In the column mention is made of a book that gay-activist Larry Kramer was writing in which he claimed he would publish letters, etc proving Lincoln was gay. In 1999 he read extracts from these purported letters but by the time Cecil wrote this column in 2004 Kramer’s book had still not been published.
So did it ever appear or did we hear any more from Kramer concerning his so-called evidence?
It looks like he did write a book, but more about “gay history” in general, although he mentions Lincoln.
I’ve never heard of this guy before. I must say, he seems to have something of a monomania on the subject.
It turns out that Wikipedia has a whole article devoted to Lincoln’s sexuality in specific. There’s a little more information there about those alledged letters.
I’ve seen a half-decent case for James Buchanan (who, to be sure, isn’t a President that anybody would want to claim as an icon, considering how he is, at least for the moment, a serious contender for the “worst President ever” label), but the rest of the list sounds like this guy was just drawing names out of a (stovepipe?) hat.
I guess I would simply ask in response to the proposed question, “Who cares?” (whether or not Lincoln was gay…)
A lot of people. The mere fact that the United States has had a gay president, particularly at that time in our history, is in and of itself very interesting from a sociological standpoint. Obviously he was not openly gay, but it is interesting nonetheless.
It must be noted there hasn’t been a peep from the Lincoln, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jackson, Pierce, Buchanan, Twain, Melville, and Nixon camps since this revelation.
Gay activists are free to draw their own conclusions from this silence.
How about Melville? I mean, have you READ “Billy Budd?” :eek:
Based on the voyage of the Pequod I assumed Melville was not as other men were, but then it turns out he was married…
… with children.
This could be the break the Douglas campaign was looking for.
In light of the fact that any of our presidents in the past could have been gay (or bi) but we simply didn’t know it at the time and don’t have sufficient evidence to conclude it now, I would postulate that speculation on whether or not Lincoln was gay is pretty meaningless.
Further, and I find this important, as long as focusing on someone’s sexual preference is important, then it will remain important for people to focus on that, which in my mind is not a good thing. No one knows here if I’m gay, bi, or dogian, and as a result of that fact, the issue never comes up in discussion. 
I think it’s Buell who would have benefitted most! 
Yeah I was thinking this too , who care !
What, gay people don’t count?
The general historical consensus on Larry Kramer’s claims is that he’s as full of shit as Elvis after a 5 day cheese orgy. (About the only really hoest thing about Kramer’s writing is in his autobiographical play Normal Heart where he was honest enough to include that other AIDS activists considered him as much of a major league asshole as anti-gay activists did.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln and Speed experimented while both were bachelors in the same bed at night (though sharing a bed then was equivalent to roommates now), and it is certainly possible Lincoln was gay. It might explain his nervous breakdown on the eve of his marriage, but there are other possible explanations as well. The short answer is we can’t know for certain (I seriously doubt he would have held a homoerotic pose for long enough to take a picture in the 1850s) and it didn’t have anything to do with his presidency anymore than if we could prove or disprove that Lincoln loved big hipped redheads. I could make a case for Lincoln and Jefferson Davis being nephew and uncle that would have at least as much circumstantial evidence for it (Jefferson Davis’s older brother was a notorious horndog who had at least one illegitimate child in Kentucky before Lincoln was born) but again, it’s trivia, not integral, and to prove it w**ould take a ridiculous amount of work for no substantive gain to knowledge. (Lincoln’s depression, relationship with his father, and ribald sense of humor were way more interesting.)
His marriage was not the happiest union, but I think in his way he did love her. I think Mary Todd gets a bit of a bad rap from history- yes, she was a virago, but without her I doubt he’d have been president and she lived before medication that would have helped and had LOTS of external circumstances that would have made anybody depressed. They probably stopped having sex following her last pregnancy as doctors told her another childbirth might very well end her life, and abstinence was the only sure birth control, so they were both probably sexually unfulfilled by the White House. His theorized homosexuality could be worked into his marriage’s unhappiness in a novel, but not into a reputable history book.
Buchanan, as mentioned, almost certainly was romantically involved with William Rufus Devane King.
I seem to remember that Garfield acknowledged a romantic fling with a man in college, but he also had an affair with a woman. (Garfield’s main similarity to Lincoln was his log cabin origins.)
Eleanor Roosevelt’s romantic relationship with Lorena Hickock is accepted even by some of her descendants.
That’s pretty much it for anything provable LGBT nature in White House history. It could well be half the presidents were flaming queens, but the evidence simply doesn’t prove it.
Alexander Hamilton’s letters to John Laurens are also cited as evidence of androphilia though he also had a (famous and disastrous) extramarital affair with a woman.
I thought the historical opinion on Hamilton was that the extramarital affair was with the male party, which is why the blackmail was done. Affair with the wife would not have been that scandalous in that relatively permissive era nor surprising since Hamilton was known to prefer other mens wives anyway, thus was merely the “cover story”.
Another one is Eleanor Roosevelt. Her letters are while not absolute proof; interesting. Add to the fact she is known to have disliked sex with FDR (one of the reasons he strayed) and you have a compelling case for if not Lesbianism, fluidity?
OTH, she was known to be rather cold with pretty much all her loved ones (except her little brother and no not in that way), as her kids recalled; so maybe it was that which led to marital breakdown.
It’s a theory. I’ve never understood why an extramarital affair was such a huge thing: in France it certainly would have met with an expression of “I’m waiting, what’s the scandalous thing you were going to tell me?” and Ben Franklin would have probably asked “Mrs. Reynolds… which one was she? Do you have a miniature to jog my memory…”. But officially, his affair was with Mrs. Reynolds, whose husband blackmailed him thereafter.
Alan Turing was gay and he could count quite well.
I thought he had a machine to do that for him.
Pretty sure I read Gore Vidal saying that a gay encounter was in fact the case. Then again, that dude probably thought that Augustus’s statue had gay lovers.
What’s your opinion on Mrs Roosevelt?