Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)

I got this book thinking it would be an amusing read about the peccadillos of our naughty founding fathers. Just who all was ol' Ben Franklin schtuping, anyway? And it is that, a little bit. But mostly it's a book about books about the sex lives of founding fathers. An examination of American history writing and hagiography.

And for that it was pretty good, if a bit dry. Major theme: 19th century writing was all about building up the mythology of the founding fathers as noble supermen. Think of George Washington and the cherry tree. Later there was an effort to also depict our founders as "normal red blooded men" - a youthful romance or two was good for the story. Only later in the 20th century do we start getting into the messy realities of personal history, particularly of the more rakish ones, and that too is steeped in contemporaneous changes like sexual liberation and general public horniness. All in all a good postmodern take on how history is never one true story of the past but rather a reflection on its writers of the present.

Three subjects came out as particularly interesting.

1. Thomas Jefferson and the way historians have engaged with Sally Hemmings.

2. Ben Franklin's friendship with le Chevalier d'Éon, a French genderqueer diplomat.

3. Gouverneur Morris, a figure I'd never even heard of. Included in the book because he wrote some very intimate personal memoirs. Also married late in life and presented a complicated image of virility given two different physical disfigurements.