George Washington Was “A Big Queen”
Playwright and essential AIDS activist Larry Kramer is making the rounds for his new book, “The American People: Volume 1: A Search for My Heart,” which is billed by its publisher as “a novel” but which Kramer says is a “history,” and which, as usual with Kramer, is creating controversy. In “The American People,” Kramer describes George Washington as a man who had sex with men — a “big queen,†he said in an interview — and writes the same of Alexander Hamilton, who “was in love with George,†Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and “the most powerful gay man†in American history, J. Edgar Hoover. Historic Jamestown was a hotbed of gay sex, Kramer writes, partly because the settlement for a long time only included men. And not only did Abraham Lincoln have intimate affairs with men – a thesis that was seen as far-fetched a number of years ago, but which more historians now support – but, Kramer writes, Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth was queer, too, and Joshua Speed, thought to be Lincoln’s lover, was a “hustler†as well as “gift†from Booth.
