On Retrospective Speculations Regarding Sexual Orientations
National Post columnist Mark Hill begins his article “The Enduring Speculation About the Bachelor Prime Ministers” with a provocative yet undeniable observation: “a spouse is a virtual necessity for anyone looking to lead a Western democracy.” Consider that America hasn’t had a bachelor president since 1857. In the past three centuries, only four bachelors have known of the prime ministership in the United Kingdom. Every French president had a live-in consort. Early twentieth-century Canada, however, presents a noteworthy anomaly: from 1926 to 1948, the Great White North was led by consecutive unmarried prime ministers who, by Hill’s reckoning, “didn’t seem all that comfortable around women.”
Hill takes this as license to speculate that, for these two-plus decades in which Liberal William McKenzie King and Conservative Richard Bedford Bennett exchanged the prime ministership, Canada “may have […] been shaped by gay men forced to live lives concealing their own sexuality.” Hill then proceeds to provide a welter of circumstantial evidence that may or may not suggest that Bennett and King pursued clandestine homosexual relationships. While both prime ministers were canonically labelled as workaholics who were “married to their job,” there have been recurrent speculations among contemporaries and historians about the women and men in their personal lives. With Bennett, there is very little evidence of same-sex attraction, as there are gaps in his memoirs (though Hill interprets these gaps in a fairly suggestive manner). King, by contrast, did dedicate some flowery letters to male friends, but there is no hard evidence that these relationships went beyond some intensive homo-admiration. All told, Hill’s is not the most convincing queer-reading ever undertaken. As if to help along the article’s insinuations, the National Post layout team has included an accompanying picture of Bennett and King with arms interlinked. Herein, the two give the impression of cordial political opponents rather than a pair of Bank Street queens.
And yet while the article did not sway me intellectually, it did shellac me emotionally. As I read, I felt a mounting terror. I’ll assure the reader that I was not terrified by the prospect of gay prime ministers. In fact, I assume I’ll see gay and lesbian prime ministers and presidents in my lifetime, and I welcome this. Rather, my horror presented itself on a deeply personal level.
You see, I myself am a man who is perpetually single. But for a few scattered flings with women of which little or nothing came, I have never dated in earnest, and I certainly have never had a serious long-term relationship. Like King and Bennett, I’m not “all that comfortable around women.” But I’m also patently uncomfortable around men. I’m uncomfortable around people in general. Further to that, I’ve never really understood the institution of marriage and why it persists as an unquestioned goal for so many people across cultures. But that’s just me. On the cusp of 40, I have come to accept that I will be a lifelong bachelor, and I feel no terror in this prospect. But as I read Hill’s article, a different kind of terror began to seize me: sure, I can accept my single status . . . but what if others can’t? Does this mean that, once I pass away, those who survive me (not ancestors, of course, but shirttail relatives, perhaps) will look back and do a queer-reading on me? Will friends, family, and eulogizers be winking all-knowingly among themselves at my funeral, as if they are privy to a joke I lived but never quite got: that I was gay and didn’t know it?
There will be some readers who may conclude from the basis of my having merely asked the aforementioned questions that my friends, family, and eulogizers will be justified to speculate. (Alternatively, some may take my knowing that Bank Street houses Ottawa’s gay village as evidence enough in itself.) By this line of reasoning, if you leave any questions about your sexuality whatsoever, then your sexuality is fundamentally in question. That a subject was single for an extended period of time, or even muted with regard to their private affairs, then, means it’s open season for queer-readings.
So as I read Hill’s queer-reading of Bennett and King, which shoehorned two long-dead public figures into a category only haphazardly articulated during their lifetimes, I began to feel not only a dread but also a strange compulsion. I began to ask myself a heretofore unfamiliar question: Should I be looking to date someone, simply for the benefit of the historical record? Perhaps a few flowery emails to some half-interested local forty-something females would cement my legacy as solidly hetero. But maybe that wouldn’t be enough. Maybe I’d have to do something more drastic. This prompted a darker query: is this the reason why marriage is such an abiding and unquestioned goal for so many people? That is, does marriage (or at least having a live-in partner) represent the only way to truly set the record straight? (The operative word being straight, not gay.) As I finished Hill’s article, I had a perfervid urge to sign up for E-Harmony so that I might catch a fading star and put in a few months or years with her, leaving a trail of nuzzling selfies and maybe even a sex tape to set at ease the suspicions of my surviving family. Of course, my life goals do not include leading a western democracy, so marriage isn’t essential, but on the other hand, I would like to be remembered as a straight man . . . albeit a straight man whose raging heterosexuality was stunted by his lack of comfort around women (often because he was so profoundly attracted to them that he couldn’t begin to articulate his passions).
Marriage, then, starts to look like an exercise in game theory. Maybe a few years in the worst imaginable marriage has merits over and above being single for life. Strategically speaking, getting married has utility in that it can soundly confirm for anyone who’s interested your attraction to a given gender. In the past, this had to be the opposite sex if you wanted to participate in society, but now the rules have expanded to include the same sex. (The game is complicated, of course, if you are bisexual, in which case you would need to pursue affairs with genders other than that of your spouse within and between marriages). Marriage, then, effectively affirms the box you fit into. “He/she/they is/are married to him/her/them” becomes a one-sentence abstract for the configuration of your desire. By summing yourself up as such, you dispel confusing questions among every new person you meet. Marriage is a preemptive strike against the speculations of strangers. No matter your orientation, all essential personal questions are answered by marriage. But if you stay single, you leave yourself at risk: unless you have interchangeable arm-candy from week to week, people may treat you as a question without easy answers. And if you do not present as an easy answer, you may not be worth people’s time. Worse yet, potential employers may not see you as a “good fit.” Marriage, then, seems more and more like a worthwhile goal to even the most jaded among us, insofar as it expedites and optimizes interactions with acquaintances and employers and everyone else. When you’re married, people don’t have to wonder about you.
Which brings us back to Hill’s wonderings about Bennett and King. The syllogism driving Hill’s article appears to be as follows: if the subject is never married, then the subject was likely gay. It may sound as if I’m faulting Hill, but in his defense, such speculations on orientations of historical figures are not uncommon. But why are our speculations on sexuality so unimaginative? Why, I mean, do we always go with “gay”? Do we imagine it’s too statistically improbable that two consecutive Canadian prime ministers weren’t attracted to anyone? (Maybe it’s impossible for us to imagine: as asexuals account for 1% or less of the population, the vast majority of us can’t put ourselves in an asexual’s shoes.) Are we too dignified to consider that Bennett and King might have both been autosexuals, fully and completely satisfied with the familiar caress of their own hand and some racy pictures to accompany it? Indeed, in speculations such as Hill’s, among many others, there is a distinct copulative bias. We assume that another person had to have been involved. As recently as forty or fifty years ago, we only recognized one sexuality, the hetero-, as acceptable. Now we’ve tripled our allowances by accepting homo- and bi- into the fold, but we still have a bias toward coupling (or tripling and quadrupling, etc., for the orgy types). Yet we still have trouble with singularity, and the unanswered questions that being single apparently prompts.
Why can’t we try another tack? Since the lifetimes of King and Bennett, fewer people have been entering into marriage. While marriage remains a critical social institution, its numbers have declined. Relatedly, divorce rates have increased. So can we not hypothesize that people like King and Bennett were actually ahead of their time in their non-connubial lifestyle? Perhaps King and Bennett did not put high priority upon an institution that, as it turned out, fewer and fewer people would prioritize in the decades to follow. Perhaps King and Bennett saw in marriage a massive time-sink that would potentially hinder the attainment of personal and professional goals. (This is getting closer to my own perspective on marriage, though running a western democracy is admittedly a little more ambitious than writing Medium articles.) Perhaps King and Bennett are historically significant not by virtue of being closeted gay men, but rather because they were trailblazers of a post-relationship vision of human life — a vision that didn’t make coupling the be-all and end-all.
All that being said, Hill’s article is not without merit. Regardless of whether or not King and/or Bennett were into male, female, or genderqueer individuals, there were indeed historical figures, prominent and insignificant, who were attracted to any and all of the above. There were also some historical figures who were attracted to no one. Speculations such as Hill’s aren’t entirely empty, insofar as they acknowledge that these endlessly diverse expressions of desire (or lack thereof) have always existed, and yet they were often kept hidden or outright oppressed. Progressive westerners may sometimes underestimate the sheer amount of repression in our past, given that we live in a society where the majority would probably be open to the possibility of a gay prime minister or president.
But would we be open to an asexual head of state? For some of us, the questions never cease.
