Homorobics and the Queering of King County

Thought that organized group aerobics couldn’t get any gayer? Think again:

With its inaugural workout tonight at 20/20 Cycle in the Central District, Homorobics continues on the first and third Wednesday of each month. “Flamboyant workout attire encouraged!”

Explaining the story behind their namesakes, Homorobics hosts Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy direct us to a tidbit of King County’s own eponymous history buried in the annals of Wikipedia: King County was originally named after William Rufus King, the rumored lover and longtime roommate of James Buchanan, our country’s only president never to marry. Andrew Jackson ostensibly referred to them as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy.

• Mathew Brady
• The “darkly handsome and smolderingly receptive” face of William King, according to John Updike.

William King was a senator from Alabama who later became vice president under Franklin Pierce (though his was the shortest VP term ever—aside from those who succeeded to the presidency). He turned out to be a shameful namesake, what with the slave owning and the fierce advocacy of Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law requiring the return of alleged fugitive slaves from the North back into captivity in the South. So in 1986, the King County Council passed a motion introduced by Ron Sims and Bruce Laing to “rename” (renamesake, really) King County after Martin Luther King Jr. instead. Twenty years later, the council changed the county logo to reflect this new namesake.

Now for the gay part. But let me first say that, although the outing of public figures past and present stokes the gay flames in my heart, we shouldn’t automatically believe these retellings of history hook, line, and sinker. Not only is it clearly anachronistic to call someone from the 1800s gay, sexual identity/preference/orientation/etc. has a murky, if dangerous, relationship with truth. That said, history is not about truth; it is about stories. Only bits of the histories we tell are constructed of verifiable, indisputable facts. The rest—the filler, the fun—is the stories we tell to connect those facts. And this is one fun story (aside from the whole slavery thing). Plus, caveats about revisionism aside, King sure sounds like a queen.

First, William King’s biography at the Senate’s website drops a couple hints:

[King] enjoyed significant support [as a vice presidential contender] in the electorally important state of Pennsylvania, thanks to his roommate and close ally Senator James Buchanan… In the closeness of their relationship in the years after 1834, King and Buchanan—both lifelong bachelors—became known as the “Siamese twins.”

Paul F. Boller Jr., author of Not So!: Popular Myths About America from Columbus to Clinton, dishes more details:

A far likelier candidate for presidential homosexuality [than Abraham Lincoln] was James Buchanan, Lincoln’s predecessor in the White House, the only president never to marry.* With Buchanan there is a great deal of information pointing to at least latent homosexuality… He developed friendships with women from time to time, but always quickly terminated them when the woman became serious about him. “I feel it is not good for a man to be alone,” he once wrote, “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.” But he never seriously contemplated marriage… Buchanan’s association with Senator [William] King, a bachelor like himself, was something of a joke in Washington. The two met in 1821, when Buchanan first entered the House, and King, five years older, was in the Senate, and took quickly to one another, became roommates, and lived together in Washington for the next sixteen years. Buchanan amusedly noted that some people… even referred to King as his “wife.”

* Hey, WhiteHouse.gov editors, you might want to fix the hyperlink directing readers to “James Buchanan’s spouse, Harriet Lane” at the bottom of Buchanan’s bio. She was actually his niece, acting as his “hostess” in the presidency.

Keep reading below the jump for another odd, slightly less gay tale about King from his Senate bio.

King contested Henry Clay’s 1832 move to recharter the Bank of the United States, not because he opposed the bank, but because he objected to Clay’s political opportunism, tied to that year’s presidential election. When, as part of that controversy, [Andrew] Jackson ordered the removal of federal funds from the bank and then refused to respond to a Clay-inspired Senate demand for a copy of a related document, the Senate took the unprecedented action on March 28, 1834, of censuring the president. Administration partisans, led by Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and King, launched a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to expunge the censure from the Senate’s journal. King, who had become widely respected for his knowledge of the Senate’s rules and precedents, argued that Jackson’s refusal to produce the document was in no way an assault on senatorial prerogatives. “The Senate was in no danger,” he asserted, “it had never been so strong or so saucy as it was at the present moment; why, then, was it like the Italian beggar, continually wounding itself, for the purpose of exciting the commiseration and benevolence of the public.”
King’s conflict with Clay and the dangerous tenor of the times are symbolized in the clash between the two men that took place in March 1841, as the Senate, under Clay’s leadership, for the first time passed to the control of a new Whig majority. A great battle developed over Senate printing patronage as Clay sought to dismiss Democrat Francis P. Blair, editor of the Washington Globe, as official Senate printer. Clay “believed the Globe to be an infamous paper, and its chief editor an infamous man.” King responded that Blair’s character would “compare gloriously” to that of Clay. The Kentucky senator jumped to his feet and shouted, “That is false, it is a slanderous base and cowardly declaration and the senator knows it to be so.” King answered ominously, “Mr. President, I have no reply to make—none whatever. But Mr. Clay deserves a response.” King then wrote out a challenge to a duel and had another senator deliver it to Clay, who belatedly realized what trouble his hasty words had unleashed. As Clay and King selected seconds and prepared for the imminent encounter, the Senate sergeant at arms arrested both men and turned them over to a civil authority. Clay posted a five-thousand-dollar bond as assurance that he would keep the peace, “and particularly towards William R. King.” Each wanted the matter behind him, but King insisted on “an unequivocal apology.” On March 14, 1841, Clay apologized and noted that he would have been wiser to have kept quiet despite the intensity of his feelings against Blair. King then gave his own apology, after which Clay walked to King’s desk and said sweetly, “King, give us a pinch of your snuff.” King rose and both men shook hands as applause engulfed the chamber.