1857 – James Buchanan inaugurated the 15th president of the United States. A bachelor from Pennsylvania, Buchanan was in a long-term live-in relationship with William Rufus King, a U.S. Senator from Alabama and later briefly served as Vice President of the U.S. under President Franklin Pierce until his death. Evidence is limited (letters between them were said to be destroyed by their families) but at least some historians feel enough to be convinced that Buchanan and King were in a gay relationship.

1860 – Walt Whitman, considered by many academics to be either gay or bisexual, publishes a cluster of homoerotic poems under the title Calamus