Thanks to an old government rule, Rose Cleveland became the first LGBTQ first lady when her unmarried brother was president

• Before he was married, President Grover Cleveland's sister Rose served as first lady for 15 months.
• Rose had a romantic relationship with Evangeline Marrs Whipple, a widow and philanthropist.

President Grover Cleveland became the first and only president to marry in the White House when he wed Frances Folsom in 1886. But for the first 15 months of his presidency, he was a bachelor.

White House protocol dictated that a female relative should serve as first lady for an unmarried or widowed president so, when Cleveland took office in 1885, his younger sister, 38-year-old Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, filled the role.

She went on to sustain a decades-long romantic relationship with Evangeline Marrs Whipple, a widow and philanthropist, making her the first LGBTQ first lady in US history.

Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Marrs Whipple met in 1889 and began exchanging love letters in 1890

Three years after she left the White House and her role of hostess, Rose Cleveland met Evangeline Marrs Whipple, a wealthy 32-year-old widow, while vacationing in Florida, and they began exchanging love letters in April 1890, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

Rose's letters were donated to the Minnesota Historical Society in 1969 by a relative of Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, Evangeline's second husband. They were published for the first time in 2019 in a collection entitled, "Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890-1918" edited by Lizzie Ehrenhalt and Tilly Laskey. None of Evangeline's letters to Rose remain, though Rose occasionally quotes them in her own.

"You are mine, and I am yours, and we are one, and our lives are one henceforth, please God, who can alone separate us," Rose wrote in one letter. "I am bold to say this, to pray & to live to it. Am I too bold, Eve — tell me? ... I shall go to bed, Eve — with your letters under my pillow."

Another letter acknowledges their sexual relationship, describing "long rapturous embraces" that "carry us both in one to the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love!"

Rose was heartbroken when Evangeline married a preacher in 1896

After six years, during which they took vacations overseas and bought property in Florida together, Evangeline announced her engagement to Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, an Episcopal preacher. The news came as a surprise, not least because her husband was 34 years older than her. Rose was devastated, and begged Evangeline to "try once more to be satisfied with me."

"Could you not take six months for that experiment?" she wrote. "We would go away from everyone."

Rose eventually resigned herself to her lover's decision, wishing the couple well in a letter written on White House stationery, according to the National First Ladies' Library.

After Evangeline's husband died in 1901, the love letters began once again

Rose's letters from this period of their relationship detail their extended visits to each other's estates, and her desire to shorten the distance between them.

"I need you and life is not long enough to always wait," she wrote.

In 1910, they traveled to Italy to care for Evangeline's dying brother. After his death, they continued living together until Rose died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Evangeline eventually moved to London and died there in 1930.

They are buried next to each other in the English Cemetery in Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

Rose's letters remain an important artifact in LGBTQ history

"It's hard to overstate the emotional impact of first-person narratives — the immediacy of opening up a letter or diary and seeing your own experience reflected back at you," Ehrenhalt writes in the preface of "Precious and Adored." "For queer readers, especially young ones who feel alone in their otherness, that moment can be lifesaving. It disproves the idea that queer people have no history, no network of predecessors that stretches back before the invention of sexual orientation."