The sexual life of Abraham Lincoln

After reading C.A. Tripp's highly anticipated study of Abe's alleged homosexuality, we still don't know if he was gay. Does it matter?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jan 12, 2005 | Let's skip over the question of whether Abraham Lincoln was gay for a minute, especially since we don't know and, absent some startling revelation, we never will. (Let's also bypass the related question of whether we should care.) The question that bothers me, right now, is why a book quite as bad as "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" had to be published. It's a book that does nothing except fling mud on the reputation of its author and require reviewers to speak ill of the dead. This posthumous (and evidently unfinished) volume by the well-respected sex researcher C.A. Tripp purports to marshal the evidence that our greatest president possessed "a plentiful homosexual response," to use the author's terminology. In fact, it does nothing of the kind.

Tripp's manuscript is such a mishmash of supposition, rumor, half-cooked research and specious reasoning that he assassinates his own case almost as thoroughly as John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln himself. Contrary to what much of the pre-publication propaganda has claimed, from Gore Vidal's fascinating but misleading online Vanity Fair feature to Doug Ireland's vastly overstated L.A. Weekly article, Tripp has no smoking gun, as it were, on the question of Lincoln's sexual behavior. (In fact, Ireland's article and early publicity materials refer to claims that seem to have disappeared from Tripp's book, including allegations that early acquaintance A.Y. Ellis and law partner Henry C. Whitney were Lincoln's lovers.)

All Tripp has got, at the end of the day, is one well-known historical fact whose significance has long been disputed and two items of second- or third-hand gossip from Civil War Washington (one of them not recorded until 30 years later). The fact is that as a young man Lincoln shared a bed for four years in Springfield, Ill., with a man named Joshua Speed, perhaps the closest friend he ever had. The gossip suggests that a certain Capt. David V. Derickson, attached to the Pennsylvania regiment that guarded Lincoln, may have slept in the presidential bedroom a few times in 1862 when Mary Lincoln was away.

We'll get back to these ambiguous events, and what they may or may not tell us, in due course. But the publication of "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" brings a thuddingly anticlimactic end to one chapter of the long-running was-Lincoln-gay saga; apologists like Vidal and Ireland aside, anyone who's been following the issue over the past 15 years of scholarly debate can only be disappointed. Tripp's book has been so long anticipated, and so much delayed, that a book responding to his claims was actually published before his was.

"'We Are Lincoln Men,'" a 2003 study of Honest Abe's closest male friendships by David Herbert Donald, the reigning king of Lincoln biographers -- at least until Michael Burlingame's forthcoming three-volume biography appears -- is in large part intended as a rejection of Tripp's overarching argument that Lincoln was predominantly homosexual. (In one of his better moments, Tripp explains that he refuses to describe Lincoln as "gay" because there was nothing in him of "the lightness and frivolity, let alone the social protest" implied by that word.) Donald specifically examines and rejects Tripp's interpretation of the Speed and Derickson cases as love affairs. Since Tripp himself died in May 2003, at age 84, he had no chance to read or respond to Donald's critique, and one reads his book with the peculiar sensation of encountering "new" information that's already been debunked, at least in part.

Beyond the stories of Speed and Derickson, there's not much to "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" except wild speculation, Kinseyesque pseudo-science and a bizarre attempt to destroy Lincoln's heterosexual credentials (which are ample, as it happens), as if the idea that he may have had male lovers somehow depends on proving that he didn't like girls. Part of the problem is that Tripp is too honest to falsify evidence -- he agrees, for instance, that Joshua Speed's notorious erotic diary, purportedly possessed by playwright and gay activist Larry Kramer, is almost certainly fictitious -- which drives him to unsupportable guesswork. He spends an entire chapter on Lincoln's warm friendship with the dashing Col. Elmer Ellsworth, who became the first celebrated casualty of the Civil War, only to admit that Ellsworth was clearly heterosexual and there is no evidence of erotic contact between them.

Published in this form, with included essays by Lincoln scholars who either attack it (in the case of Michael Burlingame) or damn it with faint praise (in that of Jean Baker, the biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln), and apparently edited at the last minute to redact or tone down Tripp's most dubious claims, this book will convince no one except true believers. Supporters of the view that Honest Abe was a veritable hetero Lothario of the prairie didn't pay to get this into print, presumably, but they might as well have.

I already feel guilty for all the things I have said and will say against "The Intimate World," mostly because Tripp, a onetime colleague of Alfred Kinsey who wrote the important 1975 study "The Homosexual Matrix" -- comes off as an eccentric, agreeable figure with honorable intentions toward the great Illinois Railsplitter. He doesn't see himself as a gay propagandist in the Larry Kramer mold, trying to "claim" Lincoln for his team. Rather, he hopes to construct a nuanced and complicated portrait of an intensely private historical figure, one in which consideration of Lincoln's sexuality helps illuminate the darker corners of his famously opaque personality. Had Tripp lived longer, he might have come at least a little closer to this goal -- although it's hard to see how this manuscript's glaring flaws could have been fully redeemed -- but the larger point is that the ghost of a much better Lincoln book hovers invisibly above this one.

Next Page: Men on the frontier bunked together routinely, and privacy was a commodity available only to the rich

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