What Would Lincoln Do?

Excerpt from an essay by Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry, on HuffPo:

Abraham Lincoln may have been the first American to write about a same-sex couple getting married. His 1829 poem recounting the marriage of Nate and Billy was "perhaps the most explicit literary reference to actual homosexual relations in 19th century America." Lincoln's most important early biographer, William Herndon, initially included the poem in his Life of Lincoln, but as so often with gay subjects, it was subsequently omitted and largely ignored by later scholars.

Recently there has been greater willingness to debate evidence that our greatest president may himself have had same-sex attraction and even acted on it, as the iconic Lincoln biographer, Carl Sandburg, intimated in 1924 when he wrote of Lincoln's "streaks of lavender." In 2005, C.A. Tripp's Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln marshaled accounts of Lincoln's relations with men such as Captain David Derickson, including a November 1862 diary entry by the wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy that reads, "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!" Like other scholars, Tripp explored Lincoln's singularly intimate relationship with Joshua Speed, who told Herndon, "If I had not been married & happy -- far more happy than I ever expected to be -- [Lincoln] would not have married."

But it's not because of Lincoln's sexual orientation or other "stuff" that February 12, Lincoln's birthday, has for 12 years now been the centerpiece of National Freedom to Marry Week. Lincoln's strongest connection to the freedom to marry cause lies in the values he embodied in his life, and embodies in ours. He was committed to equality, freedom, and lifting people up. He called Americans to the "better angels of our nature," and he combined a deep moral integrity with a determined and strategic focus on achieving what is most important and right.

In the wake of last November's Proposition 8 temporarily halting marriages in California, and with marriage equality shimmering within reach in other states such as New York and New Jersey, gay and non-gay people and organizations across the country will spend Freedom to Marry Week asking our fellow citizens to, in Lincoln's words, "think anew" about how exclusion from marriage harms gay families while helping no one. Freedom to Marry Week in this Lincoln bicentennial year recalls his admonition, "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

Note from your Head Trucker: Nothing is proven about Lincoln's sexuality; read the Wikipedia article linked to the title of Tripp's book above for more insight into the speculations. I can testify from personal experience that bed sharing with a friend or relative - either male-male or female-female - was quite an ordinary custom in the Deep South well into my lifetime, if the necessity arose, and nobody thought a thing about it.

For one thing, people weren't nearly as affluent as they are nowadays; folks had much smaller houses and a lot less stuff, including extra beds. For another thing, although people knew there was such a thing as homosexuality, and regarded it as the most perverted, detestable kind of sin, you never ever saw any homosexuals; nobody at all was "out." So the very strong default assumption was that everybody was straight, and thus not even tempted to get queer in the sheets. Nowadays, I suppose people think differently, but that's the way things were until the 1970's, at least.

The reality, of course, is that some people did have gay sex back in the day, but they would have been very, very careful to keep it covered up; to do otherwise would mean your family would disown you, your friends wouldn't speak to you, and you would be liable to be locked up in jail or sent off to an insane asylum. Homosexuality was, let's not forget, officially a sin, a crime, and a mental illness, and society was not at all slow to punish you for all three.

Despite all that, gay love did sometimes bloom in secret - go read up on all Walt Whitman's lovers, for gosh sakes - but even Whitman was ultra-discreet about his sexuality in public (notwithstanding the allusions in his poetry) all his life. It was a very different world, and all the stuff about Lincoln has to be taken in that context. I'd love to know that he was gay, or bi, but - it's all merely speculation yet.