Was Lincoln Gay?
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
Published: January 9, 2005, Sunday
THE INTIMATE WORLD
OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By C. A. Tripp.
Edited by Lewis Gannett.
343 pp. Free Press. $27.
THIS book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge) or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to make sense of it.
Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book, which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have been overlooked by less fevered minds.
Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he wasin no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp.
Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people. In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing.
Six years later, Lincoln moved to Springfield, where he met Joshua Speed, who became a close friend; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two early biographers, called him ''the only -- as he was certainly the last -- intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.'' Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed in Speed's store for four years (for two of those years, two other young men shared the room, though not the bed). More important than the sleeping arrangements was the tone of their friendship. Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's wedding in 1842 are as fretful as those of a general before a dubious engagement. Several of them are signed ''Yours forever.''
By contrast, Lincoln's relations with women are either problematic or distant. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of a New Salem tavernkeeper with whom Lincoln boarded in 1832. Three years later she died of malaria and typhoid. Lincoln biographers have been feuding for decades over whether Lincoln loved her. Tripp, naturally, sides with the skeptics. He concedes that Lincoln was devastated by her death, but argues that it was death itself that distressed him.
In 1836 Lincoln courted Mary Owens. Tripp correctly characterizes his diffident suit as ''reaching forward while sharply leaning back.'' In 1837 Owens broke the relationship off. Lincoln then wrote a jeering letter to a friend, explaining that he had lost interest because Owens was so fat. ''I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff.'' The nervous hostility of this letter, disguised as humor, is cringe-making. (Tripp finds it hilarious.)
The longest relationship of Lincoln's life was with his wife, Mary Todd, whom he married in 1842; they had four children, on whom Lincoln doted. Mary Lincoln's character is also dark and bloody ground for biographers. Tripp unhelpfully suggests that she had a psychopathic personality, like ''various outlaw types, from Hitler down to myriad petty criminals.'' Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening -- remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent.
Tripp highlights two relations with men from Lincoln's presidency. Col. Elmer Ellsworth was a flashy young drillmaster, ''the greatest little man I ever met,'' as Lincoln put it. Lincoln recruited him to his Springfield lawoffice, made him part of his presidential campaign and gave him a high military post as war loomed. A few weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, Ellsworth was killed hauling a rebel flag down from a hotel in Alexandria, Va. Lincoln was shattered.
For nearly eight months in 1862-3, Capt. David Derickson led the brigade that guarded Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home in the District of Columbia, the Camp David of the day. Derickson, in the words of his regiment's history, published three decades later, ''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 shirt!''
Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so erratic that the reader is often left on his own. One wonders: What does it mean to be homosexual? Not all of the men Lincoln admired were. Ellsworth seems straight as a ruler: he was engaged to a woman he passionately loved when he died. Even Derickson married twice and fathered 10 children (one son was serving in his unit while he was sleeping with Lincoln). Tripp argues that a cultural innocence -- the word ''homosexual'' had not yet been coined -- allowed acts of physical closeness between men that had no deeper meaning, as well as acts that did but could escape scrutiny. We know more than our ancestors, and our reward is that, in some ways, we may do less. In any case, on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back. Their words tell us more thantheir sleeping arrangements.
What does Lincoln's erotic life tell us about Lincoln? For a gregarious, popular man, he had few intimates (Tripp's very title is a misnomer). Like many secretive types -- Benjamin Franklin comes to mind -- he kept the world at bay with a screen of banter. Yet behind the laughs lay an almost bottomless sadness, and sympathy for those he saw as fellow sufferers. There were many Lincolns: the joker, the pol, the logician, the skeptical theologian. But the man of sorrows may be the most important. ''The president has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought which is his most valuable mental attribute,'' as his secretary of state, William Seward, said. Desiring what he could not consistently have did not make him grieve -- what Virgil called the tears of things did that -- but it may have deepened his grief.
Towering above these Lincolns is the man who saw liberty and equality as facets of the same thing, and who maintained his (he called it his and the founders') vision in the face of Northern confusion and Southern fury. This is the Lincoln that matters. The rest is biography.
Richard Brookhiser is the author of ''Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution.''
----------------------------------------
The article below is from NYTimes.com
Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
December 16, 2004
By DINITIA SMITH
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 anew 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 withhim.' 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 supportfrom 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'sfriend 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."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
Published: January 9, 2005, Sunday
THE INTIMATE WORLD
OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By C. A. Tripp.
Edited by Lewis Gannett.
343 pp. Free Press. $27.
THIS book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge) or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to make sense of it.
Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book, which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have been overlooked by less fevered minds.
Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he wasin no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp.
Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people. In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing.
Six years later, Lincoln moved to Springfield, where he met Joshua Speed, who became a close friend; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two early biographers, called him ''the only -- as he was certainly the last -- intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.'' Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed in Speed's store for four years (for two of those years, two other young men shared the room, though not the bed). More important than the sleeping arrangements was the tone of their friendship. Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's wedding in 1842 are as fretful as those of a general before a dubious engagement. Several of them are signed ''Yours forever.''
By contrast, Lincoln's relations with women are either problematic or distant. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of a New Salem tavernkeeper with whom Lincoln boarded in 1832. Three years later she died of malaria and typhoid. Lincoln biographers have been feuding for decades over whether Lincoln loved her. Tripp, naturally, sides with the skeptics. He concedes that Lincoln was devastated by her death, but argues that it was death itself that distressed him.
In 1836 Lincoln courted Mary Owens. Tripp correctly characterizes his diffident suit as ''reaching forward while sharply leaning back.'' In 1837 Owens broke the relationship off. Lincoln then wrote a jeering letter to a friend, explaining that he had lost interest because Owens was so fat. ''I knew she was oversize, but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff.'' The nervous hostility of this letter, disguised as humor, is cringe-making. (Tripp finds it hilarious.)
The longest relationship of Lincoln's life was with his wife, Mary Todd, whom he married in 1842; they had four children, on whom Lincoln doted. Mary Lincoln's character is also dark and bloody ground for biographers. Tripp unhelpfully suggests that she had a psychopathic personality, like ''various outlaw types, from Hitler down to myriad petty criminals.'' Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening -- remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent.
Tripp highlights two relations with men from Lincoln's presidency. Col. Elmer Ellsworth was a flashy young drillmaster, ''the greatest little man I ever met,'' as Lincoln put it. Lincoln recruited him to his Springfield lawoffice, made him part of his presidential campaign and gave him a high military post as war loomed. A few weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, Ellsworth was killed hauling a rebel flag down from a hotel in Alexandria, Va. Lincoln was shattered.
For nearly eight months in 1862-3, Capt. David Derickson led the brigade that guarded Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home in the District of Columbia, the Camp David of the day. Derickson, in the words of his regiment's history, published three decades later, ''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 shirt!''
Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so erratic that the reader is often left on his own. One wonders: What does it mean to be homosexual? Not all of the men Lincoln admired were. Ellsworth seems straight as a ruler: he was engaged to a woman he passionately loved when he died. Even Derickson married twice and fathered 10 children (one son was serving in his unit while he was sleeping with Lincoln). Tripp argues that a cultural innocence -- the word ''homosexual'' had not yet been coined -- allowed acts of physical closeness between men that had no deeper meaning, as well as acts that did but could escape scrutiny. We know more than our ancestors, and our reward is that, in some ways, we may do less. In any case, on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back. Their words tell us more thantheir sleeping arrangements.
What does Lincoln's erotic life tell us about Lincoln? For a gregarious, popular man, he had few intimates (Tripp's very title is a misnomer). Like many secretive types -- Benjamin Franklin comes to mind -- he kept the world at bay with a screen of banter. Yet behind the laughs lay an almost bottomless sadness, and sympathy for those he saw as fellow sufferers. There were many Lincolns: the joker, the pol, the logician, the skeptical theologian. But the man of sorrows may be the most important. ''The president has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought which is his most valuable mental attribute,'' as his secretary of state, William Seward, said. Desiring what he could not consistently have did not make him grieve -- what Virgil called the tears of things did that -- but it may have deepened his grief.
Towering above these Lincolns is the man who saw liberty and equality as facets of the same thing, and who maintained his (he called it his and the founders') vision in the face of Northern confusion and Southern fury. This is the Lincoln that matters. The rest is biography.
Richard Brookhiser is the author of ''Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution.''
----------------------------------------
The article below is from NYTimes.com
Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln's Legend
December 16, 2004
By DINITIA SMITH
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 anew 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 withhim.' 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 supportfrom 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'sfriend 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."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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