The gays are learning all about JFK’s queer past thanks to this tweet

Sometimes, you’ve gotta be a little fruity to pull a bad b*tch, and perhaps no one knew this better than John F. Kennedy, the 35th U.S. President and notorious puller of bad b*tches.

But just how fruity was JFK? Possibly fruitier than we realize, according to some accounts.

When user @PunishedZoe posted an intriguing excerpt some days ago on Twitter next to a quite romantic photo of a young Kennedy with his best friend from prep school, everyone’s gay antennae went up. But just how close was the friendship, and where does this intel come from? Let’s take a look.

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John F Kennedy and his gay “best friend”, Lem Billings
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When Lem Billings and JFK met in 1933, they were both sophomores at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. And while Billings made his feelings for John known (allegedly by writing a love note on a roll of toilet paper,) it’s less clear how JFK felt about his friend. All we know is that the two stayed close until JFK’s untimely end.

We also have a series of extremely romantic photos of the two as young men, and Laurence J. Quirk, author of “The Kennedys in Hollywood,” would later claim that Billings opened up to him about how far his relationship with the future president really went. According to Quirk, the boys’ relations “included oral sex, with John always on the receiving end.”

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Quirk also explained in the book that the relationship between JFK and Billings “enabled Jack to sustain his self-delusion that straight men who received oral sex from other males were really only straights looking for sexual release,” and, “Jack was in love with Lem being in love with him and considered him the ideal follower adorer.”

The two even went on vacation together to Europe in 1937. They exchanged letters throughout their lives, and Lem even acted as wingman for Kennedy when he courted Jackie Bouvier.

Did their relationship ever make Kennedy the subject of speculation while he was in the White House? In a word, yes. “We even know of one instance,” says JFK Library archivist Stacey Chandler, “where the Soviet Union discovered that one of JFK’s associates was gay and tried to blackmail him.“

Chandler went on to say that among Kennedy’s close circle, it “somewhat of an open secret that [Billings] was gay. His family said it wasn’t something that was ever discussed. And as far as I know, Lem didn’t really discuss it either. But it does seem to be something historians are acknowledging more and more, and it being an important part of their relationship in that, it did carry a lot of risk for both of them. But friendship trumps everything.”

It certainly does.

We may never know what precisely went on between these two, but it’s clear that they loved each other, and that love went deep. We’ll leave you with some pics of these two hunks plus a very cute dachshund.

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