Was Abe Lincoln Gay?

[villager]

send this to all your Freeper/Fundie/Repubbie "friends"...:

Was Abe Lincoln Gay?

The blockbuster book that will change America’s history

by Doug Ireland



If the loving heart of the Great Emancipator found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex, it would certainly be a stunning rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes. And a forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp — The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published in the new year by Free Press — makes a powerful case that Lincoln was a lover of men.

Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor and author of the 1975 best-seller The Homosexual Matrix, which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and natural occurrence.

In his book on Lincoln, Tripp draws on his years with Kinsey, who, he wrote, "confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual component in a person’s life from none to entirely homosexual. By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 — predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual."

Tripp also found, based on multiple historical accounts, that Lincoln attained puberty unusually early, by the age of 9 or 10 — early sexualization being a prime Kinsey indicator for same-sex proclivities. Even Lincoln’s stepmother admitted in a post-assassination interview that young Abe "never took much interest in the girls." And Tripp buttresses his findings that Lincoln was a same-sex lover with important new historical contributions.

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http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/50/news-ireland2.php

[DianeG5385]

1. Aren't we 150 years too late to figure that out??

Culturally in the 19th century, men "friends" were not considered a bad thing. They were wayy too worried about female chastity and how to dampen desire.

[villager]

2. Not if it changes the level of tolerance in this country...

Besides, you should read more of the article:

One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe (however obliquely) the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the tome titled The Prairie Years (1926), Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets." "I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours," Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And again, "You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting." In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the "lust at first sight" encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) "yours forever" — a salutation Lincoln never even used to his wife. Speed himself acknowledged that "No two men were ever so intimate." And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.

<snip>

[Journeyman]

4. Serious scholars of Mr Lincoln's life. . .

give little credence to Mr Sandburg's hagiography. Though beautifully written it is deficient in scholarship.

[villager]

6. it's not just based on Sandburg...

Read the whole article

[progressivedancer]

3. well

as a gay man I don't give a damn.

[villager]

7. you should

the concept of Lincoln being gay would force a lot of bigots to perhaps reconsider

[The Icon Painter]

9. Reconsider?

I doubt it. Don't you know they never make mistakes? If Lincoln had relations with forty men in front of their pulpit, they would simply pray that he be "born again" which would surely turn him around and save his soul. They are impenetrable, the bastards. Living in their world of unreality, they recognize neither fact not scholarship. :-(

[villager]

11. that's true, they'd just shut it out and wait for the rapture...

...still, if it became an essentially known fact, it would have to bug 'em...

[soothsayer]

5. it always cracks me up to think that Lincoln had a really high pitched

voice. He's never portrayed that way, but it's true. He NEVER would have gotten elected in this day and age....!

[bloom]

8. Freeper brother already hates Lincoln re-> Federal power

not a winning argument to "discredit" his heterosexuality.

[villager]

10. well, and Lincoln freed the slaves, too

...so the Freepers are bound to hate that intereference with "free enterprise..."

[eurolefty]

12. "No central heating"

I love the freeper argument "Lincoln only slept with men because they did not have central heating."
Kinda makes you wonder. Like... you know... some evil "terrorist" could sabotage freepers' central heating. :evilgrin:

[villager]

13. yeah... when the coal and oil run out...

...they'll have to start sleeping with men - Just like Lincoln!