Eleanor Roosevelt had good taste

From Rush & Malloy (NY Daily News), who took a time out from covering the Paris Hiltons of the world to bring us this gossipy tidbit …

Did First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt have the hots for aviatrix Amelia Earhart?
Biographers have long speculated about Roosevelt's close friendship with reporter Lorena Hickock. Now comes author Gore Vidal to assert that FDR's wife lusted after Earhart.
"Eleanor did like my father [Gene Vidal] because he was close to Amelia Earhart, for whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found disconcerting," Vidal writes in his second memoir, "Point to Point Navigation."
"Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights together all around the country, just the two of them, communing with the wind and the stars."
When Earhart's plane disappeared, Vidal quotes Roosevelt saying, "I made my own small investigation. ... I harassed everyone connected with the flight and the search." He says she concluded that, contrary to rumor, Earhart hadn't been spying but "simply lost her way."


A slightly less dismissive view of Amelia's potential interest in flying on "both sides of the Atlantic" ….
http://www.amazingdreamspublishing.com/patricianellwarren/lesbiansports1-2005.html

An Interesting RelationshipMuch has been speculated about their relationship. It may have one of those marriages of convenience that stud the history of American celebrities. Gay historians point out that prominent closeted lesbians and bisexual women have often covered their tracks this way. In Hollywood, Dietrich, Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, Tullulah Bankhead and Agnes Moorhead (to name a few) made such marriages. Even non-gay authors ponder the question. Donald Goldstein, co-author of "Amelia: The Centennial Biography of an Aviation Pioneer," said: "I think she and George truly liked and respected each other .... I don't think they had sex, for what that's worth. She may have been gay, and if she wasn't, she was [sexually] neutral. But I think their marriage worked. Amelia was a feminist without being a man-hater." Significantly, the couple had no children.