Hello and welcome to Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated quares in history.

My name is Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.

And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Gay Museum in Berlin.

Last week we talked about Nikolai Yezov, one of Stalin's henchmen who ended up the victim of a purge.

Who are we talking about this week, Ben?

Well, this week we're going to talk about a man who's consistently ranked by historians of the

United States as one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic.

Intriguingly, he may also have been its first gay president.

More intriguingly, the president he immediately preceded, the much better known and better

loved Abraham Lincoln, may also have been a little

bit, you know, and while we can't know exactly what his love-like was like, it is intriguing

to think about the differences between homosexual love and erotic friendship, and how

Buchanan's long association with another, let's say, confirmed bachelor may have influenced some of his

worst decision-making around crucial questions of slavery, the rights of freed slaves,

and the formation of the reactionary force that would come to me known as the Confederacy.

On this topic of 19th century male romantic friendship and homosexuality, I want to quote the historian

Jonathan Ned Katz in his excellent book, Love Stories, Sex Between Men, Before Homosexual. He writes,

This was the world before the homosexual heterosexual hypothesis, the universe before that great

sexual divide. Pondering these 19th century tales, I hope that readers will question the assumptions before that great sexual divide. Pondering these 19th century tales,

I hope that readers will question the assumptions of that time

and ask of these stories' characters,

what were their past words for men's sexual and affectionate intimacies with men?

...