] it is of absolutely no interest to me. Well said. I think this stuff is speculated-upon too much. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/43 "2014-02-27T01:55:58Z")
Maybe he just felt pretty, what with that wig and those ruffles. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/44 "2014-02-27T02:25:32Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Am I the only person here who can say that she really doesn’t give a shit if he was gay straight or confused? Since I am not planning on sleeping with him at any time soon [as he has been dead a couple hundred years now] it is of absolutely no interest to me. Why shouldn’t it be of interest? Sexual orientation is a part of what makes a person’s character. Knowing that Washington or Lincoln were gay would be as noteworthy as knowing that FDR was handicapped or that Jefferson was a spendthrift. ---
**Author:** ![j666](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9de0a6/32.png) [@j666](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j666)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/45 "2014-02-27T03:01:07Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > Am I the only person here who can say that she really doesn’t give a shit if he was gay straight or confused? Since I am not planning on sleeping with him at any time soon [as he has been dead a couple hundred years now] it is of absolutely no interest to me. Well, it might be fun to find definitive proof that a Founder Father or two was gay, and watch a few heads explode. But that doesn’t interest me as much a how anyone could let a reference to Hamilton as president slip into publication. Isn’t that the first thing they teach in Fact-Checker School, that Hamilton and Franklin were never president? ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/46 "2014-02-27T03:51:36Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Why shouldn’t it be of interest? Sexual orientation is a part of what makes a person’s character. Knowing that Washington or Lincoln were gay would be as noteworthy as knowing that FDR was handicapped or that Jefferson was a spendthrift. Here here. (I get so tired of the “who cares?” comment; judging by the fact that any thread about almost any famous person’s sexual orientation, be they living or be they dead, gets thousands of hits and resurrected as a zombie years later, apparently quite a few people have some curiosity.) [QUOTE=Hollow mask] Probably not. But then, he had a lot on his mind. There are no photos of him smiling. [/QUOTE] I think Marley23 was probably going less by pictures and more by Lincoln’s well documented lifelong battle with depression. It’s amazing that a man who had multiple episodes in his life when friends feared he would commit suicide held it together so incredibly well conducting one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history until that point while also dealing with the death of his beloved son (for whom he so grieved he at least once went to the boy’s tomb to look at his remains), his wife’s “peculiarities” (ranging from eccentricities like her reliance on psychics to periodic bouts of absolute madness), his millions and millions of enemies who called him every kind of fool and traitor and mass murderer you can think of and openly called for his death, and also with- it’s easy to forget- affairs of state that would have kept the presidency a full time job even if there had been no Civil War, when his inclination towards depression is documented and there was no medicinal or analytical therapy to alleviate it even slightly. As to his sexual orientation, there’s more evidence that he was gay than there was for Washington- it goes way beyond his sharing a bed with another man- but there’s no smoking pole and it will never be known. My own theory is he was probably straight but may have had a fling with Speed as well- the two are not mutually exclusive. I think he had a lot of emotional baggage and probably some sexual baggage as well (one theory is he had, or at least was very afraid he had, a STD the first time he was engaged to Mary Todd and that’s why he called off the wedding). Again, no way of knowing. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2014, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538/47 "2014-02-27T23:53:03Z")
I counted two scenes in Moby Dick that implied Herman Melville might be gay. But since no chronicle at the time implied he was, I conclude he wasn’t. NB: I’m one of those too lazy to click the link provided, [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-washington-really-gay/681538.md?page=2)