A wonderful and absolutely must read piece from Gore Vidal on the
question of Abraham Lincoln's sexuality. This particular question
doesn't really interest me much, since it seems to fall into the area
of internally unprovable questions on which much time and passion can
be spent if one has nothing better to do with one's time.
But the piece Gore Vidal has written is, as expected, trenchant and
very funny, and with some historical interest too - I didn't know
Vidal was one of the people interviewed by Kinsey. The descriptions
of attitudes towards homosexuality in the America of Lincoln's time
and even up to the mid-20th century when Sandburg was writing his
(completely over the top) biography are also strikingly reminiscent
of how at least parts of India still feels.
Am posting both the link here and the full piece - it absolutely has
to be read.
Vikram
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/050103roco02?
print=true
Was Lincoln Bisexual?
By Gore Vidal
In a Web-only exclusive, the author examines C. A. Tripp's long-
awaited, hotly contested book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln—
and ponders American sexuality a century before Kinsey
As a schoolboy I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of
Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg was a poet-performer, and I tended to skip
his rhapsodic passages, thus missing some key points. Even so, I was
sufficiently drawn to his Lincoln … well, to be precise, there is no
Sandburg Lincoln, only a sort of grab bag of anecdotes, a do-it-
yourself folklore Lincoln, using material that, with time's passage,
has been more and more rejected by those scholar squirrels who are
always in attendance upon the Lincoln brigade's stern academic icon-
dusters. Eventually, I came to write my own Lincoln, dealing with the
master politician as a counterbalance to the folksy figure so beloved
of apolitical chroniclers, particularly in the early part of the 20th
century, when the sex life of a Mount Rushmoreite was taboo and
speculation was neither encouraged nor pursued by those with tenure
rather than truth in mind. The Second World War changed everything.
Over 13 million American males served in Europe, the Pacific, and,
most exotic of all, that unknown land the United States of America,
which suddenly became a place of sexual marvels unknown to previous
generations. But then, in 1945, when much of the war ended, we were
abruptly translated from the Land of Oz back to dreary—even bloody—
Kansas, not to mention Indiana, where one Alfred C. Kinsey was
scientifically analyzing our intimations and dreams of Oz as well as
who did what sexually and why. Among Kinsey's researchers was C. A.
Tripp, who had become interested in the sexuality of our greatest
president, but I am now ahead of our story.
In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male. He also wrote me a note of appreciation for my "work in the
field": The City and the Pillar, a novel about a star-crossed love
affair between two "normal" young male athletes with which I had
shocked America … well, the New York Times, by making the point that
their affair was a perfectly natural business, despite so many
popular superstitions derived from our various Bronze Age religions.
At about that time I met Tripp, whose posthumous The Intimate World
of Abraham Lincoln has at last been published by Free Press.
What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge
that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals,
and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance
between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted
drives. So, what has all this to do with our greatest president?
The young Lincoln had a love affair with a handsome youth and store
owner, Joshua Speed, in Springfield, Illinois. They shared a bed for
four years, not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a
smoking gun—only messy male housekeeping. Nevertheless, four years is
a long time to be fairly uncomfortable. The gun proved to be the
letters that passed between them when Joshua went home to Kentucky to
marry, while Lincoln was readying himself for marriage in
Springfield. Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the
wedding night ahead. Can they hack it? To Sandburg's credit he picked
up on this (who could not after reading the letters?), but, first
time around, I skipped his poetical comments on Lincoln's "streak of
lavender and spots soft as May violets." Sandburg was a typical
American of his time and place; he knew that any male with sexual
feelings for another male was a maiden trapped inside a male body.
Even the great Mae West, our first commanding sexologist, was
convinced that fairies were simply women, obliged, through no fault
of their own, to inhabit crude male bodies: Plangently Doctor Mae
mourned her lost sisters.
Predictably, most Lincoln authorities prefer to ignore the
implications of the Lincoln-Speed letters. But not Jonathan Ned Katz;
in 2001 this relentless scholar wrote a study of their "love affair"
as an example of sex between men before the invention of
homosexuality; a word and generic concept that dates back only to the
late 19th century, while "heterosexuality," previously popularly
known as "just sex," is now the name for a new admirable team whose
first appearance in public print was in a 1924 edition of, I fear,
the New York Times. But more to the point, Tripp notes that although
Lincoln was plainly bisexual, as demonstrated by the four children
that he had with his wife, there is practically no other compelling
record of his heterosexuality. There are no girlfriends in youth. Ann
Rutledge (the great love that ended in her tragic death, which he
forever mourned) proves to have been an invention of his law partner
William Herndon, who, perhaps suspecting that the man he had
practiced law with for 16 years had remained "uncomfortable" with
women all his life and so needed some beefing up in the boy-girl
department. Yet all evidence suggests that Lincoln's stepmother got
it right when after Lincoln's death she said, "He was not very fond
of girls." Nevertheless, Herndon feverishly "researched" and
embellished the Ann Rutledge story for years, but a generation or two
of scholar squirrels have successfully shot that story down. Later,
during his presidency, when most incumbents express affection—and
more—for women not their wives, Lincoln was already a marble statue
to Family Values. Now we know that he was never unenthralled by those
May violets.
I knew C. A. Tripp through Dr. Kinsey, whose famous report was
actually published some months after my novel. In due course, Kinsey
and I met, and he took, as they say, my history for his research.
This involved encoded questions about sexual activities with some
trick questions in order to catch liars. During all this, Kinsey, a
seriously gray man, was like a friendly bank manager in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota. Overnight, Kinsey became a national hero to many, the
devil to others. It is interesting now that we have entered a new
America ruled by Moral Values; faith-inspired attacks are being made
on Kinsey's findings so long after the fact.
Tripp is described by his publisher as a "psychologist, therapist,
and sex-researcher" (for Kinsey). His ground-breaking book The
Homosexual Matrix (1975) firmly "discovered" that homosexuality is
inborn, not acquired. What Tripp learned from Kinsey and associates
is a way of gauging the hetero-homo balance in men. "Kinsey's figures
on the pervasiveness of the homosexual experiences of men dazzled the
ever inquisitive Tripp," as historian Jean Baker writes in her
introduction to his study of Lincoln. More to the point were Kinsey's
investigations into why some men were more responsive than others to
same-sexuality and how these responses tend to vary throughout life's
stages. One finding that Tripp uses in evaluating Lincoln: Kinsey's
research showed that those males who entered puberty early were more
apt to seek homosexual outlets if only because girls were out of
reach. They were also less apt, as they grew up, to have sexual hang-
ups of the sort late bloomers did because society has more time to
indoctrinate a teenager than a nine-year-old. Much remarked upon in
Lincoln's rustic world was his sudden spurt of growth at about nine
years old, some four years before the average of other males. Also,
his fascination with sex stories whose obscenity alarmed even him—he
was an early stand-up comic and, as such, was appreciated in the stag
world of the law. Descriptions of his performances (and the stories
told) even suggest a mild case of Tourette's syndrome. Certainly,
anal sex was a common denominator to his tales. Later in life when
someone suggested he publish his funny stories, he was shocked: he
compared them to open privies. Incidentally, the one thing that the
Kinsey report, Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix, and my The City and the
Pillar had in common, aside from the unwelcome candor about our human
estate, was the hysteria we created at The New York Times. The three
books were not only attacked in the paper but the Times refused to
advertise Kinsey or me once the contents of our infernal books were
known; also, in my case, seven novels subsequent to the proscribed
book were not reviewed in the daily Times, and never would be, the
daily reviewer (Orville Prescott) proudly told my publisher, E. P.
Dutton. Now, in the 56 years since 1948, The City and the Pillar has
never been out of print in English or in a number of other languages.
Tripp has interesting "new" material on Lincoln's encounters as a
young man in New Salem, Illinois (where Lincoln lived from 1831-37);
he reports on "contacts" with merchant A.Y. Ellis and fellow lawyer
Henry Whitney, the last observing that Lincoln seemed always to be
courting him: Whitney also reported that Lincoln said that sexual
contact was a "harp of a thousand strings." So what form did these
contacts take? One hint is given by Billy Greene, who shared a bed
and a grammar teacher (not together) with Lincoln in New Salem around
1831. Greene described Lincoln's muscular figure as attractive to
him, commenting in particular on his powerful thighs, which suggests
a form of sexuality much indulged in by citizens of classical Athens:
since any citizen would lose citizenship if anally penetrated by a
man, "femoral intercourse" was a useful substitute; that is, orgasm,
mutual or otherwise, between firm thighs.
What then did researcher Tripp discover over the last decades about
Lincoln's lavender streak and those soft May violets? The answer is a
great deal of circumstantial detail, of which some is
incontrovertible except perhaps to the eye of faith, which, as we all
know, is most selective and ingenious when it comes to the ignoring
of evidence.
Jean Baker's introduction to Tripp's Lincoln is balanced. She notes
that as late as the 1980s more than 60 percent of all Americans found
homosexuality an unacceptable "lifestyle," plainly the result of
fierce lifelong indoctrination. Tripp finds homosexual (and
heterosexual) behavior common to all mammals and apt to be practiced
given sufficient opportunity, energy, desire. Baker notes that Tripp
was "dazzled" by Kinsey's finding that more than one-third of
Kinsey's sample males had engaged in a homosexual act during their
lifetime even though only a slim 4 to 6 percent identified themselves
as exclusively homosexual. Baker occasionally falls into the semantic
trap of using adjectives like homo/heterosexual as nouns to describe
an entire person when these adjectives can only describe specific
sexual acts and never an actual human being; hence the difficulties
in pigeonholing Lincoln, who, like almost every man of his time and
place, duly married, had children, and conformed while yielding to
his homosexual inclinations only when inevitable, as in the long
affair with Joshua Speed. The most moving part of their letters comes
after Speed goes home to Kentucky to marry, and Lincoln steels
himself to do the same in Springfield with Mary Todd. Each is
terrified of the prospective wedding night. Lincoln is like a good
basketball coach reassuring a timid player while confessing to his
own anxieties on that score. It is hard not to suspect that Lincoln
was, as far as women were concerned, a virgin on his wedding night.
Speed proved to be nonfunctional on that night and, apparently, all
subsequent nights despite much boasting of powerful passions
fulfilled. Tripp notes that Lincoln has no problems with penetration
on the grounds that: "tops don't." (We give Dr. Tripp his
idiosyncrasies).
Tripp has investigated male sexual partners for Lincoln from early
youth to his affair with the captain of his personal military guard,
David V. Derickson of the Pennsylvania Bucktails' Company K. This,
according to Baker, "is one of at least five verifiable cases of
Lincoln's sexual activity with other males." This guard usually
escorted the president from the White House to the Soldiers' Home in
a part of town where he could escape the equatorial summer heat of
riparian Washington. Presumably the affair began on September 8,
1862, when Lincoln was at the Soldiers' Home (Mrs. Lincoln was safely
in New York City, seriously shopping). Lincoln sent for the newly
assigned Derickson, to get to know him. Derickson, we are told, was
five feet nine, deep-set eyes, prominent nose, thick black hair. At
44, he was nine years younger than Lincoln. At the start of their
affair he was the father of nine children by two wives; a grown son
also served in Company K during the idyll at the Soldiers' Home.
Others have noted that when they shared a bed, Derickson wore one of
the president's nightshirts. Although the Washington press was not as
prurient then as now, it was also wartime, which could well have
intimidated gossipers, if not Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of the
assistant secretary of the navy. The Foxes were friends of Lincoln;
Mrs. Fox also kept a diary about high life in Washington. Entry for
November 16, 1862: "Tish [Letitia McKean] says, '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!" The final epithet can
mean "people will say anything." Or as Governor Richards of Texas
said in reference to a question about her divorce: "You know what men
are like!" Quite a different emphasis. So what did these two fathers
whose combined progeny numbered 13 boys actually do? Tripp draws a
great deal not only from surviving commentaries from Lincoln's youth
but also from Kinsey's findings on what sort of experience or simply
sexual development predisposes some males to be actively attracted to
other males. Happily, Freud is nowhere consulted.
In Tripp's reconstruction of the intimate Lincoln, the fascinating
discovery is not the many details about Lincoln's homosexual side as
the fact that he had, marriage to one side, so very little
heterosexual side. Although William Herndon arouses some alarm in
many scholars with his huge Ann Rutledge romantic tragedy, he does
indeed have other tales to tell.
According to Herndon, "About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to
Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl
and caught the disease [syphilis]. Lincoln told me this…. About the
year 1836-37 Lincoln moved to Springfield … at this time I suppose
that the disease hung to him and not wishing to trust our physicians,
he wrote a note to Doctor Drake … " He was treated by him in
Cincinnati: presumably with mercury. Was he cured? By 1840 he was
engaged to the well-born Mary Todd. Lincoln was a rising man in the
political world of Illinois and so must have a wife and a family. But
suddenly he broke off the engagement. Took to his bed. Wrote a poem
called "Suicide," which was published in the Springfield newspaper,
later to be secretly cut out of the file copy. Herndon's commentary
on all this is cryptic. He suggests that the early deaths of two of
Lincoln's sons and Tad's disability in speaking, and then Mary Todd's
headaches, breakdowns, madness, details of which seem to conform to
the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy's description of paresis-
syphilis—although we have since learned that an autopsy was performed
on her head (odd, since even in 1882 the whole body would have been
examined). Anyway, there may be a record at Walter Reed Hospital or
there may not be. More to the point at hand, why did Tripp not count
the Beardstown girl in Lincoln's heteroscore? And the whore in a
Springfield boardinghouse whom Lincoln visited? She wanted three
dollars. He had less. He asked for credit; then, according to
Herndon, she simply charged him nothing.
So here we are; history, too. The magisterial Professor David Herbert
Donald disagrees with Tripp's interpretation of Lincoln's intimate
life, but he also rejects Herndon's version on a key point. Since
Professor Donald wrote a superb book called Lincoln's Herndon, he is
turning, as it were, on one of his own characters. Professor Donald
is our foremost authority on Lincoln and so backed by much of the
history establishment. Tripp is a maverick with new information and a
different synthesis. Neither Donald nor Tripp nor, indeed, Herndon's
ghost can prove his case. Lincoln's ghost is no doubt ready to chat—
with, I suspect, a story, possibly obscene.
Some years ago at Harvard, Professor Donald and I were answering an
audience's questions apropos of the Massey lectures that I was
giving. One urgent professor wanted to discuss Lincoln's
homosexuality, which I had ignored in my study of his presidency and
Professor Donald tended to discredit. He and I were also in agreement
that, true or false, what did sex have to do with his conduct of the
Civil War, the emancipation of slaves?
I have now read Professor Donald's We Are Lincoln Men, and though he
does not agree with Tripp's conclusions, their professional relations
seem to have been amiable. Tripp is quick to acknowledge an
occasional debt to Donald's work, which might explain the absence of
the Beardstown girl in Tripp's study. Professor Donald is a pre-
Kinseyan and so does not endorse the possibility of genital contact
between Lincoln and Speed, and, later, between Lincoln and Bucktail
Captain Derickson. Here is Professor Donald on Beardstown: "Equally
controversial, and equally unprovable, is another intimate confession
Lincoln allegedly made to Herndon. Late in life, Herndon told his
literary collaborator, Weik, that "Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the
syphilis about the year 1835-36." (Which means that mere boy Lincoln
was 26 or 27, by which time Alexander the Great had conquered most of
the known world … ) "For this story, which Herndon wrote more than
fifty years after Lincoln's alleged escapade and more than twenty
years after his death, there is no confirmatory evidence." (In so
delicate a matter, is there apt to be any?) "Lincoln never told it to
anyone else." (How on earth do we know?) "Not even to Joshua Speed,
with whom he was sharing a bed at this time." (I should think not
particularly to Speed, whose bed might have been contaminated by
Lincoln's disease, particularly if, like so many men of his day, he
suffered from syphilophobia, which, Donald suggests, might have been
the origin of Lincoln's story to Herndon about his own alleged
syphilis, which, if he did tell him such a story, might have been the
result of a common fear among relatively inexperienced males at a
time when syphilis, like AIDS today, could be a killer.) Donald even
quotes another historian, Charles B. Stozier, who thinks that
Lincoln's confession to Herndon—if true—revealed more about his
sexual confusion and ignorance than about the state of his health.
(About what, then, is he confused? Of what is he ignorant?) Are we
then to believe that a brilliant lawyer nearing 30 knows next to
nothing about heterosexuality in a town where girls are available for
three dollars?
Since Donald rejects Herndon's story, Tripp doubtless feels free to
ignore the Beardstown girl, too. This buttresses his case that
Lincoln was not fond of girls. Donald's rejection of Herndon in this
matter is no doubt due to a certain reluctance to admit that so great
a man could have had syphilis or trafficked with a three-dollar
whore. Since none of us has much to go on beyond what Herndon says
Lincoln said, why should anyone think that Herndon was making up a
story that casts no glory, rather the reverse, on his hero? Ann
Rutledge is his one great untruth, which does make the young Lincoln
sound like a totally normal youth heartbroken to have lost his first
love. This was a familiar 19th-century dodge of the lifelong bachelor
trying to explain why he had never found Miss Right. President
Buchanan had some success in this line.
Although I did once agree with Professor Donald that Lincoln's sex
life sheds no particular light on his public life, I am now intrigued
by some of the generalities Dr. Kinsey made about males who go early
into puberty. Precocious sexually, they are apt to be precocious
psychologically. Lincoln's understanding of the adult world began
early, and this gave him not only a sense of the broad picture but
inclined him to empathy for others unlike himself. He had also
avoided the hang-ups of those indoctrinated in their teens with the
folklore of the time which condemned masturbation and same-sexuality
as evils, while Lincoln knew firsthand that they were not. From that
single insight it was no great step to recognize that the enslavement
of one race by another was, despite St. Paul's complaisance, a true
evil.
Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was
not religion, it was religiosity that put him off. Finally, as the
Civil War got more and more bloody, he began to adjure Heaven and the
Almighty though not any particular creed. On this point Tripp makes
much of Lincoln's preference for ethics over morality. The first word
comes from the Latin for "customs" and the second from the Greek
for "customs," but there is a world of difference between the two
words. Morality, with which Lincoln had little to do, is religious-
based, which means that in the name of religion, say, homosexuality
could be proscribed as immoral—and was—while ethics tends to deal
with law, cause and effect, logic, empiricism. Tripp writes, "Since
boyhood Lincoln displayed a marked capacity to see the big picture in
life and to not be swerved aside by smaller (moral) considerations."
This already sounds much like ethics, based on widely shared values
and poles apart from the petty differences honored by opposite sides
of the (proverbial) railroad tracks.
Over the years, Herndon canvassed many of Lincoln's friends and
acquaintances about Lincoln's character and beliefs. The lawyer
Leonard Swett's reply was dated January 17, 1866. After describing a
masterful handling of a cabinet crisis that saved Lincoln's
administration, Swett sums up: "One great public mistake of his
character as generally received and acquiesced in—he is considered by
the people of this country as a frank, guileless, unsophisticated
man. There never was a greater mistake. Beneath a smooth surface of
candor and an apparent declaration of all his thoughts and feelings,
he exercised the most exalted tact and the wisest discrimination. He
handled and moved man remotely as we do pieces upon a chessboard. He
retained through life, all the friends he ever had, and he made the
wrath of his enemies to praise him. This was not by cunning, or
intrigue in the low acceptation of the term, but by far seeing,
reason and discernment. He always told enough only, of his plans and
purposes, to induce the belief that he had communicated all; yet he
reserved enough, in fact, to have communicated nothing. He told all
that was unimportant with a gushing frankness; yet no man ever kept
his real purposes more closely, or penetrated the future further with
his deep designs."
Finally, without this great ethical Lincoln there would be no United
States and despite our current divisions, we should be forever
grateful not only to him, but of course to his Creator, who, on our
behalf, brought him to an early puberty; thus, making our restored
Union God's country.
One of America's pre-eminent historians and novelists, Gore Vidal is
the author of Lincoln: A Novel, among many other titles. His latest
book is Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
(Nation Books).
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