Elizabeth Custer Documentary

Libbie Custer is the only still-beautiful thing to come out of the crushing, vile, necessary military defeat of her husband, General George Armstrong Custer, in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Though gay, I admire her warm, sexual relationship with the mentally ridiculous but physically gorgeous man that was General Custer ("When I hear the clink of your saber on the stairs, etc."). I would put the happy couple they made, up there with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, and, of course, Victoria and Albert--as proof of the axiom that, heterosexuality (sex and marriage), when it works, makes you better.

Et bien, when love and marriage doesn't work, you get: Marcus Aurelius and Faustina,  Nicholas and Alexandra, the Lincolns, Suleiman the Great and Roxelana--wherewith everything, or some part of everything, goes to shit: (in the aforementioned cases) Commodus, the Russian Revolution, our Civil War, peaceful political change of power in the Ottoman Empire.  Some spousal couples are poison, though they love one another to bits.