Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed Redux Young Mister Lincoln and handsome Joshua Speed lived together and shared a bed for four years above Speed's store. Speed wrote of the hugs and kisses the two shared. As President, Lincoln likely had intimate relationships with members of the military, long before Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Explaining a Presidential Relationship Krissy Clark First, a note about gaydar. You know, radar that detects "gay-ness." The word gaydar, of course, didn't exist back in Abraham Lincoln's time. But if it had, and the facts of Lincoln's life had blipped across its screen, those facts would not have gone unnoticed. Fact number one, explains historian Jean Baker: Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, a shop keeper from Springfield, Ill. Lincoln was a young lawyer who'd just come into town, she explains. "Didn't have much money. Had all of his possessions in two saddlebags. He went to Joshua Speed's store. Now, Lincoln didn't know Speed." But Speed knew of Lincoln. He was gaining quite a reputation for his powerful speeches in the state legislature. "And so," Baker says, "Lincoln arrives, and says he doesn't have enough money to buy a mattress, and so Speed immediately says, 'Oh, why don't you share mine?'" Lincoln and Speed bedded down together above the store, in a room they shared with a few other bachelors. Four years later, Lincoln had made more than enough money to buy a mattress, but he was still there. Lincoln eventually moved out, and got married. Still, he and Speed stayed devoted friends. They wrote tender letters to each other. Baker says Lincoln signed his "Yours, Forever." But wait, there's more: Lincoln's late-in-life marriage at 32; his awkwardness around women; the poem he penned as a young man about two boys named Biley and Natty, who get married and have a baby. "The egg it is laid," Lincoln wrote, "but Natty's afraid, that the shell is so soft it never will hatch." And then there's David V. Derickson, one of Lincoln's body guards once he became president. Derickson "ate with Lincoln when Mary Lincoln was away, slept in the bed when she was away, and once, according to another officer, was discovered wearing Lincoln's night shirt," says Baker. And yet, the surprising thing about Lincoln's personal life is not the male bed-fellows, the nightshirts, or the homo-erotic poetry. The surprising thing is that none of those intimate details seemed to matter back then. One woman, the wife of a Washington bureaucrat, wrote a diary entry about the bodyguard rumors she'd heard: "'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!" But, in the gossip department, that was it. Now, imagine how America would react tomorrow if we heard George Bush was sharing a bed with his bodyguard. His masculinity would be questioned. A fuse would blow in the country's collective gaydar. But in 1862? Baker says, Lincoln's close relations with men inspired more of a collective yawn. "In his time," she says, "Lincoln was mocked for many, many things. But he was never, never mocked for this." Of course there's a huge controversy over how to interpret the details of Lincoln's personal life. "I think what Lincoln's experience really alerts us to," says George Chauncey, a historian at Yale University," is that he and the people that lived in his time lived in a really different emotional and erotic universe than we do today." For example, plenty of men shared beds in those days purely out of convenience, explains Chauncey. "You have to remember it was a much less rich society than this. There were a lot fewer beds to go around." You couldn't just go buy one at Ikea. And back then, there was nothing un-masculine about writing tender things to a male friend. "So was Lincoln gay or wasn't he? No one knows. But that's not the most interesting question, says Chauncey. What interests Chauncey is this: when did American's start caring about who was gay and who wasn't? When did who you sleep with start to define who you are? Chauncey says the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality just didn't exist in most of the 19th century in the way that they do for us today. Now, he says, "They stand as really powerful boundaries as we're trying to think about who we are sexually." But back then, nobody defined themselves around those boundaries. Of course, America has always liked its men manly, and its women feminine. Sodomy laws have been on the books since the beginning. But society's rules around what was proper masculine behavior took a dramatic shift in the early 1900s. To illustrate this point, Chauncey takes out some old pictures of the men's football team at Yale. First he shows photographs from the 1880s. "They've got their arms all over each other, they're leaning into each other. Touching each other's knees." And then, around the 1920s, the poses start to change. "And suddenly they're putting their hands clasped before them, or on their hips, or clasped behind them. Anywhere but on the other men around them," Chauncey laughs. "And I think that that sort of records a growing anxiety around physical as well as emotional intimacy between men." So how, in just a few decades, did America go from a place where manly men could openly share beds, to a place where male teammates kept their distance in front of the camera? And when did figuring out who's gay and who's not become a national obsession? It's hard to say exactly. But Chauncey has two possible ingredients: an increased awareness of sex, thanks to Freud. And, Coney Island. Or, at least, the rise of places like Coney Island. "Commercial amusements," Chauncey explains, "dance halls, certain kinds of restaurants and so forth. Places where younger men and women were encouraged to spend time together and develop partnerships in a way that wouldn't have been true in an earlier generation, when people were expected to remain fairly sex segregated." By the 1920s, men and women had more places to flirt, to hang out, to share the same social space. And there were more chances to scrutinize how we behaved around each other. For men, it wasn't enough to be just one of the guys anymore. Now you had to broadcast your manliness -- a manliness that was becoming all wrapped up in how attracted you were to women. Of course, even in Lincoln's day, there was at least one thing that could get a man immediately suspected of being un-masculine, deviant. Not voting. "If you didn't go to vote," explains historian Jean Baker, "you were called a 'Nancy Girl.'" Voting was, after all, something only men could do at the time, she says. "And party politics was an entirely masculine affair, built around parades and solidarity among men." The word homosexuality didn't exist back in Lincoln's day. But more than that, the concept didn't exist. People didn't have sexual identities, says Baker. "Today if you ask someone who they are, you might get the answer, 'I'm gay.' If you ask someone in the 19th century who they were, they'd say 'I'm a Republican from the state of Illinois.'" So even if Lincoln was "gay," in the way we think about it today, his contemporaries cared much more about his political identity than his sexual one. More: http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/02/15/lincoln/ Lincoln's 'Secret Gay Life' Controversy by Kilian Melloy EDGE Contributor Friday Feb 13, 2009 (Source:Portrait by Alexander Gardner, 1863) With the occasion of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, rumors about the sexuality of one of America's greatest presidents have resurfaced, charging up both left and right The Feb. 12 episode of The Early Show on CBS addressed the long-simmering issue, according to a news item at right-wing Web site News Busters that same day. According to Jeff Sammons, a professor of history with New York University, Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with another man, Joshua Speed, for four years, beginning when Lincoln was 28 and Speed 23--a well known fact that is not in dispute in and of itself. But what right and left contend over is the question of whether two men sharing a bed, even over a long period of time, indicates a sexual relationship, or was merely a pragmatic response to the times, when living spaces were often not well heated and such sleeping arrangements between men did not necessarily carry a hint of anything more. Calling speculations about Lincoln's sexuality "revisionist rumors," the Newsbusters article also said that the segment called into question whether Lincoln, credited as the emancipator of America's slaves, might not have been a racist who viewed African-Americans as "inferior." The site posted a transcript of the exchange between Sammons and host Maggie Rodriguez, in which, among other topics, the two discuss Lincoln's sexuality, with Sammons saying, "One of the very interesting stories about Abraham Lincoln is that he might have been gay. "Lincoln actually did sleep in the same bed with a gentleman for a four-year period." Responded Rodriguez, "So the question of Abraham Lincoln's sexuality still remains a mystery." Or, at the least, a topic capable of generating vigorous controversy, year after year. As far back as 1999, the media have been reporting on the conflicting views of Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, with a May 3, 1999 Salon.com reporting on a still-unpublished book by GLBT equality advocate and screenwriter Larry Kramer, who claims that Lincoln's cohabitation with Speed, which took place in Springfield, Ill., was more than a practical solution to a housing problem. The Salon.com article notes that, What [no major historian] questions is that Lincoln and Speed's years of living together cemented a friendship unparalleled in its intimacy and tenderness in Lincoln's life," though "So far, all major historians have stopped short of intimating that Lincoln was ever involved in a romantic affair with a man--in fact, they explicitly discourage such interpretations." That hasn't stopped the issue from turning into a n intermittent point of contention in the so-called culture wars, with gays (conservative and liberal alike) claiming Lincoln as one of their own--the Salon.com article references a comment by one of the Log Cabin Republicans to the effect that Lincoln, credited with creating the modern Republican party, was gay. Others are unconvinced that the four years the two men spent living together, the friendship they enjoyed for years afterwards, and the intimate letters they wrote to one another mean anything more or less than that the two were best friends--straight best friends, at that. Salon.com quotes Kramer as saying, "There's no question in my mind he was a gay man and a totally gay man." Added Kramer, "It wasn't just a period, but something that went on his whole life." Ten years later, with Kramer's book not yet available and questions about the authenticity of the evidence that Kramer has said he possesses, the go-to book on the subject remains C. A, Tripp's "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," which declares that Lincoln was what Kinsey wold have called a "5" on his sexuality scale: "predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual," as Tripp sums it up. Tripp also points to Lincoln's bodyguard, Capt. David Derickson, who for about a year and a half, proponents of the gay Lincoln theory speculate, may have been Lincoln's lover. Though the issue has gained wider recognition (and controversy) since the mid-1990s, historians have grappled with the question of Lincoln's sexual proclivities for far longer, according to an article at the History News Network Website posted on June 10, 2001. One famous, if non-historian, text that is often referenced is Carl Sandberg's poem "The Prairie Years," which says that Lincoln's friendship with Speed had a "streak of lavender." To some, uch rush Limbaugh, suggestions that Lincoln may have been gay or bisexual constitute an attempt to diminish Lincoln. Gays bristle at the suggestion that to be gay is somehow inferior or reduces the historic significance of Lincoln's tenure as president. As with other notable figures from history that gays have embraced--Alexander the Great, for example--there's always the impenetrable mystery of how the men in question saw themselves. "Gay" and "straight" as we currently understand them are modern classifications; it may be that the men both sides look on now would note have understood or even particularly cared about the distinction. It's also possible that in the future the current debate will seem trivial, even wasteful. More: http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=87241 For me the most relevant part of the article was the questions about male affection today and the change over time. This is important to me because as a Hispanic Gay man I have found that there seem to be male Cultures in the U.S.A and I have been consciously border crossing into and out of these American Male cultures. I have very intimate friendships with men most of whom are straight. There is more awareness about homosexulity but it does not always translate into understanding. -- Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time. Have a great day, Tommy -- Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time. Have a great day, Tommy -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more.
