Lincoln Was Gay?

I don't think we've ever had two postings on Lincoln on the same day, but I can't help but marvel at Dinitia Smith's fawning pseudo-review of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published next month. It was written by the late C. A. Tripp, who, we're told, was "a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey."

That's important to know, because Tripp had the uncanny ability to discern what small-fry scholars like Carl Sandberg were trying to say, but couldn't; or wanted to think, but didn't know how. Or something:

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.

Ah, that insight discovered only through the science of psychology!

But wait, as they say on TV! There's more!

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.

And more! 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."

As to why none of Lincoln's contemporaries said such things about him, Tripp had a ready explanation: 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.

Well, then, why stop at old Abe? Why not toss in Thomas Jefferson, whose sex life is already the subject of much discussion and debate. After all, I've never read anything by his contemporaries suggesting he was gay, so he must have been. Ditto Washington, Lee, Grant (let's be ecumenical), Hamilton (have you ever considered the real reason Burr shot him?), FDR (those marriage problems, you know), JFK (ditto).

Then again, I can't claim to have researched anything in life the way Tripp said he researched Lincoln:

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.

My, that's quite a lot of work. If you Google "Abraham Lincoln," you'll get 3,310,000 returns. You'll get 2,514 results from Amazon. And of course, as Google knows very well, most scholarship isn't in electronic form yet.

David Herbert Donald, the dean of Lincoln studies, finds Tripp's charges untrue, and the writer Philip Nobile called it a "fraud."

But now that a deceased student of Alfred Kinsey, of all creatures, has come up with this, there remains another key question: will a professional Lincoln hater like Thomas DiLorenzo follow the example of his fellow far-right brethren and align himself with the latest addled theory from the far left?