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According to Out of the Past, Neil Miller's survey of gay history, the first openly gay person in the United States to run for public office was a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961. But the highest office ever won by a closeted gay person was the presidency of the United States more than a century earlier—by James Buchanan in 1856. Wheatland, Buchanan's house in Lancaster, is open to tourists, but visitors won't learn that he was homosexual—or much else about him.
In life, Buchanan was not very far in the closet. For many years in Washington while serving as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate, he lived with William Rufus King, Democratic senator from Alabama. The two men were inseparable; wags referred to them as “the Siamese twins.” Andrew Jackson dubbed King “Miss Nancy,” and Aaron Brown, a prominent Democrat, writing to Mrs. James K. Polk, referred to him as Buchanan's “better half,” “his wife,” and “Aunt Fancy ... rigged out in her best clothes.” When in 1844 King was appointed minister to France, he wrote Buchanan, “I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation.” On May 13, Buchanan wrote to a Mrs. Roosevelt about his social life, “I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with anyone of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.” — James W. Loewen.
Lies Across America by James W. Loewen, 1999, Page 341-342.