The Washington Post has a story today about America’s first gay first lady.
She was Grover Cleveland’s sister Rose, who acted as his first lady because he was elected without a wife.
In the summer of 1910, Evangeline Simpson Whipple told the caretaker of her home not to move anything in her absence. The wealthy widow was going on a trip, but would be back soon, she said.
She never returned. When she died in 1930, she was buried at her request in Italy next to the love of her life — a woman with whom she had a relationship that spanned nearly 30 years. That woman, Rose Cleveland, had served as first lady.
The letters, preserved by the caretaker at Evangeline’s Minnesota home, are collected in a new book, “Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple,” and make clear that they were more than just friends, according to its editors.
When Grover Cleveland took office in 1885, he was a 50-year-old bachelor, a fact that almost derailed his campaign when rumors spread that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. (He had.) Protocol for unmarried or widowed presidents called for a female relative to fill the role of first lady. In stepped his sister Rose.
She was seen as an important counterbalance to her brother’s scandalous baggage: She was respectable, well-educated, a former teacher at a women’s seminary and the author of serious books.
Her term as first lady, however, was a mixed bag, according to the National First Ladies’ Library. Her book of essays, “George Eliot’s Poetry,” became a bestseller based on her fame, but she was frustrated with public scrutiny of her necklines and a ban on her going to private dinners or public markets.
Fourteen months in, Rose was relieved of her duties when the president married his 21-year-old ward, Frances Folsom. Rose returned to her family estate, nicknamed “The Weeds,” in Upstate New York.
Rose met Evangeline Simpson in the winter of 1889-1890, less than a year after her brother left office for the first time. (Cleveland is the only two-term president not to have served his terms consecutively.) They probably met in Florida, where both spent the season making the rounds among the nation’s wealthier families. Rose was 43 and never married. Evangeline was probably 33 and had inherited a fortune from a late husband nearly five decades her senior.
The love letters begin in April 1890, once the two returned to their respective homes. (Evangeline lived in Massachusetts.)…
When the staff [at the Minnesota Historical Society] discovered the love letters, a memo warned that some of the letters “strongly suggest that a lesbian relationship existed between the two women” and should be hidden from the public.
That ban was lifted following complaints in 1978. Historians have mentioned the letters over the years, but a complete collection of the letters had never been published, until Ehrenhalt and Tilly Laskey’s book.
“There have been women loving other women for all periods of history,” Ehrenhalt said.
Rose Cleveland was not the only gay first lady. Eleanor Roosevelt, while first lady, had a long relationship with a journalist named Lorena Hickok (“Hick”), which was documented in biographies of Eleanor by Blanche Wiesen Cook and Susan Quinn.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Important history!
LikeLike
Very interesting. Hoping to live long enough to see a woman elected Pres. who brings her wife to the White House.
LikeLike
Amen to that!
LikeLike
Keep your eye on Maura Healey, current Attorney General of Massachusetts.
LikeLike
Yes!!!!
LikeLike
I highly recommend an HBO show called “Gentleman Jack.” It is based on the letters of Anne Lister, a strong, intelligent, independent, propertied lesbian woman, trying to negotiate the mores and laws of 1830s England. It is an excellent production that speaks to culture, misogyny, class, values, family and affairs of the heart.
LikeLike
Yes, I have seen “Gentleman Jack.” A wonderful series. The Star was also in the recent movie “The Favourite,” another period piece.
The same writer Sally Wainwright wrote “Last Tango in Halifax,” streaming now.
LikeLike
Fascinating and altogether wonderful. President Cleveland, btw, was often referred to as “Grover the Groper.” Something else common to presidents, it seems. Sickening, isn’t it, that this is STILL the case in the 21st century!
These books about gay and lesbian relationships in days gone by are fascinating. One of my favorites: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, by Lillian Faderman, which treats, among other things, “romantic friendships” among upperclass American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ms. Fademan vividly describes the sexual repression and limited opportunities for social interaction and self-expression of well-to-do American women at the time and how they often poured their genius into these beautiful, romantic relationships with other women, conducted by post.
Another: there is a GREAT treatment of Abraham Lincoln’s gay relationships in Harvard historian John Stauffer’s wonderful Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Importantly, Stauffer points out that in the nineteenth century, before European doctors invented the category of “homosexual” and started treating sexual partnerings as definitive of a human “type,” occasional dips into the other pool were very common among American men, and he gives substantial evidence of this. But Abe’s primary orientation was almost certainly what we would today call a homosexual one. Many in the nineteenth century weren’t shocked at all by the explicitly gay themes of much of Leaves of Grass. Rather, they were shocked by his explicitness about sex and sexuality in general. Here, an essay of mine on the subject of sexual orientation: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/is-sexual-orientation-innate/
Adding this book to my reading list!
LikeLike
CX: Many in the nineteenth century weren’t shocked at all by the explicitly gay themes of much of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Rather, they were shocked by his explicitness about sex and sexuality in general.
LikeLike
And, of course, both FDR and Eleanor had their female lovers living in the White House.
LikeLike
There is another more recent book about Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorean Hickok.
“Loving Eleanor”, by Susan Wittig Albert – February 1, 2016.
“Drawing on extensive research in the letters that were sealed for a decade following Hick’s death, Albert creates a compelling narrative: a dramatic love story, vividly portraying two strikingly unconventional women, neither of whom is satisfied to live according to the script society has written for her. Loving Eleanor is a profoundly moving novel that illuminates a relationship we are seldom privileged to see and celebrates the depth and durability of women’s love.
LikeLike
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. Lao Tzu. …”
LikeLike
Laozi, also spelled Lao Tzu and Lao-Tze, was an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer. He is the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching, the founder of philosophical Taoism, and a deity in religious Taoism and traditional Chinese religion.
He lived around the time of Confucius and some think they might have met.
LikeLike