 Benjamin 's troubled married life has led to speculation that he was gay . Daniel Brook , in a 2012 article about Benjamin , suggests that early biographies read as though " historians are presenting him as an almost <unk> stereotypical gay man and yet wear such impervious heteronormative blinders that they themselves know not what they write " . These conjectures were not given scholarly weight until 2001 , when in an introduction to a reprinting of Meade 's biography of Benjamin , Civil War historian William C. Davis acknowledged " cloaked suggestions that he [ Benjamin ] was a homosexual " . 
