Here's Gore Vidal on Lincoln:
Vanity Fair: Was Lincoln bisexual? QUOTE
The young Lincoln had a love affair with a handsome youth and store owner, Joshua Speed, in Springfield, Illinois. They shared a bed for four years, not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a smoking gun—only messy male housekeeping. Nevertheless, four years is a long time to be fairly uncomfortable. The gun proved to be the letters that passed between them when Joshua went home to Kentucky to marry, while Lincoln was readying himself for marriage in Springfield. Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead. Can they hack it? To Sandburg's credit he picked up on this (who could not after reading the letters?), but, first time around, I skipped his poetical comments on Lincoln's \"streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.\" Sandburg was a typical American of his time and place; he knew that any male with sexual feelings for another male was a maiden trapped inside a male body. Even the great Mae West, our first commanding sexologist, was convinced that fairies were simply women, obliged, through no fault of their own, to inhabit crude male bodies: Plangently Doctor Mae mourned her lost sisters.
Predictably, most Lincoln authorities prefer to ignore the implications of the Lincoln-Speed letters. But not Jonathan Ned Katz; in 2001 this relentless scholar wrote a study of their \"love affair\" as an example of sex between men before the invention of homosexuality; a word and generic concept that dates back only to the late 19th century, while \"heterosexuality,\" previously popularly known as \"just sex,\" is now the name for a new admirable team whose first appearance in public print was in a 1924 edition of, I fear, the New York Times. But more to the point, Tripp notes that although Lincoln was plainly bisexual, as demonstrated by the four children that he had with his wife, there is practically no other compelling record of his heterosexuality. There are no girlfriends in youth. Ann Rutledge (the great love that ended in her tragic death, which he forever mourned) proves to have been an invention of his law partner William Herndon, who, perhaps suspecting that the man he had practiced law with for 16 years had remained \"uncomfortable\" with women all his life and so needed some beefing up in the boy-girl department. Yet all evidence suggests that Lincoln's stepmother got it right when after Lincoln's death she said, \"He was not very fond of girls.\" Nevertheless, Herndon feverishly \"researched\" and embellished the Ann Rutledge story for years, but a generation or two of scholar squirrels have successfully shot that story down. Later, during his presidency, when most incumbents express affection—and more—for women not their wives, Lincoln was already a marble statue to Family Values. Now we know that he was never unenthralled by those May violets.
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QUOTE
Tripp is described by his publisher as a \"psychologist, therapist, and sex-researcher\" (for Kinsey). His ground-breaking book The Homosexual Matrix (1975) firmly \"discovered\" that homosexuality is inborn, not acquired. What Tripp learned from Kinsey and associates is a way of gauging the hetero-homo balance in men. \"Kinsey's figures on the pervasiveness of the homosexual experiences of men dazzled the ever inquisitive Tripp,\" as historian Jean Baker writes in her introduction to his study of Lincoln. More to the point were Kinsey's investigations into why some men were more responsive than others to same-sexuality and how these responses tend to vary throughout life's stages. One finding that Tripp uses in evaluating Lincoln: Kinsey's research showed that those males who entered puberty early were more apt to seek homosexual outlets if only because girls were out of reach. They were also less apt, as they grew up, to have sexual hang-ups of the sort late bloomers did because society has more time to indoctrinate a teenager than a nine-year-old. Much remarked upon in Lincoln's rustic world was his sudden spurt of growth at about nine years old, some four years before the average of other males. Also, his fascination with sex stories whose obscenity alarmed even him—he was an early stand-up comic and, as such, was appreciated in the stag world of the law. Descriptions of his performances (and the stories told) even suggest a mild case of Tourette's syndrome. Certainly, anal sex was a common denominator to his tales. Later in life when someone suggested he publish his funny stories, he was shocked: he compared them to open privies. Incidentally, the one thing that the Kinsey report, Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix, and my The City and the Pillar had in common, aside from the unwelcome candor about our human estate, was the hysteria we created at The New York Times. The three books were not only attacked in the paper but the Times refused to advertise Kinsey or me once the contents of our infernal books were known; also, in my case, seven novels subsequent to the proscribed book were not reviewed in the daily Times, and never would be, the daily reviewer (Orville Prescott) proudly told my publisher, E. P. Dutton. Now, in the 56 years since 1948, The City and the Pillar has never been out of print in English or in a number of other languages.
Tripp has interesting \"new\" material on Lincoln's encounters as a young man in New Salem, Illinois (where Lincoln lived from 1831-37); he reports on \"contacts\" with merchant A.Y. Ellis and fellow lawyer Henry Whitney, the last observing that Lincoln seemed always to be courting him: Whitney also reported that Lincoln said that sexual contact was a \"harp of a thousand strings.\" So what form did these contacts take? One hint is given by Billy Greene, who shared a bed and a grammar teacher (not together) with Lincoln in New Salem around 1831. Greene described Lincoln's muscular figure as attractive to him, commenting in particular on his powerful thighs, which suggests a form of sexuality much indulged in by citizens of classical Athens: since any citizen would lose citizenship if anally penetrated by a man, \"femoral intercourse\" was a useful substitute; that is, orgasm, mutual or otherwise, between firm thighs.
What then did researcher Tripp discover over the last decades about Lincoln's lavender streak and those soft May violets? The answer is a great deal of circumstantial detail, of which some is incontrovertible except perhaps to the eye of faith, which, as we all know, is most selective and ingenious when it comes to the ignoring of evidence.
