Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Abraham Lincoln: A Gay American
by Jack Nichols

Nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than anticipating the heated uproar due next month over the publication of a book that will probably cause heart attacks and strokes in the Republican Party. It is a very carefully researched book about one of America’s greatest presidents, a man hailed by the GOP as its very founder: Abraham Lincoln.

The late author of this scholarly work, Dr. C.A. Tripp, was a friend of mine, introduced to me by another friend, Dr. George Weinberg, the heterosexually-inclined coiner of the term homophobia. During summers in the early 1970s, when Dr. Tripp (Clarence) was working on an earlier tome, George often took Lige Clarke and me to swim in his pool, situated atop the Palisades on the Hudson River and overlooking the Tappanzee Bridge.

Dr. Tripp, who had worked as an associate of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s, would take a break from his writing and sit with us under a tree at the end of his pool. Once, prior to her 1972 trip to Europe, I introduced Dr. Tripp to my mother as well. Lige and I wrote about these visits in our memoir I Have More Fun with You Than Anybody, describing Dr. Weinberg rescuing drowning insects from the pool.

C.A. Tripp’s posthumously published work will be titled The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (Free Press). In spite of the extreme privacy with which Lincoln surrounded himself, there are more than a few indications that he was what a recently-resigned governor called himself at the strategic urging of the Human Rights Campaign, namely “a gay American.”

The famed AIDS activist, Larry Kramer, believes that Dr. Tripp’s book will change history. Past and Future.

In the future, when rabid Republicans discover that their Party’s homosexual founder was sleeping with the captain of his bodyguards, those quick moments of oral ecstasy stolen by Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, will appear to fascist American voters in the slave-owning “red” states of Lincoln’s time to be small potatoes by comparison.

From the standpoint of these puritanical prudes, it will seem much worse that Abraham Lincoln’s sweetly stolen moments with a man didn’t take place in a mere office, but in the very bed he shared with his wife.

The author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987) told the New York Times that she’d once speculated that the Civil War president’s wife’s tantrums were due to the fact that Abe had remained impervious to her “charms” because he was working on matters of state. “I previously thought he was detached because he was thinking great things about court cases, his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation.”

Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, a woman who knew him as well as anybody, told William Herdon, Lincoln’s law partner: “He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me.”

An observation by Lincoln’s most famous biographer, Carl Sandburg, appeared in the 1926 edition of Abraham Lincoln but was removed in the abridged version of his work published in sex-phobic 1954. Speaking of Lincoln’s youthful relationship with Joshua Speed, the poet Sandburg had originally noted that their friendship had “streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets.”

Sandburg had also noted of Lincoln that: “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 work.”

It was into such curiosity-piquing stacks and bundles that C.A. Tripp began his endless rummaging, a massive research project, in fact, that would extend over a ten year period. Knowing Clarence Tripp as I did, I can assure readers of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln that he seemed to me to be meticulous in the extreme.

My one regret is that Dr. Tripp’s untimely death in 2003 now prevents him from publicly defending his research from those hordes of Republican rats who, in January, will embark on a course of frantic nibbling at Dr. Tripp’s reputation as a careful scholar.

To protect his findings, however, Clarence Tripp constructed an enormous database at the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois. Therein, he cross-referenced his findings so that detractors of his book had best study this database before engaging, as fascist Republican theocrats so often do, in mindless shouting matches on FOX News.

Among Dr. Tripp’s more amusing findings - especially today - was an 1829 poem by a youthful Lincoln signaling his unabashed approval of same-sex marriages. Titled “First Chronicles of Reuben” Lincoln talks of the nuptials of two men: Biley and Natty. The poem says:

“But Biley has married a boy
The girlies he 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.”

Dr. Tripp also cites two instances in which contemporaries of Lincoln during his presidency noted that he was carrying on a pointedly intimate relationship with Captain Derickson, his guard. An 1862 diary entry by Virginia Woodbury Fox, for example, 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!”

A 1895 history of Captain Derickson’s regiment written by the soldier’s commanding officer noted that: Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president’s confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln’s absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage sleeping in the same bed with him and - it is said - making use of His Excellency’s nightshirts!”

Since the electoral tragedy of November 2, 2004, the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender movement is finding itself in a quandary about what strategic moves to make next. Speaking as an early 1960s strategist myself, I’d recommend a wholehearted embrace of C.A. Tripp’s new book, one that has come along at a particularly opportune moment.

Atlanta’s black Missionary Baptist brigades, anti-gay bigots who recently marched on the tomb of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and America’s vast homo-hating Republican hordes need to know that the great man who liberated America’s black slaves while first hoisting the GOP’s banner was, in fact, A HOMOSEXUAL!

If the Human Rights Campaign hopes to retain an enthusiastic constituency in the wake of a post-election shake-up, let its board march forthwith to the Lincoln Memorial to memorialize an immortal hero with style and élan. “O Captain, My Captain,” Walt Whitman’s best-known verse about Lincoln, a poem of schoolbook fame because it’s the only find in Leaves of Grass that rhymes, must now advance to a new level of national significance.

ETA: The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln

Well that explains the hat.

I don't know anything about his sources, their accuracy, or anything. I do know, however, that if you refer to me as a fascist because I'm a Republican, and then proceed to tell me that your book has such ground-breaking facts, I'm going to have to think that you just might have an agenda with those facts...

It could be true.. if so, Abe Lincoln was gay, so what?

Then again, it could be like the "research" that some nut jobs cite that tells us that the recent vote in Ohio was stolen.

If I had my guess, I'd have to say it's the later.

Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

So what? Clearly a great President and American. His sexual habits are none of our business.

Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Cheney's daughter was gay and an American too.

25% of Gays had been Republicans (I don't know how many as of the 2004 election).

This is not a new allegation but is only being put out there because a new book came out. To read a review of this book from the Times (which isn't a debate over whether it is right but just a review):

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/bo...=all&position=

Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
By DINITIA SMITH

Published: December 16, 2004


Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American?

The subject of the 16th president's sexuality has been debated among scholars for years. They cite his troubled marriage to Mary Todd and his youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four years. Now, in a new book, C. A. Tripp also asserts that Lincoln had a homosexual relationship with the captain of his bodyguards, David V. Derickson, who shared his bed whenever Mary Todd was away.

In "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month by Free Press, Mr. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. 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. His conclusion is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man.

But his book has not stopped the debate. During the 10 years of his research, Mr. Tripp shared his findings with other scholars. Many, including the Harvard professor emeritus David Herbert Donald, who is considered the definitive biographer of Lincoln, disagreed with him. Last year, in his book "We Are Lincoln Men," Mr. Donald mentioned Mr. Tripp's research and disputed his findings.

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.

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.

But in "We Are Lincoln Men" Mr. Donald wrote that no one at the time ever suggested that he and Speed were sexual partners. Herndon, who sometimes slept in the room with them, never mentioned a sexual relationship. In frontier times, Mr. Donald wrote, space was tight and men shared beds. And the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed was not that of lovers, he maintained. Moreover, Lincoln alluded openly to their relationship, saying, "I slept with Joshua for four years. " If they were lovers, Mr. Donald wrote, Lincoln wouldn't have spoken so freely.

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."

Mr. Tripp tries to debunk the popular opinion among scholars that Lincoln's lifelong depressions were caused by the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge. He writes that at the time she was supposedly involved with Lincoln, she was engaged to John McNamar and that her name appears nowhere in Lincoln's letters.

Mr. Donald also takes issue with the conclusion that Lincoln had a sexual relationship with Derickson, his bodyguard at his presidential retreat, the Soldiers' Home, outside Washington. Mr. Tripp writes that their closeness stirred comment in Washington, and cites a diary entry from Nov. 16, 1862, by Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy. She recounted a friend's report: " '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!" But Mr. Donald writes that "What stuff!" meant she was dismissing the rumor.

Mr. Tripp cites a second description of the relationship in an 1895 history of Derickson's regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, by Thomas Chamberlain, Derickson's commanding officer: "Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the president's confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him and - it is said - making use of his Excellency's night-shirts!"When Derickson was to be transferred, Lincoln pulled strings to keep him. But Mr. Donald wrote that if their relationship was romantic, they would not have separated so casually when Derickson finally left Washington in 1863.

Despite Mr. Donald's criticism, Mr. Tripp has won support from other scholars. Jean H. Baker, a former student of Mr. Donald's and the author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: a Biography" (W. W Norton, 1987), wrote the introduction to the book. She said that Lincoln's homosexuality would explain his tempestuous relationship with Mary Todd, and "some of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship."

"Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached," Ms. Baker said in a telephone interview. "But I previously thought he was detached because he was thinking great things about his court cases, his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation."

"The length of time when these men continued to sleep in the same bed and didn't have to was sort of an impropriety," Ms. Baker said.

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.

Ms. Baker said the focus of 19th-century moral opprobrium was masturbation, not homosexuality. "Masturbation was considered more dangerous," she said. "For homosexuals, there was a cloud over them, but it seldom rained." People, she noted, "were accustomed to these friendships between men."

In researching Lincoln, Mr. Tripp created a vast database of cross-indexed material, now available at the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. He began the book working with the writer Philip Nobile, but they fell out. Mr. Nobile has charged that Mr. Tripp plagiarized material written by him and fabricated evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality.

"Tripp's book is a fraud," Mr. Nobile said in an interview. He declined to say what was fraudulent, however, because he said he was writing his own article about it.

After Mr. Nobile made his charges, Free Press delayed publication. "We made some slight changes," said Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for the publishing house, "and we are satisfied that we are publishing a book that reflects Mr. Tripp's ideas and is supported by his research and belief." The manuscript was edited by Mr. Tripp's friend Lewis Gannett.

Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said that Mr. Tripp's book "will change history."

"It's a revolutionary book because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay," he said. "Now maybe they'll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded."

Michael B. Chesson, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and another former student of Mr. Donald's, wrote an afterword to Mr. Tripp's book supporting his thesis. The book is "enormously important to understanding the whole person," he said in an interview. He likened the criticism to early objections to Fawn Brodie's 1974 biography of Thomas Jefferson in which she claimed that Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings; later genetic studies suggested that they had at least one child together.

Finding the truth is a sacred principal for historians, Mr. Chesson said, adding, "It's incumbent on us as scholars to present to readers material if historians have ignored it or swept it under the rug because they don't agree with it."

Still, if Lincoln was gay, how did it affect his presidency? Ms. Baker said that his outsider status would explain his independence and his ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a homosexual, she said, "he would be on the margins of tradition."

"He is willing to be independent, to do what is right," she said. "It is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior."

-Rudey

Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Can't agree with ya more, DA. Ol' Honest Abe outed after all these years? Dead men tell no tales...

Re: Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Co-Sign

This whole thing sounds ridiculous. Considering the era, and the distance in time from when this research is conducted, its doubtful that Lincoln's alleged homosexuality can be proved, or disproved. The author sounds like he has an agenda, and that he wrote a book to back it up.

That said, if Lincoln was gay, it doesn't really change his legacy. At least it shouldn't.

Not really shocking stuff - the theory has been out there for a while, and there are quite a few gay Republicans. Neither count is cause for a big deal.

If he was, fine, if he wasn't, fine. It doesn't change what he did or what kind of President he was.

Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Well, that's how I feel about William Jefferson Clinton, but I guarentee I'm not in the majority on that one....

Re: Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Now that's a WHOLE other thread...

Re: Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

Lincoln didn't lie under oath though. But, yeah, another thread :D

Re: Re: Re: Re: Abraham Lincoln was a gay republican who approved of same-sex marriage
 

How do you know that?

It puts me in mind of the old joke:

How do you know if a politician is telling a lie?

His mouth is moving.

Nobody else commented on this: The guy outing Lincoln is CA Tripp. The lady who outed Clinton is Linda Tripp. Any relation? Spouses? Or just a bad luck name for Presidents and their sexual lives?

ETA: Oops, misread things a little "the late Tripp"... maybe it's her dad!