“It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,” Kramer told the New York Times last week.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27681883)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27681886)

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From here on out, like a Sabbath elevator, Mr. Kramer’s book stops at every floor. American Indians bring “anal intercourse into general use in this country.” The mostly male settlers at Jamestown take a great deal of comfort in brotherly love. In this telling, George Washington, who disappears into the woods with “cute young Indian fellows,” is gay, as are Hamilton, Franklin, Lincoln, Jackson, Pierce and Buchanan. Minutemen jokes? Check.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27684263)

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“You only have to look at photographs of Wilkes and [co-conspirator] Lewis Powell to see that they’re full of their own beauty. We call it gaydar – the thing straight historians don’t have. Or take Mark Twain. He had a huge gay life.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27681892)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41iypN-UZCL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27683255)

So far we’ve got George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron von Steuben, Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson — which really surprised me — Hawthorne, Melville, John Wilkes Booth, Mark Twain, Eleanor Roosevelt, of course, James Forrestal, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover. You’re writing three kinds of history in this book. There were times when you would quote from a book you had read, and you would acknowledge the author and the source. To me, that’s just history. Then there were times when I was in a kind of phantasmagoria nightmare scene, and I thought, This is not history anymore; we’re now in Larry’s imagination. And there’s the most deceptive category, the middle, in which it seems to me that you were mixing real source material with imagination. You didn’t want to write a history in which you simply extracted little-known facts about gay people in history and put it together as straight history?

[Kramer]No, originally I didn’t want to call it a novel, I just wanted to call it The American People and let people figure out what it was. There isn’t anything in the book that I don’t agree with, or have some belief in, and if I couldn’t find some source that would give me the right to say it, I said my version of it, as with John Wilkes Booth. Did you ever look at the pictures of all the guys who were charged with murdering Lincoln?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2854292&forum_id=2)#27684247)