Ah ha! The secret of your 30-second recitation is that you only say their surnames, whereas I recite their names entire, and no doubt would take, even under the best of circumstances, more than twice as long.
It turns out my antecedents were not properly lined up at the tail end of my sentence about our gay executives. President Franklin Pierce (to whom George W. is related) and Vice President William King indeed lent their names to Washington State counties, but there's never been any rumors about them being lovers -- Pierce was almost certainly straight. It was James Buchanan, Pierce's successor, who was almost certainly gay, and it appears very likely that Buchanan and King were long-time lovers, though that relationship had likely ended by the time Buchanan became president. A 20+ year correspondence survives between the two, upon which the supposition is largely based.
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Date: 2007-10-09 04:53 pm (UTC)It turns out my antecedents were not properly lined up at the tail end of my sentence about our gay executives. President Franklin Pierce (to whom George W. is related) and Vice President William King indeed lent their names to Washington State counties, but there's never been any rumors about them being lovers -- Pierce was almost certainly straight. It was James Buchanan, Pierce's successor, who was almost certainly gay, and it appears very likely that Buchanan and King were long-time lovers, though that relationship had likely ended by the time Buchanan became president. A 20+ year correspondence survives between the two, upon which the supposition is largely based.