Americans love Eleanor Roosevelt. One of the most widely respected American public figures of the twentieth century, she maintains to this day an influential place in the public imagination. In August 2015, The New York Times reported that she was the top choice for the new face of the $10 bill (Rogers). In February 2014, she was yet again voted the most respected First Lady in US history by a poll taken of American historians (Kopan). In September 2014, she, along with her famous male relatives (Theodore and Franklin), was the subject of a widely seen and critically praised fourteen-hour Ken Burns/PBS miniseries, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. In her lifetime she was both deeply admired and highly controversial. Since her death her heroic status has been solidified: she is less controversial and continues to be held up as a model of extraordinary citizenship.The Many Loves of Eleanor RooseveltIt is now well-accepted, although not universally celebrated, that Roosevelt was queer. Blanche Wiesen Cook was the first of her many biographers to document her long-term love affair with Lorena Hickok and to put it into a meaningful context; however, that is certainly not the only thing that makes her queer. Cook describes, along with the relationship with Hick (as Hickok was called), the very intense and romantic relationship between Roosevelt and her bodyguard Earl Miller, as well as the unorthodox and close relationships with lesbian and heterosexual friends throughout her adult life.At the end of her life, beginning shortly after FDR died in 1945, Roosevelt began an intense companionship with her doctor, David Gurewitsch, who was eighteen years younger than her. In the 2014 Ken Bums documentary, Gurewitsch's widow, Edna Gurewitsch, tells the story of the trio they created together. By the time David was engaged to Edna he was Roosevelt's constant companion and confidante, and that was not going to change. The documentary quotes a letter Roosevelt wrote to Dr. Gurewitsch that said, ?T love you as I love and have never loved anyone else. Mrs. Gurewitsch explains that she knew that she had to make room for Roosevelt as an intimate in their lives and did so, seemingly with great love. The three of them bought a house together in New York, and Roosevelt spent her final years with them. Dr. Gurewitsch is the person who accompanied Roosevelt's casket to Hyde Park after she died.The point is this: Roosevelt created unconventional intimacies throughout her adult life, while she lived out the public persona of FDR's wife, First Lady, mother of five. All of these identities were true as well. They just were not the whole truth of her life, and heteronormative ideology would suggest that they were. One of the primary ways that heteronormativity secures its dominance is by insisting that it is the only legitimate set of relationships that structure our lives. It erases other truths happening parallel to it, underneath it, outside of it. It is an enveloping force that shapes the story of a people in a predictable narrative. But, Queer?As Leila Rupp agues in her book Sapphistries, the story told of history is always imagined, always a creation made through interpretation. She writes that she is inspired by Monique Wittig, who wrote in Les Guerilleres, 'Make an effort to remember. Or failing that, invent'(5). If one takes the intimacies of Roosevelt's's life as seriously as the public persona, one gets a different picture seen through a different prism. What does it mean to read Roosevelt's biography queerly? How can readers make the connections between her queer affections and her incredible impact on the national and international scene of her time? And further, how might this reading be related to the enduring respect she continues to command ?As the first historian to make the public claim that Roosevelt had a love affair with Lorena Hickok, Blanche Wiesen Cook laid the ground for the next iteration of meaning we can make with that information. …