5/17/2023 0 Comments Lem billingsSo when the Congressman is too busy running for the Senate to tend to the business of wooing the requisite political wife, who better to serve as surrogate than the “big bespectacled guy” whom Jack’s mother, “with just the barest brush of quotation marks,” has described as her “fifth son”? Lem, as Jack calls him, has been by Kennedy’s side “since the third form of Choate” and serves as both friend and foil to the entire Kennedy clan. Vidal was unabashedly out of the closet, and the author of a best-selling gay World War II novel, at a time when most queer books were ruled obscene and evidence of homosexual acts could bring a prison term.Louis Bayard’s latest novel, “Jackie & Me,” focuses on the future First Lady’s friendship with Kennedy intimate Lem Billings during Jack’s unconventional courtship. In addition to his bisexual brother in law, actor Peter Lawford, and Lem Billings, Gore Vidal, a relative of Jackie’s by marriage, was a frequent visitor to their home. Although JFK embarked on his vigorously heterosexual adventures as a very young man and Billings remained focused on an erotic life with men, they remained intimate in part by managing Jack’s sex life, his career, and his family, together. However he quotes Billings as having admitted that he may have been in love with Kennedy his whole life. Pitts was either unable to verify this, or unwilling to publish it, having been given special access to the Billings papers by Robert Kennedy, Jr. Jack and Lem, as a reviewer for The New York Daily News put it in 1996, “engaged in the kind of sexual experimentation not unknown at all-boys boarding schools.” However, an earlier book by Hollywood writer Lawrence Quirk alleges that Billings was not rebuffed. Were they sexually intimate as well? Billings once admitted that he made a pass at Jack early on he claimed he was rebuffed, and according to Pitts, it was then that the pair really became close and decided to share a room. Kennedy later graduated from Harvard, but the pair wrote letters back and forth, spent weekends together in New York and traveled to Germany, in the summer of 1937. The pair matriculated at Princeton together in the fall of 1935, although Jack had to withdraw for health reasons (probably early signs of Addison’s disease). Lem never really left Jack’s orbit after boarding school. Between 19, “The bond between Jack and Lem grew so tight,” journalist David Pitts wrote in Jack and Lem (2008), “that they really had no need for friendships with other boys.” We might even call it a romantic friendship. A crew jock, he met Jack at Choate, a boys’ boarding school, in Wallingford, Connecticut (it is now co-ed). Born in 1916, he was the son of a Pittsburgh doctor. Lem Billings may have been present for, but just outside the frame, of these pictures. A Catholic couple, the Kennedys hoped for more children: Jack had been one of nine, while Bobby and Ethel Kennedy had eleven. In a third, the President is walking on the beach with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, later Onassis, grieving the death of their premature son Patrick. Another photo shows older daughter Caroline, now the American Ambassador to Japan, on her pony. One famous shot shows the toddler John, Jr., who would also die tragically young, playing peek-a-boo under the desk. Pictures of JFK’s family, widely distributed before and after his death, show him as a conventional, heterosexual family man. This queer perspective is not readily visible in President Kennedy’s official history. Billings was so much a part of the extended Kennedy clan that he was regularly included in family gatherings, and Attorney General Robert “Bobby” Kennedy named his son Michael LeMoyne Kennedy. At least one of them, Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, was one of Jack’s body men and lived part-time in the White House. But straight men can have a gay side, and JFK’s life was filled with prominent gay men. Kennedy was famous for his vivid, and some might say almost compulsive, heterosexuality. Jack and Lem, horsing around in the snow at Choate.
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