In 1932, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott in an apartment in Los Angeles. Both were aspiring actors looking to save on rent. They found a house in Beverly Hills, and then, eventually, a beachside bungalow in Santa Monica.
The two men had a tender relationship: together, they cooked meals like crab meat chow mein. One famous photo shows Scott gently touching Grant’s shoulders while both sit on the edge of a diving board. As the years passed, and as each man’s fame ballooned, rumors abounded about the exact nature of their relationship.
Decades later, even historians have been split on exactly how romantic the pair were. So you can only imagine what a challenge it must have been for the enumerator who showed up at their doorstep in 1940 to distill that relationship for the US Census. Ultimately, the Census enumerator decided to go with a descriptor that accounted for a variety of possibilities.
That year’s Census listed Scott as the head of household and Grant as his “partner.” Over the centuries, enumerators for the US Census have captured all kinds of unofficial relationships between members of a household, as Dan Bouk outlined in his book . You can find of people classified as “concubine/mistress and children,” for example.
But “partners” became a popular way for bureaucrats to describe people who shared a household but who existed outside of the heterosexual nuclear family unit. Bouk identified over 200,000 examples of “partners” in Census ledgers. Were �.