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.