1863 portrait by Alexander Gardner, public domain
Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American? The subject of the 16th President’s possible queerness has been debated for years. There was that youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four years. In 1999, The late, great writer and Gay Rights activist Larry Kramer claimed that he had uncovered new sources which shed fresh light on Lincoln’s sexuality, including Speed’s diary and letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his relationship with Lincoln. These items were supposedly discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived together and are now in a private collection.
Speed had heard the young Lincoln speak when Lincoln was running for election to the Illinois legislature. In 1837, Lincoln arrived at Springfield, the new state capital, as a young lawyer when he met Speed. Lincoln sublet Joshua’s apartment above Speed’s store, sharing a bed and becoming his lifelong best friend.
In 1840, Speed announced plans to sell his store and return to his parent’s large plantation house near Louisville, Kentucky. Lincoln, notoriously awkward and shy around women, was at the time engaged to Mary Todd, a temperamental society girl, also from Kentucky. As the dates approached for both Speed’s departure and Lincoln’s marriage, Lincoln broke the engagement on the planned day of the wedding. Speed departed, leaving Lincoln deep in depression and guilt.
In July 1841, Lincoln, still depressed, decided to visit Speed in Kentucky. Speed welcomed Lincoln to his house where he spent a month putting himself back together.
Speed and Lincoln disagreed over slavery, especially Speed’s argument that Northerners shouldn’t care about the issue. In 1855, Lincoln wrote to Speed:
“You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it. I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet. In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio, there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continued torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings.”
Historian C.A. Tripp also asserted that Lincoln was queer in his book The Intimate World Of Abraham Lincoln (2004). Tripp was a psychologist and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, who died in 2003, two weeks after finishing his book, scoured nearly every word ever written by and about Lincoln for clues. His conclusion was that America’s greatest President, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man.
Tripp wrote The Homosexual Matrix (1975), a book that disputes the Freudian notion of homosexuality as a personality disorder. He says that early biographers of Lincoln, including Carl Sandburg, sensed Lincoln’s gayness. In the preface to Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years And The War Years (1926), 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 wrote that Lincoln and Speed had “streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets“. Tripp said that references to Lincoln’s possible homosexuality were cut in the 1954 abridged version of the Sandburg biography. Tripp maintains that other researchers also found evidence that Lincoln was gay but shied away from defining it as such or omitted crucial details.
Daguerreotype of Lincoln, then Congressman-elect from Illinois, 1846 / 1847
Tripp’s book cites Lincoln’s extreme privacy and accounts by those who knew him well. Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, wrote: “He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me…” Lincoln was terrified of marriage to Todd, although they eventually had four children.
It’s true that in frontier times, men shared beds. Plus, Lincoln alluded openly to their relationship, writing: “I slept with Joshua for four years…”. If they were lovers, Lincoln probably wouldn’t have spoken so freely.
Yet, Lincoln had intimate relationships with other men, including Billy Greene, with whom Lincoln shared a bed in New Salem, Illinois. Greene later wrote that that Lincoln’s thighs “…were as perfect as a human being could be“. Lincoln’s fellow lawyer Henry C. Whitney observed that Lincoln “wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity“.
Then there is also Lincoln’s humorous poem 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 girls he had tried on every Side/ but none could he get to agree/ all was in vain he went home again/and says that he is married to Natty.”
Tripp debunks the popular opinion among scholars that Lincoln’s lifelong depression was 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 never appears in Lincoln’s letters.
Lincoln seems to have had a sexual relationship with Captain David Derickson, his bodyguard at his presidential retreat outside Washington. Their closeness scandalized Washington DC. In 1862, Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy, wrote:
“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!”
In an 1895 history of Derickson’s regiment, the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Derickson’s commanding officer writes:
“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 going to be transferred, Lincoln pulled strings to keep him.
In Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987), historian Jean Baker writes that Lincoln’s homosexuality explains his tempestuous relationship with Mary Todd as:
“…some of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship. Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached. 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.”
The question of Lincoln’s sexuality is complicated by the fact that the word homosexual was not seen into print in English until 1892 and that “gayness” is a modern concept.
Kramer said of Tripp’s book:
“It’s a revolutionary book because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay. Now maybe they’ll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded.”
Remember, Fawn Brodie‘s 1974 biography of Thomas Jefferson claimed that Jefferson had children with his slave Sally Hemings; and plenty of people refused to believe it.
Baker writes that Lincoln had an outsider status which explains his independence and his ability to take anti-Establishment positions like the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. As a gay man, she said:
“…he would be on the margins of tradition. He is willing to be independent, to do what is right. It is invested in his soul, in his psyche and in his behavior.”
The romantic relationship of Lincoln and Speed is covered in Jonathan Katz‘s book Love Stories: Sex between Men Before Homosexuality (2012) with a collection of their letters.
In Kramer’s 800-page The American People: Volume One, Search For My Heart, he writes of the secret gay life of figures from Alexander Hamilton, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville.
1857 portrait by Alexander Hesler, public domain
Kramer, who was the co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (Act Up), and the plays The Normal Heart and The Destiny Of Me, said his book was designed to counter what he feels to be the exclusion of gays and gay life from history books.
Kramer:
“Most histories have been written by straight people. There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning. It’s ridiculous to think we haven’t been here forever.”
