SELMA, Ala. (AP) – As a U.S. vice president, William Rufus De Vane King was a “Jeopardy!” question waiting to happen.

Entombed under a huge oak tree in Selma, the city he helped found, the obscure King is best known as the only member of the executive branch sworn in outside the United States. He was inaugurated in Cuba in 1853 and died weeks later.

But with the nation debating same-sex marriage and civil rights for gays and lesbians, King is gaining new attention for another part of his life that local admirers would rather not discuss. According to some historians, rumors that circulated 150 years ago were accurate: King and James Buchanan, who years later would become the nation’s 15th president, were a devoted gay couple.

Neither man ever married, yet they lived together for years in an arrangement that was fodder for critics and political opponents of the time, including Andrew Jackson, the seventh president.

“Buchanan and King were lovers,” said author James W. Loewen, whose 1999 book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong helped add fuel to current speculation about the men.

The claim – repeated in numerous printed articles in recent years and dozens of gay-oriented websites – is disputed by some historians. It angers members of the Selma chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which is named for King.

“It’s certainly nothing people in Selma talk about,” said chapter regent Edna Ledyard. “It’s a myth. Nobody has any way to prove it or disprove it.”

But a gay historian defended the review of historical figures like King who may have been involved in same-sex relationships.

“It’s doubtless that the recovery of what today we would call a gay identity in a celebrated historical figure is certainly important,” said Jonathan D. Katz, director of gay and lesbian studies at Yale University.

With gay rights a hot topic nationally, a leading authority on King said he is often asked the question, “Was he or wasn’t he?”

“Hardly a month goes by that someone doesn’t call,” said Daniel Fate Brooks of Birmingham. “There’s a lot of scholarship now going into Buchanan and King.”

Brooks believes King was gay, based on letters and documents of the time. But he is bitterly opposed to focusing solely on King’s sexuality instead of his broader work as a moderate who hoped to preserve the Union as the Civil War loomed.

“[Homosexuality] is not what his life was all about,” said Brooks, who is completing a biography of King based on 25 years of research. “He made some major contributions.”

A native of North Carolina, King was born in 1786 to a slave-owning family. He was elected to Congress three times in his home state before joining the fledgling U.S. diplomatic corps and moving abroad.

King returned stateside and settled in Alabama, where he built a huge plantation near the current site of Selma and became a major slave owner. In 1819, he was elected as one of Alabama’s first two U.S. senators.

King and Buchanan met around 1834 and were sharing a residence within two years – not an uncommon practice for the time. Critics soon referred to King as “Buchanan’s wife,” and Jackson called King “Miss Nancy,” a slang term for effeminate men.

After being appointed as minister to France, King wrote to Buchanan expressing his reluctance to leave:

“I am selfish enough to hope you will not be able to procure an associate who will cause you to feel no regret at our separation. For myself, I shall feel lonely in the midst of Paris, for there I shall have no friend with whom I can commune as with my own thoughts.”

Brooks said correspondence between the two shows they had “a very intimate relationship,” but he is less certain of Buchanan’s sexual orientation than King’s.

Despite failing health, King agreed to be nominated as Franklin Pierce’s vice president and was elected in 1852. He was inaugurated on March 24, 1853, in Cuba, where he had gone on the advice of a physician for relief of respiratory problems.

King died of tuberculosis less than a month later in Alabama, having never formally served as vice president.

For Selma historian Alston Fitts, claims that King was gay are secondary to his role in Congress and in founding a city that in the 1960s became known for civil rights confrontations.

“The fact that he had refined tastes and never married aren’t really proof,” said Fitts. “Part of it is that the gay pride people have picked up on him. They are looking for role models and heroes.”

In Seattle, Wash., gay activists have complained on and off ever since officials renamed King County for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1986. The county had been named for Vice President King, whose brief time in office came around the time Washington was settled, but the designation was changed because King owned slaves.

The Daughters of the American Revolution leader said discussions of King’s personal life are inappropriate so long after his death.

“Me feelings are, ‘Leave it alone.’ I can’t see that it would serve anyone any good to bring it up,” Ledyard said.

But Loewen said the relationship between King and Buchanan matters because it adds context to a key part of Buchanan’s presidency: His refusal to confront slavery – which King supported – despite being from a part of Pennsylvania that vehemently opposed the practice.

“You explain it through his relationship with King,” Loewen said.

Katz, the Yale expert, said it’s unlikely King would have thought of himself as what is today called “gay” even if he did have sex with men.

Back then, same-sex acts were almost universally viewed as a sin, similar to adultery, according to Katz. The term “homosexual” wasn’t even coined until the 1890s.

“The idea of straightness would have been as unfamiliar to him as gayness,” Katz said.