THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

_____________

Pictured: Young Lincoln, Lincoln book, Elmer Ellsworth.

_____________

Thirty-some years ago, the April 1976 issue of The Chicago Gay Crusader ran an article titled 'Lincoln's Other Love.' The author, Dennis Doty, drew his suggestion that President Abraham Lincoln might be gay from several sources going all the way back to a newspaper story by New Salem resident John Hill that appeared 27 years after Lincoln's assassination. He bolstered his argument with excerpts from Lincoln's letters quoted in the eight-volume 'Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln' ( 1953-55 ) .

Doty wasn't the first gay scholar to make the claim. In 1971, iconic archivist Jim Kepner recorded his gleanings from Illinois' good gray poet Carl Sandburg's multi-volume 1926 biography of the president. In 'The Prairie Years,' Sandburg noted the 'streak of lavender' and 'soft spots of May violets' that ran through Lincoln and Joshua Fry Speed, who slept together nightly for four years in a shared bed above the Springfield store where Lincoln clerked. Lest the misguided think Sandburg was merely waxing ecstatic over prairie flowers, I refer them to the chapter 'They Said it with Violets in 1926' in Kaier Curtin's wonderful history of gays on the American stage. The imagery of violets and lavender was well known to most literate Americans in the early 20th century and was commonplace by the date Sandburg's book was published.

By the 1980s the first wave of amateur and tenured gay historians were hastily 'outing' every queer they could to add them to the growing pantheon of fellow travelers who had accomplished much, but had their sexuality hidden from history. Unfortunately, many blindly followed their predecessors' published findings without digging deeper into shallow scholarly graves. Jim Kepner eventually published his thoughts on Lincoln in his privately printed 'From the Closet of History' ( 1984 ) , mistakenly citing a 1956 edition of the Sandburg as his source. In fact, as notes in C. A. Tripp's posthumously published 'The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln' ( 2005 ) suggest, the publisher had purged the suggestive homoerotic 1926 references from later editions; therefore, lazy Kepner copiers give themselves away by citing an edition that does not carry the material. ( This is reminiscent of the many lesbian 'scholars' who claimed evidence that Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith slept together for 40 years based on a misquote in a slim early publication 'Feminist Support Networks' by Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Blanche Weisen Smith. )

Jonathan Ned Katz, an historical researcher whose scrupulous accretion of documents filled his early books, 'Gay American History' ( 1976 ) and 'Gay & Lesbian Almanac' ( 1984 ) , notes in 'Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality' ( 2001 ) that the Doty article was the first he read suggesting Lincoln's possible homosexuality. Katz's book concentrates on the sexual love of men for men, rather than exploring an individual's sexual identity. In a chapter headed 'No Two Men Were Ever More Intimate' ( a quote from Speed on his relationship with Lincoln ) , Katz begins his exploration of the 19th-century conception and labeling of homoeroticism.

Tripp, in his study, introduced a handful of other men that he suggests were intimate with Lincoln ( alluding that they were among those that Sandburg called 'the 'invisible companionships that surprised me' mentioned in his research of 'stacks and bundles of fact and legend' ) : William ( Billy ) Greene, with whom Lincoln shared a bed in New Salem so narrow that when one turned the other had to also; Army Captain ( later Major ) David V. Derickson, who frequently shared the president's bed when Mary was absent; Ephrim Elmer Ellsworth, with whom he had a 'knight and squire' relationship, and who was killed in the Civil War; A. Y. Ellis, who came to Springfield and took quite a 'fancy' to Lincoln and ended up in his bed; and others. Tripp tries to answer the question everyone seems obsessed with, echoing a London reviewer of 'The Life of Lorena Hickock, ER's Friend' ( 1980 ) : 'Whether or not orifices were penetrated?' Tripp also documents his conclusion that the Ann Rutledge/Lincoln romance story was a myth, and he goes one step further than Mary Todd Lincoln biographer Jean Baker in portraying the president's wife as a shrew and his home life as hellish. Tripp's great contribution to Lincoln scholarship, gay and straight, will be the massive database he assembled which will now be, no doubt, extensively mined.

The first years of this century have seen a dozen new books of Lincolnia. As the authors/scholars make the rounds of talk shows they are now always asked whether they believe Lincoln was gay. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote about Lincoln's Cabinet, answered Charlie Rose in the negative. Phillip Nobile, acknowledged author of the original draft of the first chapter of Tripp's book, called it 'a hoax and a fraud,' according to syndicated Chicago columnist Paul Varnell. Nobile conceded, in a 2005 interview with Bill O'Reilly, that 'no Lincoln specialist will say he was not bisexual.' The crux of the matter, as I also concluded in 'Was Eleanor Roosevelt a Lesbian First Lady?' ( OUT, October 1982 ) , is the rhetorical question of why so many try so hard to discredit even minor evidence suggesting homosexuality in beloved or renowned public figures.

First Lady Laura Bush had the rather shabby old 'Lincoln Bedroom' in the White House refurbished in 2007. In his day it was called the Prince of Wales Room and used as an office. Lincoln never slept ( alone or with anyone else ) in the Lincoln Bedroom. But Eleanor Roosevelt's lesbian gal pal, Lorena Hickok, spent many a night there during her four-year 'visit' as an unofficial White House guest. That's a fact.

Copyright 2008 by Marie J. Kuda