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Author Larry Kramer claims Alexander Hamilton was gay.

(John Trumbull/New York Historical Society)

George Washington, the leader of the Continental Army and the first U.S. president, was a "big queen."

So says Larry Kramer, author of the new book "The American People: Volume 1," which posits that a surprising number of our Founding Fathers were gay.

"He decorated everything," the 79-year-old gay-rights activist and award-winning playwright said in a SiriusXM interview with Michelangelo Signorile. "He designed all the uniforms, the buttons."

The publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux is labeling Kramer's 800-page book a novel, but Kramer says he's dealing in facts and has done a lot of historical research.

"It's called a novel, but that's just to keep the lawyers away from me," Kramer told CBS News. "I believe everything in the book is true. Everything in there happened."

Kramer insists that Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, also was gay and lusted after Washington.

"There's no question ... Alex was very much in love with him," Kramer said in the SiriusXM interview. "It was a mutual attraction."

And not just Washington and Hamilton were gay.

Kramer says Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson (our seventh president) and Franklin Pierce (our 14th president) had sexual liaisons with men.

What proof does Kramer have, besides Washington's army uniform buttons? Personal letters, for the most part.

Which is why this sexual historical revisionism -- which first gained traction a few years ago with some compelling claims that Abraham Lincoln might have been gay -- is suspect.

The language was flowery back then. This was before Gary Cooper popularized the strong, silent type, which has become synonymous with American masculinity. Men in the Revolutionary War era and well into the 19th century commonly expressed their friendship and admiration for other men in words and phrases that sound erotic to the modern ear. No doubt, some of it was surely meant to sound erotic -- homosexuality, of course, existed then as now. The difficulty is in successfully identifying it.

Here's Hamilton writing to fellow patriot John Laurens in 1779:

"Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that 'til you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you."

That could be a love letter. Or it could be a commonplace missive to a close friend from a man who really likes the sound of his own voice (and the sound of his quill pen scratching across paper). Who knows?

Kramer, however, believes he can tell the difference. "It may look like fiction, but to me, it's not," Kramer said in a New York Times interview. "Most histories have been written by straight people. There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning. It's ridiculous to think we haven't been here forever."

That would indeed be ridiculous, but Kramer undercuts his argument through the sheer breadth of his claims. A 2014 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that about 2 percent of men self-identify as gay or bisexual. The Washington Post noted this was "far below the long-debunked 10 percent estimate." (Other studies have suggested that up to 5 percent of men are gay.)

We can assume the percentage of gay men was similar some 200 years ago, even if they were much less willing to self-identify as such. So what are the chances that so many of our Founding Fathers were homosexual? And not just the Founding Fathers: Moving beyond both the Revolutionary War era and the early years of the republic, Kramer believes not just Lincoln but actor John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's killer, was gay. Same with legendary author Mark Twain and scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon, among many other notable figures. He says any gay man looking at photographs of these men can tell their sexual orientation.

"We call it gaydar," Kramer says. "The thing straight historians don't have."