If you want to see something that has heartbreaking amounts of internalized homophobia, you can read The Life of Lorena Hickok, E.R.'s Friend, by Doris Faber. How did you research Lorena's life? How much were you able to? You can see how that story doesn't have quite the same narrative oomph.īut if the story for you is about the enormity and irresistibility of Franklin Roosevelt. And then she went on to become a real progressive force in America, and she hated being First Lady, and she fell madly in love with Lorena Hickok. Yes, he married Eleanor Roosevelt, it was a great meeting of the minds-although at the time most people thought that he had married up, and that she was a great catch-and then he broke her heart. And it is part of the story about Franklin. That is the American historical narrative. And that's the story.' That is not a story you have to dig for. He broke her heart when he had the affair with Lucy Rutherford, and Eleanor went on to become a great lady and a sainted doer of good deeds because she never recovered from her broken heart. And the narrative is, 'He married Eleanor, it was a great meeting of the minds. But also, for historians who really adored and admired Franklin, there is something in that adoration and that hero worship of FDR which needs to be accompanied by a very particular narrative. One, I think one should never discount internalized homophobia-as they say, sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely. Well, I think there are a couple pieces to that.

Other than just assuming these historians have so much internalized homophobia, what accounts for the fact that you have to fictionalize a story like this to get at what is almost certainly the real story? And that was her social circle.Īnd yet mysteriously, when she said, 'I long to kiss your lips in the southeast corner,' she just meant like, hey, let's get a margarita at the bar, pal. These people met at Wellesley, they met at Radcliffe, they met at Smith, they fell in love, and they lived together for the next 40 years.

They were classic glass closet lesbian couples. And they weren't schoolgirl lesbians, they were working couples. Like, really? Because all of her friends were lesbians. And so then the idea that on top of everything else, she's just really effusive, and that she wouldn't know a big butch lesbian if she saw one. And all of those fancy French lesbians ended up writing novels about their adored headmistress Mademoiselle Suzette, who took Eleanor on a two-person tour of Europe. She went to an English boarding school, for one thing, that Natalie Barney and her sisters went to. And also the idea that Eleanor was a Victorian lady-and I'm like, not really.

Amy bloom eleanor roosevelt