Was Wilbur and Orville Wrights Sister Gay?

The sex lives of the Wrights are all mixed up. They all lived at home. They all had an overbearing father who proclaimed the world evil.  Orville had a secret girlfriend and Wilbur professed not to ever have time for any kind of relationship. Then there is Katherine Wright, the enigma wrapped up in a riddle. You don't start out researching with an agenda. You come to it like an explorer looking for gold. The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright in the Library of Congress were my gold mine. They are bound in two volumes that are probably five inches across each. About 2500 pages in all. And buried in those 2500 pages of letters, diaries, official documents, drawings, are the letters of one Katherine Wright who dutifully cared for Wilbur and Orville and her father most of her life. The brothers never left home and neither did Katherine until much later.

Pictures of Katherine Wright are not kind. She is a plain almost boyish woman with wire rimmed glasses who stares directly at the camera in many of her photos. Her father Bishop Wright demanded from his daughter she keep the home after his wife died. Add to that her two brothers who also needed looking after as they scurried off to Kitty Hawk. So where is all this going. Katherine's primary relationships from high school through college and into adulthood were with woman and one in particular. Her letters to Margaret are that of two people in a relationship. Margaret was her best friend and they spent lots of time together, going to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on an extended trip when Margarets husband was away.

As you read the correspondence a glimmer of suspicion begins. We live in an age  when being gay has not a sixteenth of the connotation it did at the turn of the century. Katherine's letters gush about Margaret as they pursued their friendship and the pictures are one after another of the two women enjoying each others company. There is no smoking gun here but it would make sense. Katherine was a tough no nonsense woman who enjoyed putting bad boys in their place in her classroom. Katherine would marry at 55  a widower after a long correspondence. Orville would never speak to her again for leaving the family home. This of course is all conjecture, but the question is there along with all the other questions regarding the secretive Wright family....was Katherine Wright gay?

Wright Brothers Wrong Story

Orville Wright's Girlfriend

We have been told the Wright Brothers are stick men. They had no carnal knowledge and didn't want any. They come through history as these sawdust figures without urges, needs, bodily fluids. They are men in derbies and high collars hurrying to the next meeting on how to make a better airplane. Historians marvel that these men were so singularly focused on cracking the code of flight that they did not need women or anything else that mere mortals required. But...like most myths, it is simply not true.

Her name was Mabel Beck. She was Orville's secretary, protector, keeper of all things, and his girlfriend. This would not be revealed until the 1990's and then ignored by historians and all people writing on the Wright Brothers. But it was true. Many suspected it for years. After Wilbur had died Mabel moved onto the second brother. She had been Wilbur's secretary for years and then became Orville's. But Wilbur died in 1912 and that left Orville and Mabel 36 years to get to know each other before he succumbed to a heart attack in 1948.

In those years a secret relationship between the world famous inventor and the Dayton local girl developed. The smoking gun in all of this would happen during the Great Depression when a young boy pulled himself up to Orville Wrights laboratory window. He had been shining Orville's shoes and was curious to see the inventor at work. What he saw was Mabel Beck on Orville's lap and making out with the brother of Wilbur.

This clandestine relationship would go on to the end of his life. It fit perfectly really. Wilbur could still come across as the asexual man while having the very woman who acted as bulwark against the world be his sexual partner. It is almost blasphemous to assert that either Wright Brother had an interest outside of flying into the wide blue sky. But at least in Orville's case, he didn't mind being grounded every now and then for some maintenance.

Wright Brothers Wrong Story

Wright Brothers Wrong Story

When I was a kid living in Virginia my parents go to vacation was Kitty Hawk North Carolina. It provided for my parents that sense of getting away from it all in a rustic cottage along the eastern seaboard. For me it was hell. Isolation. Sand dunes. I spent many days mooning about the beach wondering when I could return to my all important life in Richmond and then Baltimore. But one of the offshoots or rituals of our trip was a sojourn to see the Wright Brother Memorial in Kill Devil Hills.

We would drive up the hill and look at the monolith that is the Wright Memorial and then at the manikins they had in some sheds and then a replica of the 1903 Flyer and then we would trek down to the all important track marked where each of the three flights occurred that day Dec 17 1903. I would like to say I was lit on fire with what had occurred on those cold December days but it was another trip to another hot place that I had to endure. Still, there was a glimmer of curiosity. Something about those markers under the hot Carolina sun...the absolute isolation...who would come here to fly? And really, who were these two guys in ties and vests from Dayton Ohio.

Many years later I returned to research my book Wright Brothers Wrong Story with the same question. Who were the two high school drops outs who ran a bike shop and had cracked the rubicon of flight. I had read McCullough's book and it left me flat. I still didn't know who they were. They were still historical stick figures leaking sawdust from every pore. Who were they as human beings...that started me on the road that led me back to Kitty Hawk NC and it was here I realized the wrong story had been told ever since 1903.

I would attempt to tell the Wright Story.

Wright Brothers Wrong Story