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

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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