At age 29, New Yorkers elected her to be the youngest member of Congress in 2018. Now, as she ramps up her reelection campaign at the wise old age of 36, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t shying away from controversial, “gotcha” questions from the likes of TMZ.
Such as, “If you could click your fingers, and Tucker Carlson is president, instead of Donald Trump, would you do it?" And: “What do you think we’re going to have first: Are we going to have a female president first, or a gay president?"
On Wednesday, the outlet's Charlie Cotton posed those questions to AOC on Capitol Hill, and after calling the first hypothetical “a tossup,” she was quick to respond to the second. "Well, we don’t know if we’ve already had a gay president, to be honest with you,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think there are chances that maybe we have, I dunno.”
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t alone in that supposition.
Over the years, many a writer at The Advocate has tackled this topic, and one out gay man certainly came close to being the first hailed as the chief. That is, until March 2020, when the out gay former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, ended his campaign to run for the White House. Pete Buttigieg would go on to serve as President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, and Vice President Kamala Harris said he was her first choice to be her running mate in 2024.
However, according to a report in The Atlantic, citing her 2025 book 107 Days, Harris decided against choosing Buttigieg for vice president, calling the political risk of a Black woman and a gay man on the same ticket “too big of a risk."
So, what about AOC’s claim that the White House may already have had a gay man as commander in chief? As TMZ put it, "someone needs to check the White House closets!"
Let’s circle back one more time to Buttigieg, who said in a 2019 interview, "statistically it's almost certain" that America has had gay presidents, as The Advocate reported. However, when pressed by reporters for names, he demurred, claiming, "My gaydar doesn’t even work that well in the present, let alone retroactively."
Barack Obama
Related: Was James Buchanan the First Gay President?
Related: How Gay Were America's Presidents? A Ranking
In 2012, Newsweek called Barack Obama "the first gay president" in 2013, in a cover story for an Andrew Sullivan essay that doesn’t actually call the 44th president that. There was also a report a decade later claiming that Obama fantasized about hooking up with men, something the New York Post revealed Obama wrote as a Columbia University student in a 1982 letter to an ex-girlfriend.
"In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,” the then-21-year-old reportedly wrote. “My mind is androgynous to a great extent, and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men. But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency,” he long-windedly added.
At last check, Obama, 64, is still straight and married to Michelle Obama, and neither has ever addressed that report in the Post.
James Buchanan
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As The Advocate reported in 2019, there has also been much speculation about the sexuality of our 15th president, mainly because of his lifelong bachelorhood. But there was also his intimate friendship with fellow politician, senator, and diplomat William Rufus King of Alabama.
In a ranking of 14 potentially gay presidents by The Advocate in 2019, Buchanan scored a 100. It was noted that he and King were seen together so often around Washington that they were called the “Siamese twins.” While King was away, Buchanan wrote, “I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them." Both men had their papers burned after death.
Louis Bayard and Danny Salles concluded, "Oh, come on, he’s gay."
Related: Why it's time for a vice president who happens to be gay (and maybe because of it)
Abraham Lincoln
That same article ranked Honest Abe 82 percent secretly gay. The authors noted Lincoln shared a bed with his friend Joshua Speed for three and a half years, wrestled nearly 300 times, with only one defeat, and once addressed a wrestling crowd by crowing, "I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns."
Related: Obama Our First Gay President
Chester Arthur
If Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet is to be believed, "the apparel oft proclaims the man," then the 21st president was at least 70 percent gay, according to Bayard and Salles. He was widely known as "Elegant Arthur" and owned 80 pairs of pants, held rummage sales in the White House, took frequent fishing trips with his buddy Sen. Roscoe Conkling, and on his last day in office, four women offered to marry him. He said no to all.
The best evidence that Arthur was not secretly gay, they wrote: "He checked the women out before turning them down."
Read about other non-gay presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, Warren Harding, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, by clicking here.
AOC on women candidates
By the way, Ocasio-Cortez was also asked by TMZ if she thinks Democrats will hesitate to nominate another woman after two big losses — Harris and Hillary Clinton.
"Honestly, I think anything can happen. I don’t really buy into the skepticism," said AOC. "A man has lost almost every presidential election."
