Jfk gay as hell
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Historian Lois Banner has also provided details about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with JFK, one of numerous women procured for the President by Peter Lawford, who himself staged sexual orgies in Los Angeles that the President attended.
However, gay men played another role in Kennedy’s history that was not overtly sexual: they were part of an avant-garde cultural world that Jackie Kennedy cultivated, as she linked the Kennedy name to national arts, letters and music for the first time.
History has a way of keeping its biggest secrets hidden.
But remember, this is just a theory, and while it’s fascinating, we can’t say for sure if it was true. Biographer Sally Bedell Smith referred to Billings as “probably the saddest of the Kennedy widows.”
Following the assassination of RFK in 1968, Billings transferred his romantic feeling to Kennedy’s nephew, Bobby Kennedy Jr, to whom Billings would become a “fawning surrogate father and fellow drug user.”
“Young Bobby replaced Jack in Lem's heart of hearts,” one source told Oppenheimer, who is the author of the book Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. And The Dark Side Of The Dream.
Love Irish history? Lawrence J. Quirk's book The Kennedys in Hollywood claims their relationship was sexual in nature, though they maintained discretion given the societal norms of their time.
However, he avoided the notoriety of coming out even after Kennedy’s death, perhaps because he feared that it would draw more negative attention to the extended Kennedy family, which soon struggled with a range of scandals: Chappaquidick, alcoholism, divorce and drugs were but a few. However, an earlier book by Hollywood writer Lawrence Quirk alleges that Billings was not rebuffed.
He had clearly been adopted into the larger Kennedy clan, and Jackie drew him into her family circle as well. With JFK's death, Billings lost a friend and soulmate." He never recovered, Gillon said. Billings worked on the 1960 campaign, and then lived at the White House for long stretches of time, a room permanently set aside for his visits.
JFK’s numerous affairs (before, during and after his marriage to Jackie) and his friendships with gay men suddenly had a social and cultural context that was neither gay or straight, but a harbinger of the sexual freedom and experimentation that would soon be championed in the counterculture and the mainstream.
And all the while, Lem Billings was there: waiting, serving, comforting and helping the Kennedy family adjust to the public glare.
He claimed he had no idea who the Kennedys were, but they wanted to meet Williams, and Vidal produced him. “He may have been the reason I never married.”
This essay was originally published at OutHistory.org on November 22, 2013; it has been updated and re-edited. Claire Potter is professor of history at The New School, and Executive Editor of Public Seminar. You can follow her on Twitter.
There are countless theories about John F.
Kennedy (JFK) that have surfaced since his assassination, ranging from political conspiracies to personal secrets. Knowing that, like many men who lived double lives, he “could have had a wife and family,” Billings regarded his friendship with Jack as a gift. "He may have been the reason I never got married," he had said. The two became friends, then roommates.
The pair matriculated at Princeton together in the fall of 1935, although Jack had to withdraw for health reasons, probably early signs of the Addison’s disease that would plague him the rest of his life.
With JFK's death, Billings lost a soulmate
Historian Steve M. Gillon, author of The Kennedy Assassination — 24 Hours After and host of the History Channel podcast of the same name, discussed their relationship with People.
Per reports, Billings was instantly attracted to Kennedy's charisma and charm. The affair was socially isolating for a very young and sexually un-liberated woman, causing her to deceive friends, boyfriends and ultimately her husband and children for most of her adult life.
In many ways, Kennedy was also enjoying the kind of sex life that would later characterize the gay men’s “party” of the 1970s.
They became friends while working together on their class yearbook. By the time he became president, however, that revolution had been launched: the birth control pill, developed in the 1950s, became widely available in the 1960s and, more importantly, in 1964, Life magazine would publish a major photo essay about gay men’s bars in San Francisco.
Photo credit: Cecil Stoughton/Wikimedia Commons
President John F. Kennedy has become infamous for his vivid, and some might say almost compulsive, heterosexual affairs.