Presidents Day: Was Abraham Lincoln Gay or Bi?

Presidents Day: Was Abraham Lincoln Gay or Bi?

Young Joshua Speed Shared his Bed With Young Abe Lincoln for four years. 

" He (Lincoln) would grab me in his long arms and hug and hug " - Joshua Speed letter

Young Abe Lincoln

From John and Jay: 

Was Lincoln Gay?
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
Published: January 9, 2005, Sunday

THE INTIMATE WORLD
OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By C. A. Tripp.
Edited by Lewis Gannett.
343 pp. Free Press. $27.

THIS book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of
Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic
attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth
to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with
women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge)
or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage
to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was
homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua
Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to
Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to
make sense of it.

Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book,
which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both
jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp
alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and
fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once
worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he
has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The
Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay
liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been
gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to
trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have
been overlooked by less fevered minds.

Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and
three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The
discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law
partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that
Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey
concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators
with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of
Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a
source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already
arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can
be sure that like most precocious youngsters he wasin no mood to give
it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is
as credulous as Tripp.

Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people.
In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois
frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in
grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the
other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was
common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories
of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being
could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this
seems rather gushing.

Six years later, Lincoln moved to Springfield, where he met Joshua
Speed, who became a close friend; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two
early biographers, called him ''the only -- as he was certainly the
last -- intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.'' Lincoln and Speed
shared a double bed in Speed's store for four years (for two of those
years, two other young men shared the room, though not the bed). More
important than the sleeping arrangements was the tone of their
friendship. Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's
wedding in 1842 are as fretful as those of a general before a dubious
engagement. Several of them are signed ''Yours forever.''

By contrast, Lincoln's relations with women are either problematic or
distant. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of a New Salem tavernkeeper
with whom Lincoln boarded in 1832. Three years later she died of
malaria and typhoid. Lincoln biographers have been feuding for decades
over whether Lincoln loved her. Tripp, naturally, sides with the
skeptics. He concedes that Lincoln was devastated by her death, but
argues that it was death itself that distressed him.

In 1836 Lincoln courted Mary Owens. Tripp correctly characterizes his
diffident suit as ''reaching forward while sharply leaning back.'' In
1837 Owens broke the relationship off. Lincoln then wrote a jeering
letter to a friend, explaining that he had lost interest because Owens
was so fat. ''I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair
match for Falstaff.'' The nervous hostility of this letter, disguised
as humor, is cringe-making. (Tripp finds it hilarious.)

The longest relationship of Lincoln's life was with his wife, Mary
Todd, whom he married in 1842; they had four children, on whom Lincoln
doted. Mary Lincoln's character is also dark and bloody ground for
biographers. Tripp unhelpfully suggests that she had a psychopathic
personality, like ''various outlaw types, from Hitler down to myriad
petty criminals.'' Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have
been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening -- remote and
unavailable, when he was not physically absent.

Tripp highlights two relations with men from Lincoln's presidency.
Col. Elmer Ellsworth was a flashy young drillmaster, ''the greatest
little man I ever met,'' as Lincoln put it. Lincoln recruited him to
his Springfield lawoffice, made him part of his presidential campaign
and gave him a high military post as war loomed. A few weeks after the
fall of Fort Sumter, Ellsworth was killed hauling a rebel flag down
from a hotel in Alexandria, Va. Lincoln was shattered.

For nearly eight months in 1862-3, Capt. David Derickson led the
brigade that guarded Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home in the District of
Columbia, the Camp David of the day. Derickson, in the words of his
regiment's history, published three decades later, ''advanced so far
in the president's confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's
absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the
same bed with him, and -- it is said -- making use of his Excellency's
night shirt!''

Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so
erratic that the reader is often left on his own. One wonders: What
does it mean to be homosexual? Not all of the men Lincoln admired
were. Ellsworth seems straight as a ruler: he was engaged to a woman
he passionately loved when he died. Even Derickson married twice and
fathered 10 children (one son was serving in his unit while he was
sleeping with Lincoln). Tripp argues that a cultural innocence -- the
word ''homosexual'' had not yet been coined -- allowed acts of
physical closeness between men that had no deeper meaning, as well as
acts that did but could escape scrutiny. We know more than our
ancestors, and our reward is that, in some ways, we may do less. In
any case, on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some
of whom loved him back. Their words tell us more thantheir sleeping
arrangements.

What does Lincoln's erotic life tell us about Lincoln? For a
gregarious, popular man, he had few intimates (Tripp's very title is a
misnomer). Like many secretive types -- Benjamin Franklin comes to
mind -- he kept the world at bay with a screen of banter. Yet behind
the laughs lay an almost bottomless sadness, and sympathy for those he
saw as fellow sufferers. There were many Lincolns: the joker, the pol,
the logician, the skeptical theologian. But the man of sorrows may be
the most important. ''The president has a curious vein of sentiment
running through his thought which is his most valuable mental
attribute,'' as his secretary of state, William Seward, said. Desiring
what he could not consistently have did not make him grieve -- what
Virgil called the tears of things did that -- but it may have deepened
his grief.

Towering above these Lincolns is the man who saw liberty and equality
as facets of the same thing, and who maintained his (he called it his
and the founders') vision in the face of Northern confusion and
Southern fury. This is the Lincoln that matters. The rest is
biography.

Richard Brookhiser is the author of ''Gentleman Revolutionary:
Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution.''



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The article below is from NYTimes.com

Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
December 16, 2004
By DINITIA SMITH
Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American?

The subject of the 16th president's sexuality has been debated among
scholars for years. They cite his troubled marriage to Mary Todd and
his youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four
years. Now, in anew book, C. A. Tripp also asserts that Lincoln had a
homosexual relationship with the captain of his bodyguards, David V.
Derickson, who shared his bed whenever Mary Todd was away.

In "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month
by Free Press, Mr. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and
former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the
issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. The author, who died in
2003, two weeks after finishing the book, subjected almost every word
ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis. His conclusion
is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican
Party, was a gay man.

But his book has not stopped the debate. During the 10 years of his
research, Mr. Tripp shared his findings with other scholars. Many,
including the Harvard professor emeritus David Herbert Donald, who is
considered the definitive biographer of Lincoln, disagreed with him.
Last year, in his book "We Are Lincoln Men," Mr. Donald mentioned Mr.
Tripp's research and disputed his findings.

Mr. Tripp was the author of "The Homosexual Matrix," a 1975 book that
disputed the Freudian notion of homosexuality as a personality
disorder. In this new book, he says that early biographers of Lincoln,
including Carl Sandburg, sensed Lincoln's homosexuality. In the
preface to the original multi-volume edition of his acclaimed 1926
biography, Sandburg wrote: "Month by month in stacks and bundles of
fact and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me.
Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book."

Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of
lavender, spots soft as May violets." Mr. Tripp said that references
to Lincoln's possible homosexuality were cut in the 1954 abridged
version of the biography. Mr. Tripp maintains that other writers,
including Ida Tarbell and Margaret Leech, also found evidence of
Lincoln's homosexuality but shied away from defining it as such or
omitted crucial details.

Mr. Tripp cites Lincoln's extreme privacy and accounts by those who
knew him well. "He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me,"
his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, told Lincoln's law partner William
Herndon. In addition, Lincoln was terrified of marriage to Mary Todd
and once broke off their relationship. They eventually had four
children.

But in "We Are Lincoln Men" Mr. Donald wrote that no one at the time
ever suggested that he and Speed were sexual partners. Herndon, who
sometimes slept in the room with them, never mentioned a sexual
relationship. In frontier times, Mr. Donald wrote, space was tight and
men shared beds. And the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed was
not that of lovers, he maintained. Moreover, Lincoln alluded openly to
their relationship, saying, "I slept with Joshua for four years. " If
they were lovers, Mr.Donald wrote, Lincoln wouldn't have spoken so
freely.

Mr. Tripp charts Lincoln's relationships with other men, including
Billy Greene, with whom Lincoln supposedly shared a bed in New Salem,
Ill. Herndon said Greene told him that Lincoln's thighs "were as
perfect as a human being Could be."

Lincoln's fellow lawyer Henry C. Whitney observed once that Lincoln
"wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity."

Then there is Lincoln's youthful humorous ballad from 1829, "First
Chronicles of Reuben," in which he refers to a man named Biley
marrying another man named Natty: "but biley has married a boy/ the
girles he had tried on every Side/ but none could he get to agree/ all
was in vain he went home again/and sens that he is married to natty."

Mr. Tripp tries to debunk the popular opinion among scholars that
Lincoln's lifelong depressions were caused by the death of his first
love, Ann Rutledge. He writes that at the time she was supposedly
involved with Lincoln, she was engaged to John McNamar and that her
name appears nowhere in Lincoln's letters.

Mr. Donald also takes issue with the conclusion that Lincoln had a
sexual relationship with Derickson, his bodyguard at his presidential
retreat, the Soldiers' Home, outside Washington. Mr. Tripp writes that
their closeness stirred comment in Washington, and cites a diary entry
from Nov. 16, 1862, by Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of Gustavus Fox,
assistant secretary of the Navy. She recounted a friend's report: "
'There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives
with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps withhim.' What stuff!"
But Mr. Donald writes that "What stuff!" meant she was dismissing the
rumor.

Mr. Tripp cites a second description of the relationship in an 1895
history of Derickson's regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, by
Thomas Chamberlain, Derickson's commanding officer: "Captain
Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president's
confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently
spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him and
- it is said - making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!"When
Derickson was to be transferred, Lincoln pulled strings to keep him.
But Mr. Donald wrote that if their relationship was romantic, they
would not have separated so casually when Derickson finally left
Washington in 1863.

Despite Mr. Donald's criticism, Mr. Tripp has won supportfrom other
scholars. Jean H. Baker, a former student of Mr. Donald's and the
author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography" (W. W Norton, 1987), wrote
the introduction to the book. She said that Lincoln's homosexuality
would explain his tempestuous relationship with Mary Todd, and "some
of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship."

"Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached," Ms.
Baker said in a telephone interview. "But I previously thought he was
detached because he was thinking great things about his court cases,
his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation."

"The length of time when these men continued to sleep in the same bed
and didn't have to was sort of an impropriety," Ms. Baker said.

The question of Lincoln's sexuality is complicated by the fact that
the word homosexual did not find its way into print in English until
1892 and that "gayness" is very much a modern concept.

Ms. Baker said the focus of 19th-century moral opprobrium was
masturbation, not homosexuality. "Masturbation was considered more
dangerous," she said. "For homosexuals, there was a cloud over them,
but it seldom rained." People, she noted, "were accustomed to these
friendships between men."

In researching Lincoln, Mr. Tripp created a vast database of
cross-indexed material, now available at the Lincoln Library in
Springfield, Ill. He began the book working with the writer Philip
Nobile, but they fell out. Mr. Nobile has charged that Mr. Tripp
plagiarized material written by him and fabricated evidence of
Lincoln's homosexuality.

"Tripp's book is a fraud," Mr. Nobile said in an interview. He
declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was
writing his own article about it.

After Mr. Nobile made his charges, Free Press delayed publication. "We
made some slight changes," said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for the
publishing house, "and we are satisfied that we are publishing a book
that reflects Mr. Tripp's ideas and is supported by his research and
belief." The manuscript was edited by Mr. Tripp'sfriend Lewis Gannett.

Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book
"will change history."

"It's a revolutionary book because the most important president in the
history of the United States was gay," he said. "Now maybe they'll
leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded."

Michael B. Chesson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at
Boston and another former student of Mr. Donald's, wrote an afterword
to Mr. Tripp's book supporting his thesis. The book is "enormously
important to understanding the whole person," he said in an interview.
He likened the criticism to early objections to Fawn Brodie's 1974
biography of Thomas Jefferson in which she claimed that Jefferson had
children with his slave Sally Hemings; later genetic studies suggested
that they had at least one child together.

Finding the truth is a sacred principal for historians, Mr. Chesson
said, adding, "It's incumbent on us as scholars to present to readers
material if historians have ignored it or swept it under the rug
because they don't agree with it."

Still, if Lincoln was gay, how did it affect his presidency? Ms. Baker
said that his outsider status would explain his independence and his
ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the
Emancipation Proclamation. As a homosexual, she said, "he would be on
the margins of tradition."

"He is willing to be independent, to do what is right," she said. "It
is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Gettysburg Address
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation,
or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are
met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a
portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here
gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate
-- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to
add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here
highly resolve that these dead shallnot have died in vain-- that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.



L.A. WEEKLY NEWS

Was Abe Lincoln Gay?
The blockbuster book that will change America's history
by Doug Ireland

If the loving heart of the Great Emancipator found its natural amorous
passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex, it would
certainly be a stunning rebuke to the Republican Party's scapegoating
of same-sex love for electoral purposes. And a forthcoming book by the
late Dr. C.A. Tripp -- The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be
published in the new year by Free Press -- makes a powerful case that
Lincoln was a lover of men.

Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the
groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist,
university professor and author of the 1975 best-seller The Homosexual
Matrix, which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish
that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and
natural occurrence.

In his book on Lincoln, Tripp draws on his years with Kinsey, who, he
wrote, "confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by
devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual
component in a person's life from none to entirely homosexual. By this
measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 -- predominantly
homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual."

Tripp also found, based on multiple historical accounts, that Lincoln
attained puberty unusually early, by the age of 9 or 10 -- early
sexualization being a prime Kinsey indicator for same-sex
proclivities. Even Lincoln's stepmother admitted in a
post-assassination interview that young Abe "never took much interest
in the girls." And Tripp buttresses his findings that Lincoln was a
same-sex lover with important new historical contributions.

Others, preceding Tripp, have proclaimed in print that Lincoln was
gay. The first, some four decades ago, was the pioneer Los Angeles gay
activist Jim Kepner, editor of ONE, the early gay magazine (the ONE
Institute National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of
Southern California [http://www.oneinstitute.org/] is the largest
collection of gay historical material in the world). Kepnerfocused on
Lincoln's long-acknowledged intimate friendship with Joshua Speed --
with whom Lincoln slept in the same bed for four years when both men
were in their 20s -- as did later writers, like the historian of gay
America Jonathan Ned Katz and University of Massachusetts professor
Charles Shively. Gore Vidal has said in interviews that, in
researching his historical novel on Lincoln, he began to suspect that
the 16th president was a same-sexer. But all this has been little
noticed or circulated outside the gay community.

In 1990, the American Historical Association presented a panel on "Gay
American Presidents? -- Washington, Buchanan, Lincoln, Garfield."
Tripp was in the audience, and was seized with the desire to explore
Lincoln's sexuality and emotional complexity with the same brand of
scrupulous methodology he'd learned from Kinsey. Tripp devotedthe next
decade to this research, and created an electronic databaseand index
cross-referencing for more than 600 books of Lincolnalia, a historical
tool now available at the Lincoln Institute in Springfield, Illinois.

One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe (however obliquely)
the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois
poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In
the tome titled The Prairie Years (1926), Sandburg wrote that both
Lincoln and Speed had "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May
violets." "I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours,"
Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And again, "You know my desire to
befriend you is everlasting." In a detailed retelling of the
Lincoln-Speed love story -- including the "lust at first sight"
encounter between the two youngmen, when Lincoln readily accepted
Speed's eager invitation to share his narrow bed -- Tripp notes that
Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his
letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) "yours forever" -- a
salutation Lincoln never even used to his wife. Speed himself
acknowledged that "No two men were ever so intimate." And Tripp
credibly describes Lincoln's near nervous breakdown following Speed's
decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native
Kentucky.

In the preface to his massive biography, Sandburg wrote that "month by
month in stacks and bundles of facts and legend, I found invisible
companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences
lurk and murmur in this book." Tripp's book is remarkable and
precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names
and faces (more than just Speed's) to a number of those previously
invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the mostvenerated
of America's presidents, among them, Henry C. Whitney; the young Billy
Greene, a Salem contemporary of Lincoln's and another bedmate (who
admired Lincoln's thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis.

One of them was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the
president's junior, captain of Lincoln's bodyguard Company K, the unit
assigned to ensure Lincoln's protection in September 1862. Citing a
variety of sources -- including an autobiographical essay by Captain
(later Major) Dickerson, Lincoln's letters, contemporary diaries and
historical accounts written while many of the witnesses to the
Derickson-Lincoln relationship were still living -- Tripp describes in
great detail how Derickson was the object of "the kinds of gentle and
concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that [Lincoln's law
colleague] Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been onthe
receiving end, well described: '[It was] as if he wooed me to close
intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.'"

Lincoln's seduction of Dickerson was more than successful. Tripp
discovered a forgotten volume of Union Army history, an account of The
Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade, published
in 1895 by Derickson's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas
Chamberlin, who was historian of the Bucktail Survivors Association,
and in which he recounted:

"Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President's
confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence he frequently
spent the night at his cottage [at the summer White House], sleeping
in the same bed with him, and -- it is said -- making use of his
Excellency's night-shirt! Thus began an intimacy that continued
unbroken until the following spring, when Captain Derickson was
appointed provost marshal of the Nineteenth Pennsylvania District,
with headquarters in Meadville."

The Dickerson-Lincoln affair was common gossip in Washington's high
society, as Tripp notes with a citation from the diary of the wife of
Assistant Navy Secretary Gustavus Fox: "Tish says, Oh, there is a
Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and
when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!"

Lincoln was very fond of witty, and quite often ribald, stories, a
great many of them having anal references. When a friend once
suggested that he should collect his stories and publish them in book
form, Lincoln replied that he could not, for "such a book would Stink
like a thousand privies."

Another Tripp rediscovery is a smutty, humorous poem written by
Lincoln when he was a teenager -- in which the future president
describes a marriage between two boys! Here (with some of the spelling
corrected for easier reading) is Lincoln's gay-marriage poem:

I will tell you a Joke about Jewel and Mary
It is neither a Joke nor a Story

For Rubin and Charles has married two girls

But Billy has married a boy

The girlies he had tried on every Side

But none could he get to agree

All was in vain he went home again

And since that is married to Natty

So Billy and Natty agreed very well

And mama's well pleased at the match

The egg it is laid but Natty's afraid

The Shell is So Soft that it never will hatch

But Betsy she said you Cursed bald head

My Suitor you never Can be

Beside your low crotch [slang for big penis] proclaims you a botch

And that never Can serve for me

Tripp notes that the stanza beginning "The egg it is laid" suggests
that "Abe was well aware of the term 'jelly baby.' Originally from
Negro vernacular, the phrase soon came to be used by whites as well:
slang denoting what uneducated folk imagined . . . as a 'pregnancy'
from homosexual intercourse . . . As a poem, Lincoln's rhyme of course
is a mere trifle, except that it is perhaps the most explicit literary
reference to actual homosexual relations in 19th-century America --
more explicit certainly than anything Walt Whitman ever wrote about
the 'Love of comrades.'"

There is a great deal more to this book, which -- as Lincoln scholar
Jean Baker notes in her admiring preface -- "is not a work of sexual
or biological reductionism, but rather a significant effort to
understand a complicated man." Among the many invaluable contributions
is the chapter revealing that Lincoln's supposed tragic "romance" with
Ann Rutledge -- often hyped by Hollywood retelling -- was a myth
invented after Lincoln's death (this chapter is for the most part due
to the research of Tripp's faithful collaborator on the Lincoln
project, the writer Lewis Gannett, who edited the book for
publication). Many of Tripp's findings come from finely argued
circumstantial deductions -- which will no doubt be seized upon by
what Vidal has called the "scholar squirrels" of the considerable
Lincoln industry, who have a lot of skin in the game. But it will take
more than their usual regurgitations of the cliché about the absence
of central heating back in those days to explain Lincoln's consistent,
yearslong choice of male bed partners, a same-sex affinity that he
acted on even as president.

Tripp completed The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln just two weeks
before his own death. It is a tragedy that tawdry squabbles between
the aging and irascible executor of Tripp's estate and his publisher
prevented the book's publication before this year's elections (it is
now due out, after yet another postponement, in March). That is why,
when -- after assiduous and clandestine effort -- we managed to obtain
a copy of the book's uncorrected proofs, we decided to break with
book-chat conventions and, without authorization, make some of Tripp's
findings public here before November 2.

In a year in which those who claim Lincoln as their political
progenitor are trying to introduce a ban on recognition of same-sex
love into the Constitution that Lincoln loved so much and defended so
well (and also into the constitutions of 11 states through
referendums), it seemed to me that the voters had an overriding right
to know how, in doing so, the Republicans and their Christian-right
allies are wounding the martyr-president squarely in his heart of
hearts.

FromSalon Magazine, May 3, 1999

Fax ( 415 ) 882-8731 ( E-Mail: salon@salonmagazine.com )
(www.salon1999.com ) or AOL Keyword: Salon

 Was Lincoln gay?Firebrand Larry Kramer says he has the evidence to
prove it. Lincoln scholars are holding their fire until they see it.
Get ready for the second Civil War.

By Carol Lloyd
The 28-year-old travelerwas tall, with rough hands, a chiseled jaw and
unforgettable, deep-set, melancholy eyes. He arrived in town, his
worldly possessions in two battered suitcases, and inquired at a
general store about buying some bedding. But the price was far beyond
his budget. The strikingly handsome 23-year-old merchant took pity on
the man and invited him into his own bed, free of charge, which
happened to be just upstairs. The traveler inspected the bed and,
looking into the merchant's sparkling blue eyes, agreed on the spot.
For the next four years the two men shared that bed along with their
most private fears and desires.

If this sounds like the opening of a homoerotic dime-store novel whose
subsequent scenes feature fiery loins and ecstatic eruptions, hold
your panting. The year is 1837, the place Springfield, Ill., and the
leading men none other than our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, and
his lifelong friend Joshua Speed.

It is a story that historians have told and retold, puzzled over and
reinterpreted, dismissed and decorated. Some describe Lincoln's
acceptance of Joshua Speed's generous offer as terse and
matter-of-fact; others as beaming and emotional. What none of them
questions is that Lincoln and Speed's years of living together
cemented a friendship unparalleled in its intimacy and tenderness in
Lincoln's life. So far, all major historians have stopped short of
intimating that Lincoln was ever involved in a romantic affair with a
man, in fact, they explicitlydiscourage such interpretations.

But Larry Kramer, the 62-year-old gay rights hell-raiser, Academy
Award-nominated screenwriter ("Women in Love") and Pulitzer-nominated
playwright ("The Normal Heart"), wants to change all that. In
February, at a gay and lesbian conference in Madison, Wis., he read a
portion of his unfinished book, "The American People", which, in the
course of describing the history of gays in early America, avers that
Lincoln and Speed were not merely bedfellows but lovers.

"There's no question in my mind he was a gay man and a totally gay
man," Kramer declares. "It wasn't just a period, but something that
went on his whole life."

Like the rumors that Thomas Jefferson had sired the children of his
young slave Sally Hemings, questions about Speed and Lincoln's
relationship have circulated for years. In "Abraham Lincoln: The
Prairie Years" (1926), Carl Sandberg wrote that their relationship had
"a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets," which some have
taken as a veiled reference to homosexuality. In 1995, just after Bob
Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a
gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the
New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party,
"given that the founder was gay." Novelist Paul Russell, author of
"The Gay 100," a ranking of the world's most important gay figures,
also investigated the rumors but chose not to include Lincoln, feeling
that the case was not strong enough, thoughhe did include questionable
figures like Shakespeare and Madonna. In an interview that will appear
in a forthcoming anthology called "Sexual Writings by Gore Vidal,"
Gore Vidal told Kramer some years ago that during the research for the
historical novel "Lincoln," Vidal too began to suspect that Lincoln
was gay.

Like most of Lincoln's early private life, the story of his friendship
with Speed is a murky one, although not nearly as murky as Lincoln's
early liaisons with women. After four years of living in intimate
quarters, Speed announced plans to sell the store and return to his
home in Kentucky, where his family owned a large plantation. Lincoln,
who was notoriously awkward and shy around women, was at the time
engaged to a vivacious, if temperamental, society girl namedMary Todd,
but as the date of Speed's departure and themarriage approached,
Lincoln cracked. He wanted to break the engagement by letter, but at
Speed's entreaty, he went to Mary Todd and told her face to face he
did not love her. Some argue that Lincoln had fallen in love with
another woman. Soon after, Speed departed, leaving Lincoln mired in
depression and guilt.

Seven months later Lincoln traveled to Speed's home in Kentucky, where
he spent a month being nursed back to health. After that the two men
corresponded affectionately for decades, chronicling their most
personal internal conflicts, including their abject fear of marriage,
which they ominously refer to in their correspondence (always
emphasized) as forebodings.Speed was the first to approach the altar
successfully, an ordeal that Lincoln coached him through with tender
but not altogether convincing letters of encouragement. It seemed that
Speed was on the verge of a premarital meltdown similar to Lincoln's.
"If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient
composure not to excite alarm in anyone present, you are safe, beyond
question" Lincoln wrote just after the date of Speed's betrothal, "and
in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men."
Subsequent clandestine letters inquired whether Speed really was
"happier or, if you think the term preferable, less miserable." Both
men eventually married and had children; they remained close until
they had a falling-out in 1855 over the issue of slavery.

A shared bed, tortured secret letters and a fear of women... what more
proof could scholars want?

Real evidence, they say. First, the shared bed is meaningless, most
argue, since in the 19th century American frontiersmen often slept two
and three to a bed for purely economic reasons. "It was very common
for men to share the same bed in the 1800s, especially in taverns,"
says Gene Griessman, author of "The Words Lincoln Lived By" (Simon &
Schuster, 1997). "We know that Lincoln had a long, affectionate
friendship with Speed. He deeply loved the man, but to go beyond that
fact is to go beyond any evidence I have seen."

"It sounds like this might be a case of taking a 19th century event
and giving it a 20th century context," says Douglas Wilson, author of
"Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln" and co-director
of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox Collegein Galesburg, Ill. Wilson
adds that this trend of seeing the past in terms of the present (what
historians call "presentism") has seen a recent revival, with the
controversy over Jefferson's alleged relationship with Sally Hemings
and the "outing" of Walt Whitman.

Other scholars believe that such cozy sleeping arrangements did
reflect a distinct emotional landscape for men, but didn't necessarily
lead to hot homo lovemaking. "There was a lot of male homoerotic
desire in the middle of the 19th century," says UC-Berkeley political
scientist Michael Rogin. "There may be evidence of male-male desire,
but that's not gay. If 'gay' is going to mean anything it's got to
mean orgasms with other men. There's got to be some sense of
transgression and forbiddenness."

In an era obsessed with the fine points of identity nomenclature,
exactly what constitutes mid-19th-century homosexuality is a sticky
question. Can homosexuality, be it queer, gay or radical fairy butch,
even exist without a name? And can it exist without
self-identification on the part of the lover? Can it exist simply
through desire, or must those desires be consummated?

Kramer has little patience for such theoretical hairsplitting. "I do
not think that people were different starting with the Garden of
Eden," he says. "Why do we imagine that people were these naive
asexual beings before the 20th century? Lincoln had a lot of sex."
Kramer doesn't pretend to be a Lincolnscholar or even an objective
researcher. ("I have read all the biographies, and they are full of
shit," he spits, and derides Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln scholar
David Herbert Donald as "some dried oldheterosexual prune at
Harvard.") He's an unabashed gay rabble-rouser, beating the bushes of
history to find gay heroes. But if he really does have the new primary
sources he claims to, even the staunchest defenders of Lincoln's
heterosexuality may be forced to reconsider. Kramer claims to have a
trump card, a smoking gun: a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary, as
well as a stash of letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his
love affair with Lincoln. The secret pages, which were discovered
hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men
lived, now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport,
Iowa.

No sooner has Kramer mentioned the discovery and location of the
papers than he grumbles, "That's already more than I wish I had said."
Kramer is ambivalent about airing the entire subject. Even the
reading, he explains, was a spur-of-the-moment stopgap measure to save
him the trouble of writing another speech for a second appearance at
the conference. "I didn't know there were any reporters there," he
says, "and I didn't let anyone tape it."

Although Kramer refuses to share any portions of these documents, the
Capital Times in Madison reported some of the juicier quotes from the
reading: "He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He
would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug," Speed reportedly
wrote. Addressing his dear friend as "Linc," Speed allegedly described
the young politician as a man who couldn't getenough hugging and
kissing: "Yes, our Abe is like a school girl." Kramer also attested
that Speed recounted conversations in which the two men wondered
whether other men, too, had relationships like theirs.

Whether these quotes prove that Lincoln was gay is debatable,
although, of course, Kramer may possess others that are more explicit.
But he goes further: He not only claims that honest, rail-splitting,
nation-uniting Abe was a proto-bossy bottom, but that there existed a
whole 19th century gay frontier subculture. For example, he says there
was an underground travel agency that arranged for small groups of
man-loving men to travel into the wilderness for nature appreciation
and other earthy pleasures. Both Lincoln and Speed, Kramer says,
frequented these camping trips while living in Springfield. In one
circular, which Kramer shared by phone, a man named "Dapper Dan from
Kansas" invited "fellow travelers" on a "holiday journey" to sleep
outdoors. The passage he read was certainly suggestive but hardly
explicit.

Repeating a claim long circulated in the gay community, if not in
Hamilton scholarship, Kramer also claims that Alexander Hamilton was
"essentially a cock-tease."

All these assertions, however, pale in the face of Kramer's most
outrageous theory: that Lincoln's murder may have been a kind of
gay-bashing, resulting from a kinky sexual set-up. "There's some
evidence that shows that Speed presented Booth to Lincoln as a
'present' and the young Booth, who was a gorgeous man, was virulently
homophobic, like the men who killed Matthew Shepard," he says. "If the
murder turns out to have had a homosexual underpinning, that's going
to freak everybody out."

Seemingly outlandish claims like these, along with the fact that
Kramer is not by any conventional definition a scholar, obviously
raise questions about his historical judgment and probity. Isn't
Kramer just a propagandist,laboring mightily to turn the 1800s into
18th and Castro?

Interestingly, however, Lincoln scholars have largely held their fire
even when confronted with Kramer's more extreme claims. "That's pretty
wild," says Douglas Wilson of the Lincoln-Booth theory. "If Lincoln
and Booth had ever met, I would have thought we would have known more
about it. But all ideas are welcome; you learn more when people
argue."

Arguments coming from Larry Kramer tend to have a special vehemence.
Long a lightning rod for controversy both within and without the gay
community, Kramer knows how to play his cards for all they're worth,
although playing them close to his chest is not his strong suit. After
founding ACT-UP and the Gay Men's Health Crisis, two staggeringly
influential organizations within the gay community, Kramer assailed
the Reagan administration, the medical establishment andheterosexuals
in general (whom he referred to as "they") with razor pen and acid
tongue. Just as often, he attacked his own community; his conflicts
with factions of the two organizations he founded erupted into public
spectacles of ire and recrimination. No setting was too sacrosanct for
Kramer to tell his angry truths, as evidenced by a eulogy he once gave
in which he accused the gathering of mourners (including himself) of
murdering the deceased with their complacency and passivity.

Compared to those days of high dudgeon and real crisis, it seems odd
that Kramer is so anxious about his scholarly crusade to out a dead
president. Why won't he share his evidence? His explanations vary from
wanting to protect the poor folks of Davenport from a mob of Lincoln
lunatics to simply wanting to finish his monster-in-the-box book (now
2,000 pages long and at least five years away from being finished) in
peace. He's also planning to submit a short excerpt of the Lincoln
material to magazines this fall. But when pressed, he confesses that
he fears the vitriol, or worse, that may rain down upon him from
outraged defenders of Lincoln's sullied honor. "Don't tell them where
I live," he adds at the end of one phone conversation, with no hint of
irony.

It's possible that Kramer was led to some of his evidence by a more
respectable scholar, C.A. Tripp, the elderly author of the
groundbreaking "The Homosexual Matrix." Kramer admits that he hopes a
forthcoming book by Tripp comes out before his own. Tripp's book also
plans to drag Lincoln out of the closet, but according to Kramer, it
will do so with a good deal more scholarly muscle and nuance. Kramer
says Tripp has evidence that Lincoln had not just one, but numerous
homoerotic relationships throughout his life. Unlike Kramer, however,
he does not construe these ongoing sexual encounters as
self-consciously homosexual. Speaking by phone from his home in New
Jersey, Tripp refuses to "drop any pearls" before his book is
finished. "It's too far away," he says, "about two years."

When told that Kramer had expressed enthusiasm about Tripp's findings,
Tripp snarls good-naturedly: "Of course he did. Kramer's a
propagandist. And that's all I have to say." He does acknowledge,
however, that his research was based on "absolutely new" primary
sources that no other historian has yet to see.

All this talk of new primary sources makes the Lincoln history
establishment curious despite their skepticism.

"It's possible there is something else, but I would be very
surprised," says Michael Burlingame, author of the "Inner World of
Abraham Lincoln" and history professor at Connecticut College. "If
there's a Joshua Speed diary, then I'm eager to see it." Indeed,
Burlingame is one volume into a three-volume account of Lincoln's
life; presumably such findings might guide his current project in new
directions.

Burlingame is familiar with Tripp's work and despite his "enormous
respect for the man," he disagrees with his ideas about Lincoln's
sexual orientation. "Speed and Lincoln were close emotionally but
their letters have no discernable romantic overtones," he says.
"Besides, there is too much evidence that Lincoln was strongly
attracted to women." By way of example he cites the fact that Lincoln
was a "proto-feminist," fell "head over heels in love with 18-year-old
Matilda Edwards" and loved a beautiful young woman named Ann Rutledge.

Such evidence, however, can be interpreted several ways. Heterosexual
men have never had a corner on the market for feminist-friendly
attitudes; in fact, one might argue that proto-homosexual men might
better sympathize with the plights of proto-feminist women. Moreover,
some historians reject the tale ofhis love for Matilda Edwards as a
paranoid fantasy that Mary Todd Lincoln concocted to explain why
Lincoln abandoned her at the altar. In "Lincoln," David Herbert Donald
suggests that there was "no real justification" to think that Lincoln
had fallen in love with her and that Edwards had expressly denied that
he ever "even stooped to pay [her] a compliment." In turn, Douglas
Wilson calls Donald's refusal to deal with the Edwards evidence "just
hopeless."

Historians also posit wildly different scenarios regarding the doomed
Ann Rutledge. All evidence comes from third-hand accounts that held
that Lincoln became acquainted with her while she was still engaged to
another man. Soon afterwards, she fell ill; Lincoln sat by her bedside
for the last two days of her life. Some contend the two were on their
way to being engaged, others that Lincoln might havebefriended her
simply because she was already spoken for. Others say her death left
him a devastated man who, at least from a romantic perspective, never
recovered. Yet as Kramer is quick to point out, not a single letter
exists between Rutledge and Lincoln, and in the thousand pages of
Lincoln's personal correspondence, he never once mentions her name.

Finally, in chronicling the proof of Lincoln's heterosexual romances,
historians are split in their interpretation of his marriage to the
volatile, possibly insane, drug-addled Mary Todd Lincoln. By all
accounts the couple had a difficult, turbulent relationship, but over
the course of 10 years they managed to bear four children. Some
historians paint theirs as a difficult but loving bond; others as the
quintessential marriage from hell. Douglas Wilson gives credence to
stories that Lincoln visitedprostitutes during his marriage and later
believed himself to have contracted syphilis. David Herbert Donald, in
contrast, paints Lincoln as a faithful, if not exactly doting,
husband.

All of these heterosexist interpretations get Kramer foaming at the
mouth. "Why is their version so much more believable than mine? So
much of the history that is shoveled into the world is bullshit, we
really have to invent our own."

Do such overt desires for a specific outcome make it impossible for
Kramer to separate fact from wishful thinking? That was the charge
leveled against those who initially argued that Walt Whitman was a
19th century homosexual. At first this idea was derided as far-fetched
propaganda, but it is now largely accepted (although academics
continue to debate whether it is legitimate to call Whitman "gay").

But does it really matter if Lincoln was gay? What difference does it
make if the man who reunited the country, ended slavery, wrote some of
the most majestic speeches in the English language and died a martyr's
death desired (or actually had sex with) other men? According to
Illinois state historian Tom Schwarz, it doesn't make any difference:
"It's only important if he made conscious decisions based on his
sexuality which then influenced his political behavior, public policy
or his decisions on slavery. If not, its importance readily
diminishes."

Schwarz's politic words, however, don't take into account the enormous
symbolic significance that will attend any reevaluation of the sexual
orientation of America's most beloved figure. Imagine if the
Hemings-Jefferson love affair had been proven beyond a reasonable
doubt (which, as scientists continue to remind us, still hasn't
happened) in the Jim Crow 1950s, when certain states still prosecuted
miscegenation? Bigots would have had one less legendary leg to stand
on. Similarly, if the man on our $5 bill was proven to be gay,
right-wing politicians who invokeLincoln in one breath and denounce
the homosexual menace in the next would be forced to reexamine the
deeper meaning of the phrase "with charity towards all, with malice
towards none." Certainly, for queer theorists and gay scholars, the
ability to claim the man who was arguably America's greatest president
as their own would arm gay battalions with a powerful new rhetorical
weapon.

"Greatest" is the operative word here. When Kramer first announced at
the Madison meeting that he was setting out to get gays their "first
gay president," he could have made his job easier by looking to
Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan. The only bachelor to take
office, Buchanan spent 15 years, including some of those in the White
House, living with Sen. William King. When King died Buchanan went
into a tailspin, neglecting his executive duties; his already
ineffectual presidency derailed. The contemporary press ridiculed the
men's relationship mercilessly, and Andrew Jackson once called King
"Miss Nancy." The problem, of course, is that James Buchanan is not
the guy to stake a modern civil rights movement on. Passive and
ineffectual, he slowly but surely led the country into a bloody civil
war. Despite the fact that it was "obvious" that Buchanan was gay,
Paul Russellsays he chose not to include him in "The Gay 100"; he just
wasn't anything to be proud of.

One equally controversial gay figure did make it into the book: none
other than the fire-breathing Larry Kramer. In fact, he's the
highest-ranked of all living people on the list. "A lot of people
wouldn't agree with that," Kramer mutters when informed of this fact.

In similar fashion, many of Lincoln's contemporary enemies would have
seen the deification of the rough-hewn, socially awkward president as
the worst kind of historical revisionism. But as Kramer knows, from a
political perspective, revisionist history is the only kind of history
that counts.

More:
http://www.gayheroes.com/abe.htm

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