The following is the Preface from the recently published book by C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press, 2005).
FOR MORE THAN a quarter century, especially in the late 1990’s, print media have carried numerous reports that Abraham Lincoln may have been homosexual, or even “gay.” Lincoln was certainly not the latter. For while his personal history does indeed reflect a plentiful homosexual response and action, as will be shown, exactly none of it had the lightness and frivolity, let alone the note of social protest, implied in “gay.” The first mention of Lincoln’s homosexuality was apparently in an article written and privately printed in 1971 by an energetic collector of sexual facts, one of the first and most effective “gay liberation” activists, James Kepner.1 During the next quarter century, and especially in the 1990’s, numerous knockoff articles followed; these seldom mentioned Kepner by name, but several carried his imprint by accident. His original article contained a small error (a slightly incorrect reference to Carl Sandburg) that, when repeated in subsequent reports, flagged the source.2
Kepner’s article on the Lincoln and Joshua Speed relationship was not his first effort of this kind. Previously he had “outed” Eleanor Roosevelt in sufficient detail about her relationship with Lorena Hickok to put him in serious trouble with the Roosevelt family (legal action was threatened). These difficulties came to a sudden halt with the publication in 1980 of Doris Faber’s The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend, which more than confirmed Kepner’s comments with excerpts from a trove of no less than 3,360 letters, 2,336 of them from Eleanor Roosevelt herself.3
Still, anyone wanting to entertain doubts and disbelief about Lincoln’s special friendship with Speed, as mentioned by Kepner and by now a host of others, might still find easy pickings. Beyond the fact that Kepner and his followers had their eyes squarely on possible gains for the gay liberation movement—itself hardly noted for impartiality—there have always been flaws and holes in the story (such as unmentioned details that can sharply reduce its impact). Yet when carefully examined, the Lincoln and Speed relationship turns out to be a rich source of exactly the kinds of sexual evidence those early writers would have prized. So why did they keep using the same few examples while ignoring far stronger ones close at hand? Simplistic as it sounds, the reason seems to lie mostly with the case of copycatting, as opposed to a more laborious sifting of a copious Lincoln literature. Meanwhile, historical research at every level has improved over the years.
In 1989 Professor Charles Shively of the University of Massachusetts wrote Drum Beats, a book more about Walt Whitman than Lincoln, but it did contain a large, important section—Chapter 7—in which many facts of Lincoln’s sex life were cited and analyzed. Although Shively’s work had its shortcomings, it nevertheless broke new ground and examined a number of matters never previously explored. What may have helped short-circuit formal acknowledgment of Shively (which might otherwise have helped win him support and recognition) was his use of very impolite language in spots, coupled with a stamp of gay liberation advocacy.4 Perhaps equally harmful was his choice of a not exactly neutral-sounding publisher—the Gay Sunshine Press in San Francisco—along with the additional fact that Shively was “out” himself, which might mean that the whole effort was part of a gay agenda.
Together, these negatives were perhaps enough to blight any research effort. But would it have succeeded in turning around scholarly opinion if it had had none of these drawbacks, no exaggerations at all, and been published in a top-level journal? Nobody knows, but in view of the temper of the times and the amount of opposition arrayed against its conclusions, probably not. Yet pressures were building for what was about to happen.
The 1990’s were marked by an ever increasing tolerance for, if not homosexuality itself, at least discussing and writing about it at upper media levels. On October 1, 1995, the New York Times ran a half-page spread under the title “In Search of History,” with large pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and his friend Joshua Speed. The article began, as many others have, with Lincoln moving to Springfield in 1837, meeting the store clerk Speed who, when Lincoln proved unable to afford the price of a new bed, invited his customer to share his own, which Lincoln did for the next four years. (Bed-sharing was common enough in those days, though to stay on for years was not.) As the Times put it:
A century and a half later, that seemingly ambiguous relationship has been invoked to suggest that the Republican Party, which is often uncomfortable with accepting homosexuality, is failing to acknowledge its own past. Although the party is dominated by social conservatives who reject the notion that homosexuals should be sheltered by special civil rights laws, it is also home to people who are just as fiscally conservative but happen to be gay, many openly so.
Intimations about Lincoln’s sexuality were raised anew last month after Senator Bob Dole’s Presidential campaign rejected a contribution from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group whose name was inspired by the humble beginnings (but not the youthful sleeping habits) of the party’s first President. Scott Thompson, a prominent member of the Log Cabin Republicans, a Reagan appointee to the United States Institute of Peace, and a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, retorted that homosexuals ought to feel welcome in the party, “given that the founder was gay.”
George Chauncey, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, responded: “Almost every stigmatized group has sought to elevate its reputation by pointing to illustrious members.” The Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame added: “I don’t see how the whole question of Lincoln’s gayness would explain anything other than making gay people feel better … [a]nd I don’t think the function of history is to make people feel good. Celebratory history is propaganda.”
Other half-page articles trumpeted similar themes along with the usual counterarguments. A later account in the Los Angeles Times, dramatizing another headline, this time from Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s hometown, blared: “Lincoln Country Aghast as Local Paper Prints Gay Allegation.” Then, just as a surprising shift was apparently ready to occur nationally, a prominent gay activist, Larry Kramer, managed to arouse both public and scholarly attention by loudly proclaiming not only that Lincoln was gay (pointing to that same Lincoln and Speed story), but this time with the added fillip that he, Kramer, had uncovered a never-before-heard-of diary of Joshua Speed, complete with a few lurid lines of love quoted with no diary in hand. (Seeing is believing, should that diary ever show up; the passages claimed for it have not the slightest Lincolnian ring.) Yet for reasons not instantly clear, Kramer’s voice carried far and wide, with numerous Lincoln scholars castigating both his method and his message.
By an irony of chance, less than a week after the Los Angeles Times article appeared, the whole issue was repeated on national television under remarkable circumstances. On June 28, 1999, as Brian Lamb, host of c-span’s American Presidents Lincoln celebration, was broadcasting from Springfield, a caller asked if there was any truth to reports of Lincoln’s homosexuality. When one of the scholars stumbled in responding, Brian Lamb quickly stepped in and summarized the whole matter with full and direct quotes from Kramer’s specific charges. (Driving the effect further, c-span rebroadcast the entire program month after month—seven times between June and the end of December.) In part because of this high media attention, the issues discussed received what Shively’s work had not: very respectable publicity, plus opportune timing. It was as if a few refined verbal exchanges struck some pendulum of public opinion at a moment when it was primed to swing toward the idea, if not toward the fact, of an entirely changed view of Lincoln’s sexual side.
Castles built of papier-mâché, perhaps, and yet the results appear to overcome the clout of ordinary persuasions. Thus, when c-span’s Brian Lamb received that caller’s inquiry, and restated it as a straightforward question to the two Lincoln scholars present (David Long and Cullom Davis), he elicited from them a maturity of view that might otherwise have taken years to reach. Facing the homosexual question, now stripped of hype, Professor Long merely shrugged and asked, “So what? Would that make the Emancipation Proclamation any less eloquent?” The reaction of Cullom Davis was even more to the point: “What difference does it make?” If this realistic position were to continue to hold at upper levels, as now seems probable, it might neatly separate the facts of Lincoln’s private life from much moralistic wrenching.
At the moment, however, the question “So what?” is passed along to the present inquiry, with an added observation: In looking through all that is known of Lincoln it is hard to find any case in which his sexual orientation impinged in any way on his political judgment, pro or con. Even slavery leaves us in the lurch, since it cannot be shown that a single slave was freed sooner—or kept in chains longer—as a result of any specific aspect of Lincoln’s private life. True, his special empathy and sympathy may have helped, may well have fed his moral enthusiasm and sped him toward what many see as his finest hour. But such secondary gains are hardly traceable to his sex life—and even if they were, who is to say they were not balanced out by unknown drawbacks elsewhere?
In short, if the “contributions” of Lincoln’s sex life are as yet not specifiable, with many factions expressing profound discomfort at such revelations, and insisting they would rather not hear any such evidence—plus the further risk of damaging a pristine icon—why, indeed, not back away from this disagreeable search? One quick answer is that nowhere in science or psychology has it ever proved useful either to hide truth or to follow a false flag. Indeed, the benefits of uncovering facts in the case of Lincoln are especially great, owing in no small measure to his own supersecrecy, and the rest to an overlay of romantic fictions. Lincoln is much too important to deserve that, too central a figure in history, to keep obscuring basic facts of his life.
BY COMMON LOGIC one might have expected various restraints on Lincoln’s personal history to have been tightest upon the older, less up-to-date scholars. But the marvel is that in a bygone era of staggering sexual ignorance, there were at least a handful of early Lincolnists—in particular, Ida Tarbell, Carl Sandburg, Robert Kincaid, and Margaret Leech—who showed enough curiosity and perception first to detect and then to note at least a few homosexual elements in Lincoln’s life. Did any of them come right out and label Lincoln homosexual? Absolutely not, nor can it be proved that any, even when face-to-face with the clearest evidence, ever held the thought in just that form. But this makes all the more interesting how they dealt with certain edgy facts.
It has sometimes been charged that scholars, heeding propriety, have held back for reasons of cover-up or censorship. But, of course, if these had been the motives in Lincoln’s case, then nothing would have been easier, or safer, than to opt for the classical stance held by virtually every Lincoln scholar alive today: simply to stay silent on the whole question.
Our own interpretation of the “policy” decisions made by the early scholars who chose not to remain silent is that for reasons of personal integrity they felt duty-bound to record, and often to reveal, a part of what they discovered in Lincoln’s life, rather than hold it back. Was what they withheld purely the result of prudery? Some observers think so; I do not. (Prudery seldom bargains by halves; it seeks to kill at the root, and wilt every leaf on any unwanted tree.) No, as will become apparent, the stakes are much higher than what Alfred Kinsey used to call “defending the mores”—a fierce guarding of tradition and of questionable moral positions.
It is notable that various scholars and historians, while seeing different images of the same thing, did not agree with each other on what the rules of revelation should be. Margaret Leech was quick and startlingly frank to put Lincoln squarely in bed with the captain of his guard inside the White House, but then pulled back on small details, as if these, rather than the action itself, held the key. Ida Tarbell, on the other hand, stayed entirely away from allusions to Lincoln’s bedroom, but was quick to identify the captain by name: David V. Derickson. Her collected notes suggest that she may have achieved a remarkably detailed image of Lincoln’s private life during his final years. True, most of this failed to find its way into Tarbell’s Lincoln biography—or left much of its intimacy bypassed where it did survive. Whether this was mainly for safety or brevity is arguable. But one must not be too critical here; where silence is sacred—as it is in a wide swath of Lincoln land—credit still goes to those who speak softly, as opposed to many others who to this day have said nothing.
Carl Sandburg said not a word of anything mentioned by either Margaret Leech or Ida Tarbell. He saw Derickson as hardly more than a footnote, and added nothing to that record. But he spoke knowingly of Lincoln having “invisible companionships” and the kinds of compatibilities that drive them. Kincaid did the same, but much more specifically, and from an entirely different angle (as Shively in our day was first to note). What these very different scholars had in common—besides dealing with at least a little of Lincoln’s homosexual side—was a certain hit-and-run quality. In each case a few sharp details are followed by quick exits from dangerous territory. Were these hasty retreats designed to pander to prudery? That may be part of it, but many scholars are entirely innocent of that charge. The problem lies elsewhere.
From the moment anything comes along with the power possibly to destabilize large areas of Lincoln scholarship, it can be viewed as a major threat by historians who have invested much of their lives sifting and sorting conventional interpretations. Not that anything sexual is by itself that important, particularly in the case of a larger-than-life figure like Lincoln, whose essential qualities are undimmable. But scholarship itself is damnably dimmable. Over the years in various shifts back and forth, Lincoln has become implicated in one romantic fiction after the other, often based on little or no significant evidence. Such reporting has led to an ever more improbable picture of Lincoln—one which, in the face of contradictory information, now creates a double embarrassment. To fit the reality, his heterosexual side needs a careful, much more conservative recasting—one that honors facts such as his lifelong discomfort in intimate contacts with eligible women.5 At the same time, allowance must now be made for new, previously unrecognized homosexual components in his life.
It is apparently this prospect—the double jeopardy of a major recasting of the Lincoln literature, along with accepting the unacceptable—that seems to have caused nearly all Lincoln scholars to bolt and run at the first whiff of homosexual evidence. Conversely, it would seem unfair to fault the handful of scholars who have collected or mentioned small bits of such evidence, even though they, too, have often exited the kitchen with the cake half cooked.
Particularly interesting—and revealing—is the example of Carl Sandburg, who created a masterpiece of sorts in his six-volume biography of Lincoln. In a very prominent place—the final sentence of the preface to his 1926 edition—in words he kept there for 28 years through many editions, until finally cutting them in a major abridgment, he 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.”6 No chance at all that these “invisible companionships” were heterosexual, for in that case they would have been paraded out with trumpets blaring. Nor could they have been liaisons between casual or political friends; those would neither qualify as “companionships” nor have to be hidden by being mentioned obliquely. But homosexual relationships fit the facts exactly. Poet that he was, Carl Sandburg no doubt held his words in sharp focus and meant precisely what he said when he spoke of “invisible companionships” that “surprised” him—some of them clandestine enough to qualify as presences that “lurk” and “murmur.”
This interpretation is no stretch. When describing the most intimate relationship Lincoln ever had—the one with Joshua Fry Speed—Sandburg unmistakably labels it homosexual by making the commonplace assumption that by this very fact, the relationship must mean that a “streak” of effeminacy ran through the partners. Thus he concluded:
Joshua Speed was a deep-chested man of large sockets, with broad measurement between the ears. A streak of lavender ran through him; he had spots soft as May violets. And he and Abraham Lincoln told each other their secrets about women. Lincoln too had tough physical shanks and large sockets, also 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.”7
Then, a few pages later: “Their births, the loins and tissues of their fathers and mothers, accident, fate, providence, had given these two men streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets.”8
Remarkably, Sandburg had the “sockets” part exactly right. The whole business of complementation—each partner “importing” admired traits from the other to fill or repair a felt lack—is entirely correct. Indeed, the well-matched fit of compatible partners is quite like a ball-and-socket. The same idea was spelled out by the Lincoln scholar Robert Kincaid more than fifty years ago:
Speed saw in Lincoln the rough-hewn product of the frontier … [and]in Joshua Fry Speed, Abraham Lincoln saw a youth who was truly a “gentleman to the manor born” … their kindred hopes and ambitions fused into a unity and understanding which was never broken. … They went to parties together; they attended debating clubs and political forums; they occasionally took rides into the country.9
Unfortunately, Sandburg’s “streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets” invite serious misunderstanding. For while Lincoln clearly had his soft spots—the wellsprings of his lifelong kindness and generosity—there was certainly nothing “lavender” (effeminate) about these. In fact, a measure of just this kind of softness is apparent or inherent in the toughest of men; it relieves what might otherwise be a brittle, more easily snapped maleness. Moreover, the very notion of a bony, gnarly, rough-hewn Lincoln having the lightness to glide around with the animations and quick changeableness of effeminacy is plainly untrue, and too ludicrous to contemplate.
But just as Sandburg fell into the conventional stereotype of equating male homosexuality with effeminacy, the same assumption may well have suggested itself to other scholars, adding to their hesitations to acknowledge even the clearest homosexual indications in Lincoln.
On the other hand, it would be incorrect to suppose that all problems of dealing with Lincoln’s sexuality are necessarily part of the past, or are primitive enough to match the conventions of fifty or a hundred years ago. On the contrary, some of the most pressing questions are as alive, as undiminished, and as fully in force today as they ever were. For instance, there is still nothing intuitively clear in the proposition that a married man with four children could possibly be primarily homosexual. While such a prospect is well within the purview of trained observers, if they wish to be both clear and convincing, they have their work cut out for them. Just such evidence is on the way.
Notes
1. James (Jim) Kepner’s writings up to 1971 are housed in the ONE, Inc., archives at the University of Southern California, and are summarized in From the Closet of History, privately published by Kepner in 1984.
2. The Sandburg reference to the homosexuality of Lincoln and Speed was in his 1926 edition of The Prairie Years; the homosexual reference to Lincoln, but not that of Speed, was removed by Sandburg from his 1954 abridged edition. Yet the abridged edition was the only one cited by Kepner—and all his copiers, thus giving themselves away. At least one article, apparently independent of Kepner, was “Lincoln’s Other Love,” by Dennis Doty, Chicago Gay Crusader, 26 (April 1976). It is based on excerpts from the Lincoln-Speed letters in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.
3. More specific and more useful to modern scholars than Doris Faber’s book is a later compilation by Rodger Streitmatter: Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.
4. For example: “Lincoln’s sexual imagination is tinged with asshole images” (p. 81). Even if a more polite “anal image” had been used, the quote would still have retained one fairly serious error, namely, the implication that anal was somehow Lincoln’s personal emphasis. But the fact is, for reasons still not fully understood, nearly all sexual ribaldry has an anal emphasis (see Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, x).
5. Donald, Lincoln, 55.
6. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, vol. I, xii.
7. Ibid., 264.
8. Ibid., 266.
9. Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed: Lincoln’s Most Intimate Friend, 12-14.
