ONE OF THE LOW POINTS in American history was in the early 1950’s when Senator Joseph McCarthy successfully fueled and exploited Americans’ fear and paranoia about secret governmental conspiracies, launching witch hunts to expose allegedly subversive infiltrators and Communists within the U.S. government. A lesser known part of the story is the critical role that a same-sex male relationship, almost certainly a sexual one, played in bringing the crisis of McCarthyism to a head and, in the end, silencing the senator. As it happens, the gay couple involved cannot exactly be considered the “good guys” in the drama.

IT IS A TRUISM that Abraham Lincoln was incompetent with women. Scholars emphasize that as a young man, his awkwardness and shyness and uncouth appearance so embarrassed him that he avoided their company. He botched the niceties of courtship, tripped over himself, was almost a laughingstock. Lincoln in his twenties attempted to court a woman named Mary Owens whose verdict is widely cited in Lincoln literature: he was “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”

IT HAS BEEN a strange life after death, that of Edward of Caernarfon, born in Wales on April 25, 1284, St. Mark’s Day in the Catholic faith. This is…More

The possibility that Abraham Lincoln had sexual relations with other men has been broached in the past, and new research is tending to corroborate the thesis that he did. As one might expect, many Lincoln scholars are bitterly opposed to this view, so it is perhaps not surprising that there’s been a recent flurry of interest in Lincoln’s relations with women. Beneath this renewed preoccupation with Abe’s heterosexual dalliances, then, there lurks a subtext that has everything to do with his homosexual ones. – The Editor