Richard M. Nixon, Gay????

I was raised at my gentle mother’s knee to have nothing but contempt for Richard Nixon. My younger brother and I spent endless hours watching the Congressional hearings into the Watergate scandal because mom insisted we watch history unfold, if millimeter by agonizing millimeter (we were aged 8 and 10). The revelations that Nixon was racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, wildly homophobic and a raging drunk, just underscored how malign he was as a person. I thought Jerry Ford truly blew it when he pardoned Nixon, since I had been paying attention to all of that “rule of law” talk piously intoned by Republicans and Democrats alike of that era. But Nixon has remained beyond political redemption in my political worldview.*

So, here’s a disconcerting story about a new book (Nixon’s Darkest Secrets) that will be out next month. According to the book’s author, Dom Fulsom:

Yet the most extraordinary claim is that the homophobic Nixon may have been gay himself. If true, it would provide a fascinating insight into the motivation and behaviour of a notoriously secretive politician.

Fulsom argues that Nixon may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon.

No, no, no. I will have to see the evidence on this one. Nixon and Bebe Robozo? Really?

Nixon and Robozo????

All sorts of people hate Nixon for all sorts of good reasons. I do NOT want him to be another truly tortured, self-loathing queer with out-sized political power. Didn’t Roy Cohn already fill that niche?

*I did feel pangs of sympathy for Nixon when Pat Nixon died. But then again, I always believed that she got multiple bad deals.