James Buchanan, A.B. Longstreet, and the Homosexuality of Antebellum History

This presentation asks what it means that James Buchanan is known as both America’s "worst" President (at least until Trump) and its first "gay" President. My aim is not to resolve the debate over whether Buchanan and his... [ view full abstract ]

This presentation asks what it means that James Buchanan is known as both America’s "worst" President (at least until Trump) and its first "gay" President. My aim is not to resolve the debate over whether Buchanan and his longtime friend and occasional roommate, Alabama Senator William Rufus King, were "gay" in the way we understand it today, although there were certainly rumors to that effect in the 1830s and 1840s. Rather, I am interested in the cultural and historiographical work that those two labels "gay" and "worst" perform when affixed to the same person. My approach builds on Susan Lanser’s argument in The Sexuality of History that queer forms of gender and sexuality should be treated not as byproducts of history, but rather as prominent touchstones for working through all kinds of cultural, historical, and economic concerns beyond sexuality. That is, instead of noting that Buchanan was (probably) "gay" despite being President, I follow Lanser’s lead to explore how Buchanan’s apparent homosexuality actually helps explain his rise to power and the nature of his Presidency, particularly his support for the institution of slavery. I develop this theory of what I call the Homosexuality of Antebellum History with a brief discussion of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Old Southwestern Humor story about a marriage between two men, "A Sage Conversation" (1835). By pairing this story with what we know about Buchanan, King, and another pro-slavery southerner, James Henry Hammond, I show how these antebellum white men effectively (and to us, perhaps, ironically) cultivated a climate of same-sex erotic possibility in order to preserve the status quo of white male privilege in the nation as a whole. More than simply getting to be "gay" because they were white men first, these figures are better understood as using what we would call homosexuality as a primary force to assert and guarantee the status of an otherwise normative white masculinity. My conclusions thus suggest new ways to confront the racial/racist dimensions embedded in the history of (homo)sexuality, and to interrogate the place, race, and time of queerness in our own historical moment.