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 farcically 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 was a homosexual".