It seems the rumors of Abe Lincoln’s homosexuality have been greatly exaggerated—at least according to a new book by the author whose researched sparked the enduring speculation about our 16th president.
In his new book, Your Friend Forever, A Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed, psychoanalyst and history professor Charles Strozier debunks and complicates the misconceptions that arose from his own depiction of Lincoln and Speed’s friendship in his 1982 book Lincoln’s Quest for Union. The key to understanding the true nature of that relationship, according to Strozier, is understanding the difference in both the way sexuality was understood and the way male friendships functioned in the 19th century.
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“The historical context is really important to understand,” Storzier told The Daily Beast recently. “Now where homosexuality is so much more accepted … we accept males loving one another and being sexual with one another. But in the 19th century, the taboo of homosexuality is absolutely rigid. Whitman was gay. He had to stay in the closet. Sodomy, buggery, was illegal and severely prescribed. But friendship, intimate, loving friendship like that between Lincoln and Speed, was not only accepted but encouraged as the long as the boundary against sexualization was rigidly and absolutely maintained.”
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Strozier goes on to insist that despite the ways contemporary culture might interpret their relationship, there is no evidence to suggest that Lincoln and Speed’s relationship was sexual. However, it was “loving and close.” In fact, Strozier says, it may have saved Lincoln’s life: “Lincoln was in very bad shape when they got together … Speed provided a safety, a security, a loving relationship. And I think it was loving in the way that Aristotle talks about loving between men, real friendship between men.”
canadianflipper
I believe the quote should read “severely proscribed” not “severely prescribed”.
IDoNotHaveToAgreeWithYou
No. Trying to say he was is just cheap and desperate and makes us all look bad.
Chaucer
Utterly ridiculous as with virtually everything ever written by a psychoanalyst. These people no longer have jobs so they are applying their hocus-pocus to lay literature. Storzier’s book should be used in the most appropriate way–as kindling.
Rimminit
Homo”sexual” relationships aren’t always “sexual”!
PRINCE OF SNARKNESS aka DIVKID
First Taylor Lautner and now this 🙁 we’re losing guys…they’re slipping away from us…Cultural TITANS… and whoever this dude is
GayEGO
Who knows and who cares, keeping business and privacy separate is doable. I met met lifetime partner of 54 years when I was in the Navy. I was a musician who played the flute etc. and I was honorably discharged after 4 years. A fellow Navy musician was not so lucky as he got caught and was dishonorably discharged for being gay because he got caught and did not keep his private life separate from his military service.
CaliKyle
@IDoNotHaveToAgreeWithYou: There is nothing cheap or desperate about the conclusion that Lincoln was homosexual. The historical evidence supports that claim far more than it refutes it. Cheap and desperate are two accurate adjectives, however, that can readily be applied to the biased, anti-intellectual “scholarship” of pseudo historian cum subpar psychoanalist, Charles Strozier.
JAWIWA
This argument is hardly new. The problem is that no one ever holds up any other evidence of straight men behaving in this manner at the time. Many president’s have letters with their contemporaries preserved. Are their any other letters by presidents (or any other straight guys) lovingly describing another man’s thighs. I have yet to see evidence presented by one of these supposed scholars to ever show that this sort of intimacy was common among heterosexual males.
James
They lived together and slept together in the same bed every night for four years. Living with someone is one thing, sleeping in their bed every night for four years becomes something else……… like marriage.
James
One of my best friends is the great great grandson of Joshua Speed. He said the family never talked about Speed’s relationship with Lincoln other than to say Speed was a friend of Lincoln.
JAWIWA
And the family burned a lot of their correspondence, if I remember correctly. Is that true, James?
Atomicrob
Queerty is degenerating into a rag for increased clickthroughs…
da90027
This stuff cracks me up he has been dead over 150 years like anyone is still around to confirm this…LOL I would be more apt to believe what I read in the Enquirer
Pete
There was there was this embarrassing binge of posthumous outings in which some gays continue to engage in the same way they attempt to out any hot man who is not married. And even if they are, the wives, children are all part of his beard.
Lincoln: this is a man who fell into a suicidal depression when the great love of his young life, Ann Rutledge, died and then went on to sire five children. PROBABLY NOT GAY
Bob
So no sodomy, eh? Bet there was plenty of time to blow him in 4 years in that bed.. Or doesn’t that count?
CaliKyle
@Pete: Such ignorance. Lincoln has long been the subject of legitimate scholarly research for over a century now. The claim that he was likely homosexual is not merely some sensational “posthumous outing” or a National Enquirer hit piece. As for Ann Rutledge, it has already been established among historians that the nature of their relationship had all the hallmarks of a fond platonic friendship, not a romance let alone an ardent or passionate one. For anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Lincolns letters to both Joshua Fry Speed and Ann Rutledge, it is clear who he loved the former deeply and romantically. In fact, while Lincoln naturally mourned the untimely death of his dear friend, Ann Rutledge, it was Joshua Speeds moving away from him to marry a woman – something that was imperative for 19th century males especially if they were pursuing respectable careers – that caused perhaps the worst emotional crisis of Lincoln’s life.
Brian
The use of the word “gay” in sexual identity politics is a recent invention. It’s only about 50 or 60 years old. Therefore, it cannot be used in relation to men who lived in the 1800’s.
The biggest difference between then and now is that women have inserted themselves into all-male domains under the name of “feminism”. This has reduced the opportunities for loving male-male relationship of the type that existed before feminism.
Feminism is basically an anti-male creed. Anti-male also means anti male-male. I don’t think that a lot of you guys realize that you’ve been had by feminism.
dwes09
@Brian: Once again, you are simply making shit up and then assuming it is true. The use of the word Gay to refer to male homosexuals dates back to the very early 20th century, if not the late 19th. And while Lincoln may not have heard it used in that context, its sexual connotations date back to the 18th century, where a “gay man” was a reference to a womanizer, and a “gay woman” was a euphemism for a prostitute.
Be that as it may, we can still (with no inaccuracy) refer to men who had sex with and loved men in the 19th century as gay. The term implies more than just sex, and for most people it is not fraught with the neurotic weight you give it. I have no idea whether Lincoln’s relationship with speed was both romantic and sexual, but if it was, we may certainly refer to them as gay.
As for your misogynistic and baseless dogma concerning women and feminism (which you repeat like a pathetic mantra), they are just silly. I challenge you to provide one whit of academic or scientific support for them. Feminism is a reasonable desire on the part of women for self determination and equal treatment.
footwork61
Joshua Speed was not the only man for whom Lincoln had an apparent strong fondness. Most notable is his body guard David Derickson whose barracks Lincoln visited to share his bed on many a night while president. It was noted by others in the house how they shared a nightshirt.
Some try to dismiss the idea of two men sharing a bad by saying that it was common when traveling or when money was tight. Lincoln continued to share a bed with Speedman even after moving into a house with several available rooms and while both were making decent wages. And certainly the president of even a very troubled U.S. did not have to share a bed with his body guard through necessity.
Then there was Elmer Ellsworth whose schooling and career Lincoln supported. A contemporary noted that Lincoln appeared to have a schoolboy crush on the younger man. Ellsworth is recorded as being the first Union soldier to die in the Civil War. The president wept openly at hearing of his death and had his body lie in state in the executive residence while being reported to have been inconsolable for days.
Of course, one can’t use modern notions of “gay” or even “homosexual” (which word didn’t come into the English language until after Lincoln’s death) to people of a previous epoch, but that doesn’t mean that men were not attracted to other men. There is nothing new under the sun.
Goforit
@Brian: I do not buy into the hole Freud thing. But if he were to say “Your mother did a real number on you”, I would have to agree.
Liam
Only pathetic homophobes and prudes are desperate to label Lincoln’s relationships with two other men as platonic and lacking physicality. Lincoln has been dead 165; I’m certain that he couldn’t care less. The rest of us just want the facts from which we can draw our own conclusions.
I question that the words “gay” and “homosexual” less correct than the 19th century’s “inversion” or “uranian”. All four words as reference to homosexuality originated as clinical terminology between 1844 and 1895. Admittedly, “gay” in 2016 carries inaccurate connotations forced on it by homophobes across the 20th century.
If medical, psychological, physiological, and sociological knowledge gained between 1895 and today are removed from the issue, I doubt that Lincoln though any differently about himself than any other homosexual man up to the 1960’s: the same desire for acceptance and friendship that every human does.
OzJosh
I recently read an interview with Strozier in which he practically tied himself in knots trying to maintain some semblance of logic for his view of Lincoln and Speed’s relationship. Okay, it might have been common for men to share beds in those times for purely practical reasons. But it was usually a casual arrangement, not a commitment – and Abe and Joshua shared the same bed for more than four years. As Strozier himself acknowledges, in that time there must, at the very least, have been the occasional morning boner, the odd erotic dream and a degree of sexual tension. But Strozier insists they would have remained platonic friends through all of this. He does so, while at the same time trying to explain away the fact that Abe and Joshua had a deep and passionate commitment to one another, wrote tender and loving letters to each other, and were more than somewhat ambivalent and angst-ridden about the respective women they chose to marry. Speed went through a protracted mourning after the assassination, and went to considerable trouble to arrange a grand memorial for Lincoln. How you can add all those things together and NOT conclude that there was a romantic relationship, I don’t know. Strozier seems to choose to believe that it was a platonic, if passionate, friendship mainly because that’s what he wants to believe. But there is a great deal more evidence on the side of those who suggest it must have been something more.
dusty
They were just friends nothing more to it
Sluggo2007
Who cares? They are long dead.
onthemark
@James: You’re misunderstanding the bed situation. In recent frontier states like Illinois in 1830s and ’40s, beds were expensive and difficult to get/make. The expression “politics makes strange bedfellows” dates to this time. Hotels and boardinghouses were very basic, and male guests often slept two to a bed. So in a state capital like Springfield when the legislature was in session – arriving by horseback or stage – roommates were often political enemies from different parties. (Must have made for some fun conversation, especially with all the whiskey back then.)
Lincoln & Speed lived in Springfield (no commute) and were more prosperous than most, but it was still not uncommon at all for male friends to sleep two to a bed.
I still like to think they were gay, though!
Billy12345
@da90027: The inquiry into Linclon’s sexuality is of importance to millions. It establishes that homosexual people have existed forever including among our most magnificent hero fore bearers.
The lies told about gay people were that they were unworthy, degenerate criminals.
The inquiry seeks to assist the historical truth for the evolving of humankind’s knowledge and empathy.
Billy12345
@dusty: If you wish to take a cursory look at it, you might want to say that. But further inquiry yields other conclusions.
Setting aside Mr. Speed, there were others with whom
Lincoln slept, including whenever Mrs. Lincoln would be away.
Dismiss Speed if you wish, then go thru the many other deep intimate male relationships
Which Lincoln shared.
He BGB
I saw a movie the other day where two straight women were lying in bed carrassing.each other’s hair and talking and nobody bats an eye (except that straight guy watching hoping something will). But two guys in bed can only mean sex? Double standard. Women dancing with each other at a function nothing. Men? Shock! Stop that!
DCguy
I love the fake troll right wing accounts that come in here with the phony outrage that anybody would DARE to say that Lincoln was gay.
Sorry, but if you are on a gay website and yet act like saying somebody is gay is a huge insult you have exposed yourself as an anti-gay troll.
Nice try people.
Merv
21st century Saudi Arabia and Iran severely proscribe homosexual activity, and we know that it’s therefore non-existent there. What an idiotic argument this guy makes! It was severely proscribed in the US not only in Lincoln’s time, but continuously from then to within living memory. Yet, we have lots of gay people who can describe gay life back then. And, obviously Walt Whitman’s inclinations were an open secret.
rmarqua2921
It is just hilarious! These homophobes can finally put their head around two men being in love, even oral sex, but anal, NO! And any man who thinks he can sleep beside a man he has such affection for and not touch and play, certainly couldn’t do it for four years! But I do agree that many couples can be homosexual and never engage in anal sex! And any one, believing that gay men, active or passive, is less of a MAN because he doesn’t experiment with all kinds of sex, male and female, simply is out of touch! Its like going to the bathroom with someone transgender for in my case at least 60 years and not being aware of it and now all at once being offended, is just sheer stupidity! To think that men who sleep together regularly don’t experiment with sexual activity is just as stupid!
OzJosh
@onthemark: Yes, it’s all true about the Great Bed Shortage in frontier America. They were expensive, they were in short supply, boarding houses were basic and men did often bunk up together. But those circumstances have absolutely nothing to do with the sleeping arrangements of Abe and Josh. When Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837 he went to the local general store, owned by Joshua Speed, to buy bed furnishings. When he supposedly balked at the price, Speed took him upstairs to his own room, furnished with one bed, and invited Lincoln to share it. And they shared it for the next four years. So it wasn’t that Lincoln couldn’t afford his own bed. And it wasn’t that beds were in short supply. Joshua Speed sold beds!! He could easily have had another brought upstairs to his room! This wasn’t a sleeping arrangement forced on them or even a casual convenience. It was a very bold and deliberate choice.
onthemark
@OzJosh: Oh! Somehow I’ve never heard that. I’m glad to learn this.
CWM85
I doubt he was bisexual… man was married and had several kids…
Pete
If there was any smoke here, don’t you think Gore Vidal (of all people!) would have mentioned something in his brilliant historical novel (still the best one-volume review of Lincoln’s presidency). Instead, there’s a funny passage about John Hay’s unease when he thinks he’s getting checked-out by Walt Whitman (“such a manly man!”)