I found myself online the other day chatting with a friend about Abraham Lincoln's perfect thighs. He also had big hands, my friend noted. True, I replied, but he was homely. Ruggedly handsome, he retorted. On it went like that. There we were, cruising the greatest president in American history.
The occasion for this excited chatter was the recent publication of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. Tripp, now deceased, claims that Lincoln was predominantly homosexual. Indeed, he precisely rates Lincoln a "5" on the famous Kinsey scale that ranges from "0" (entirely heterosexual) to "6" (entirely homosexual). I avoided reading reviews of the book, not wanting to prejudice myself either way. I wanted to see whether it could rise or fall on its own. Now I've read it. There is no need to consult learned Lincoln scholars or to track down important sources and facts Tripp omitted. The book collapses under its own light weight.
There are shards of evidence that Tripp adduces suggestively to support his claim: a vengeful poem Lincoln wrote in which there are a few lines about two boys who marry each other (penned after two male acquaintances excluded Lincoln from their real weddings); the "perfect thighs" comment from a friend of Lincoln (which, for Tripp, by itself "strongly suggests" they had femoral intercourse!); Lincoln's sometimes awkward relations with women; and so on. None of this amounts to much.
Tripp sometimes anachronistically projects onto Lincoln stereotypes of modern urban gay men (e.g., Lincoln avoided "team sports"). Even proof of Lincoln's heterosexual capacity, such as his ability to consummate his marriage to Mary Todd, with whom he had four sons, is in Tripp's hands evidence that he was a "top."
These embarrassments aside, Tripp's case comes down to three main points. In ascending order of persuasiveness, they are: Lincoln matured early; as president, he slept with his bodyguard; and as a young lawyer, he slept with a roommate.
Lincoln probably reached puberty at age 10, about three years earlier than the average. "This is significant," claims Tripp, because the earlier males reach puberty the more likely they are to have homosexual experiences. It's a very weak argument. The gap in homosexual experience between early- and late-maturing males is initially large but decreases over time, becoming negligible by age 30. More importantly, Tripp cites no support for a correlation between early puberty and homosexual orientation. Early-maturing males, like other males, are overwhelmingly heterosexual.
For an eight-month period in 1862-63 Lincoln may have slept occasionally in the same bed at the White House with a personal bodyguard, army captain David Derickson (a father of nine children). The evidence that they slept together is fairly thin, consisting of contemporaneous gossip and unsubstantiated passages in two obscure histories. Even if they did sleep together, it would not be surprising to find the president's personal bodyguard in his bedroom at the lowest point in the Union's fortunes in the Civil War, in a city full of rebel sympathizers and potential assassins.
It's similarly unsurprising to learn that the president's bodyguard accompanied him to church, cabinet meetings, battlefields, and the theater. Yet Tripp treats these outings as if they were dates. Lincoln also told Derickson stories of his early life and shared battle reports with him, again unsurprising for two men who necessarily spent much time together. Yet Tripp likens these conversations to "pillow talk." Such over-interpretation of scanty evidence mars the whole book.
The strongest evidence for Lincoln's homosexuality is his close friendship with Joshua Speed. When Lincoln was a struggling lawyer, the men shared a bed for four years. Lincoln also wrote letters to Speed that, to modern ears, sound unusually tender. This much is familiar ground, and Tripp adds very little to it.
Tripp claims that he, as a homosexual, has detected the hidden romantic significance of the surviving letters, something missed by earlier scholars eager to downplay it. Yet the letters, which Tripp helpfully appends, deal mostly with politics, business, the men's marriages, and similar fare. They are written in the florid style of nineteenth-century correspondence, full of expressions of devotion and anxieties for reunion, but for this gay reader there is nothing very suggestive about them. For Tripp, however, the lack of overt homoeroticism is itself evidence of a "cover up" by the lovers.
As Tripp concedes, it was common in Lincoln's time for men to sleep together in places like boardinghouses and inns. However, four years does seem suspiciously long. Perhaps this too is a modern reaction, according to which all male-male intimacy carries the whiff of homosexuality. If the men's lengthy cohabitation would have raised eyebrows at the time, it is odd that both men freely acknowledged it to friends, even while going to elaborate lengths to "cover up" their relationship in private letters to one another.
I am not saying that Lincoln never had a homosexual experience. Perhaps he did. But it is another thing entirely to claim that Lincoln's orientation was mainly homosexual. Any such claim comes with a heavy burden of persuasion. Modern research suggests that less than five percent of men are primarily homosexual. The odds against Lincoln, or anyone else, being a Kinsey "5" or "6" are at least 20 to 1.
Should we care? Some commentators have suggested that Lincoln's hidden homosexuality may explain his characteristic sadness, sensitivity, and capacity for empathy and sympathy. But these qualities could also be explained by losing a mother when you're a child, living in poverty on a hardscrabble frontier, enduring the deaths of your own children, and leading a divided nation in the most deadly war in its history.
The book's central claim is desperate conjecture based on strained interpretation of fragmentary evidence to reach a very unlikely conclusion. It is a product of the unfortunate tendency in our time to reduce life to its sexual component. The man who saved the Union, who abolished the grotesque evil of slavery, who gave us the magnificent Gettysburg Address and the sublime Second Inaugural, is in Tripp's world just another top. We should leave Lincoln's thighs alone.