Lindsey Graham may have lived deep in the closet. He made others suffer for it

Lindsey Graham’s body is still warm, and already the salacious stories are starting.

That was never going to surprise anyone who has followed the rumors about his sexuality over the past two decades, through gossip sites, daytime talk shows, cable news, late-night jokes, and gay bars in D.C.

I've experienced the latter, and I've heard some wild tales that, to be honest, I find hard to believe.

Related: Lonely Lindsey Graham died tethered to the man who humiliated him

There have always been those knowing looks whenever he was asked, again and again, why he'd never married. "To the extent that it matters, I'm not gay," Graham once answered.

What's different now is that the man himself can no longer deny it, deflect it, sue over it, or surprise us by confirming it. Death has a way of loosening tongues that fear kept quiet while someone was alive. It also has a way, more deceptively, of bringing people forward because they want their 15 minutes of fame.

So let's talk about what's actually happening and what we, as a community, owe to the truth in the middle of it.

In the days since Graham's death, at least a couple of claims have already surfaced and resurfaced and been picked up by outlets covering the story, including an account from a trans woman alleging a paid, off-the-record relationship with the senator, and an older claim in 2020, from porn performer Sean Harding describing Graham as a known quantity within D.C.'s male escort circuit.

Neither has been independently verified. Neither may ever be. And if history is any guide, they won't be the last. We may see an avalanche of stories, but only those with receipts, both literally and figuratively, should get a second look.

This is the part where I have to be careful, because I want to be honest about something: many of us want this to be true.

Graham spent a career voting against our marriages, our healthcare, and our right to exist while cultivating relationships with men that reporters and colleagues gossiped about for years without ever nailing down.

There's a version of justice that feels satisfying in the idea that he was one of us all along, and that his cruelty was born of self-hatred, self-loathing, and believing there was something inherently wrong with being gay and true to who he was.

Plus, how many of us want to say to those who doubted it all along a self-satisfying "I told you so?”

But wanting a story to be true is exactly the condition under which we should be most careful about believing it. Rumor doesn’t become fact because we've convinced ourselves it’s true, and it doesn't become fact because the person it's about can no longer answer for himself.

If anything, that's when it deserves more scrutiny, not less. Now there's no rebuttal possible, no lawyer, no "To the extent that it matters..." on the record.

To put it bluntly, a dead man is the easiest person in the world to accuse.

Related: Anti-LGBTQ+ Lindsey Graham Reelected to Senate

I got to thinking about Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy. They remain, even today, the textbook case. There are decades of documentaries, books, and knowing winks about an affair that neither of them lived long enough to confirm or deny, built almost entirely on secondhand accounts and convenient timelines.

I also thought about longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Those of us of a certain age know the rumors about his cross-dressing, which have been repeated as fact in pop culture for the last 50 years.

That rumor originates from a single, widely discredited 1993 biography and remains completely unsubstantiated by mainstream historians.

Related: FBI Tells DiCaprio, Eastwood There's No Evidence Hoover Was Gay

More recently, there was conservative megachurch pastor Eddie Long. When he died in 2017, the internet was instantly flooded with a revival of settled, legally unproven allegations — he settled with the alleged victims out of court — that he had coerced young male congregants into sexual relationships, transforming internet gossip into definitive public consensus to highlight the hypocrisy of his anti-LGBTQ platform.

Yes, the rumors swirl while people are alive and proliferate after they die. True or false? Well, that's up for grabs.

That's the trap in front of us now. There will likely be more claims about Graham in the weeks ahead, maybe a handful, maybe a flood.

And if these stories proliferate and take hold in the mainstream media, at some point somebody is going to put a microphone in Donald Trump's face and ask him, point-blank, whether he knew the truth about his friend Lindsey.

It will be a fascinating moment if it happens, because Trump's instincts cut two ways. He hates the idea that anyone knows something he doesn't, which means he may not be able to resist implying he had some private insight into Graham's life.

Or he may go the other direction entirely and claim total ignorance, which will be a hard sell given how close the two men were: golf partners, frequent phone calls, and a friendship close enough that Trump considered him family.

Graham was reportedly Trump's source of Capitol Hill gossip. Do you think, for a minute, Trump didn't gossip about Lindsey behind his back?

If people who genuinely knew Graham, not anonymous sources, not opportunists, but people with real relationships to him, come forward and are willing to put their names on the record, then that's a different conversation, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But let's get to the bottom line of this whole discussion. Does it really matter if Graham was gay or not?

For so many of us, our sexuality is a badge of honor. We fought through decades of living in the closet, through the AIDS crisis, through being denied the right to marry, serve in the military, being forced to live in the closet, and, in many cases, the right to exist.

Being gay, and coming to terms with it, can require real courage. Standing up for our rights, protesting, and pushing for change requires empathy and guts.

By those measures, Lindsey Graham doesn't deserve to be called gay, even if he was.

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