Growing Number of Historians Believe Abraham Lincoln Was Gay

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Students around the country are required to memorize his Gettysburg Address. His debates are seen as some of the penultimate political rhetoric in U.S. electoral history. His mug is on the penny, the five-dollar bill, and on Mt. Rushmore. Scores of Republicans proudly boast that they're "the party of Lincoln." And his Emancipation Proclamation makes up one of the foundational documents in the U.S. civil rights narrative.

And he just might have been gay, at least if you look at the scholarship of a cadre of historians. That's not an entirely new revelation, of course. Back in 1926, writer Carl Sandburg speculated over Lincoln's sexual orientation, suggesting that the 16th President "had a streak of lavender," a very 1920s way of saying that Lincoln batted for a certain team. And then several years ago, the late author C.A. Tripp penned a book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, which suggested in vivid detail that Lincoln had a same-sex relationship with a man named Joshua Speed.

Tripp's book, at the time, caught the ire of a number of scholars who believed that he was blowing Lincoln's history of sleeping in the same bed with men, and his penchant for writing poems discussing same-sex love, way out of proportion. But five years later, as Doug Ireland notes in a piece at Gay City News, more and more historians are coming around and starting to see Tripp's claim about Lincoln's homosexuality as worthy of more investigation, if not downright fact.

Take, for instance, Harvard's John Stauffer, who notes in the piece that a new generation of historians believe that the history of Lincoln definitely had a same-sex component.

"We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” Stauffer said. "We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”

Suddenly I'm counting my pennies with a little more pride.

Stauffer's comments in the piece are pretty interesting, if not for the fact that they suggest that within historian circles, folks who dismiss claims about Lincoln's homosexuality might be doing so because of internalized, or not so internalized, homophobia.

"In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own," Stauffer added. "To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

The whole piece over at Gay City News is well worth the read.

Today, we're making a big deal out of people like GOP strategist Ken Mehlman coming out of the closet, or conservative straight allies like Ted Olson, Margaret Hoover, Steve Schmidt, and Christine Todd Whitman, who willingly point their name down to support marriage equality. But what if it turns out that one of America's foremost historical figures, and someone dubbed one of the greatest Presidents our country has ever seen, "had a streak of lavender?"

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