Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln

[7] Historian and psychoanalyst Charles B. Strozier believes that it is unlikely for Sandburg to have used that phrase with homosexual implications, suggesting that he instead used the term to note "Speed's and Lincoln's softer, more vulnerable sides, which shielded their vigorous masculinity".

[8] In 1999, playwright and activist Larry Kramer claimed that he had uncovered previously unknown documents while conducting research for his work-in-progress, The American People: A History.

According to Kramer, the unseen documents reportedly provided explicit details of a relationship between Lincoln and Speed, and they currently reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa.

"[11] C. A. Tripp also expressed his skepticism over Kramer's discovery, writing, "Seeing is believing, should that diary ever show up; the passages claimed for it have not the slightest Lincolnian ring.

[13][14] Time magazine addressed the book as part of a cover article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.

Shenk dismissed Tripp's conclusions, saying that arguments for Lincoln's homosexuality were "based on a tortured misreading of conventional 19th century sleeping arrangements".

[15] But historian Michael B. Chesson said that Tripp's work was significant, commenting that "any open-minded reader who has reached this point may well have a reasonable doubt about the nature of Lincoln's sexuality".

"[20] In her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin argues: Their intimacy is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable.

Scholar Douglas Wilson writes that Lincoln as a young man displayed robustly heterosexual behavior, including telling stories to his friends of his interactions with women.

The girls he had tried on every side, But none he could get to agree; All was in vain, he went home again, And since that he's married to Natty.This poem was included in the first edition of the 1889 biography of Lincoln by his friend and colleague William Herndon.

Baker writes that there are "almost no gynecological conditions resulting from childbirth" other than a prolapsed uterus (which would have produced other noticeable effects on Mrs. Lincoln) that would have prevented intercourse, and in the 1850s, "many middle-class couples slept in separate bedrooms" as a matter of custom adopted from the English.

The spacing of the Lincoln children (Robert in 1843, Eddie in 1846, Willie in 1850, and Tad in 1853) is consistent with some type of planning and would have required "an intimacy about sexual relations that for aspiring couples meant shared companionate power over reproduction".

[33] Historians such as David Herbert Donald point out that it was not unusual at that time for two men to share a bed due to myriad circumstances, without anything sexual being implied, for a night or two when nothing else was available.

Tripp discusses three men at length and possible sustained relationships: Joshua Speed, William Greene, and Charles Derickson.

Speed's immediate, casual offer, and his later report of it, suggests that men's public bed-sharing was not then often explicitly understood as conducive to forbidden sexual experiments.

Katz states that referring to present-day concepts of "homo, hetero, and bi distorts our present understanding of Lincoln and Speed's experiences.

"[19] He states that, rather than there being "an unchanging essence of homosexuality and heterosexuality," people throughout history "continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts".

[19] Some correspondence of the period, such as that between Thomas Jefferson Withers and James Henry Hammond, may provide evidence of a sexual dimension to some secret same-sex bed-sharing.

[40] Joshua Speed and Lincoln corresponded about their impending marriages, and Gore Vidal regarded their letters to each other as having evinced a degree of anxiety about being able to perform sexually on their wedding nights that indicated a homosexual relationship had once existed between them.

Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, the wife of Lincoln's naval aide, wrote in her diary for November 16, 1862, "Tish says, 'Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.'