Do you believe Abraham Lincoln was gay?

Gay rights activist Larry Kramer has long speculated that Lincoln was gay, claiming in 1999 that he'd discovered Lincoln's love letters to onetime roommate Joshua Speed. The claim is reportedly featured in Kramer's forthcoming history of homosexuality, "The American People," but historian Gabor Boritt called Kramer's assertion "almost certainly…a hoax."

Still, the idea persists. In 2005, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, written by 'Queer Theory' professor C. A. Tripp - a colleague of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey - purported to prove that Lincoln was an active homosexual who married only to conform to 19th-century convention and continued flirting and sleeping with young men throughout his presidency. Tripp went so far as to suggest that Lincoln's sexual indifference is what contributed to his wife's mental illness.

Is it true? And if it is, does it matter? According to Herndon, Lincoln exhibited a 'powerful' attraction to women, and was a regular customer in prairie brothels before his marriage at age thirty-three. His first son was born just nine months after his marriage, which suggests enthusiasm if not experience. Then again, proving that a man loves women isn't the same as proving that he doesn't love men. Maybe it's best to throw up our hands - and remember that Lincoln's sexual orientation is but a small part of his historical legacy.

Chris wrote:Is it true? And if it is, does it matter?

Who knows and not to me.

I don't believe it and I really don't see why it would matter. Love letters to a roommate, this was what 160 years ago? People today look at EVERYTHING differently, what's funny is that for all things Puritanical in appearace being placed back in the Victorian age, the Victorian age wasn't as uptight as Victorian people who exist today.

People considered Cary Grant to be gay due to the fact that he shared a bungalow with another man when he was young. People don't even look at the fact that the uptight censor board Hays office production code 30s and 40s movies were filled with pairs made up of men and boys, teenaged boys didn't want to hang out with girls, they wanted to hang around men. And at the time when you can't even show a man and woman who are married in the same bed, you have men in the same bed, women in the same bed, and nobody has a complaint with that.

The whole thing just reminds me a bit of how Steve McQueen died in 1980 but it was what, almost 30 years after that, when Paul Newman died, that people started saying the two were gay lovers? They couldn't say it when Paul was alive, they had to wait until both were dead, why? Because that way there couldn't be anyone around to refute it, funny, tabloids have plenty of crap to say about people who are still alive but this one they had to wait until both men in question were dead. And here is something that is a matter over 150 years old, DEFINITELY nobody around today to refute it.

Supernova wrote:
The whole thing just reminds me a bit of how Steve McQueen died in 1980 but it was what, almost 30 years after that, when Paul Newman died, that people started saying the two were gay lovers?

Isn't that redundant to say of two men?

Sounds to me like modern propaganda trying to forward some agenda.

Who knows. Lincoln was married and had children, and while gay people have historically married and procreated, his having had significant (and documented) heterosexual relations has to outweigh mere speculation. I don't like it when people try to use possibly misconstrued, subjective and insignificant innuendo as theories about the sexual orientation of long dead public figures. It barely goes anywhere.

No. And I think it's in poor taste to even suggest that he was. Who gives a shit at this point?