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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Real evidence, they say. First, the shared bed is meaningless, most argue, since in the 19th century American frontiersmen often slept two and three to a bed for purely economic reasons. "It was very common for men to share the same bed in the 1800s -- especially in taverns," says Gene Griessman, author of "The Words Lincoln Lived By" (Simon & Schuster, 1997). "We know that Lincoln had a long, affectionate friendship with Speed. He deeply loved the man, but to go beyond that fact is to go beyond any evidence I have seen."
"It sounds like this might be a case of taking a 19th century event and giving it a 20th century context," says Douglas Wilson, author of "Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln" and co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Wilson adds that this trend of seeing the past in terms of the present -- what historians call "presentism" -- has seen a recent revival, with the controversy over Jefferson's alleged relationship with Sally Hemings and the "outing" of Walt Whitman.
Other scholars believe that such cozy sleeping arrangements did reflect a distinct emotional landscape for men, but didn't necessarily lead to hot homo lovemaking. "There was a lot of male homoerotic desire in the middle of the 19th century," says UC-Berkeley political scientist Michael Rogin. "There may be evidence of male-male desire, but that's not gay. If 'gay' is going to mean anything it's got to mean orgasms with other men. There's got to be some sense of transgression and forbiddenness."
In an era obsessed with the fine points of identity nomenclature, exactly what constitutes mid-19th-
Kramer has little patience for such theoretical hairsplitting. "I do not think that people were different starting with the Garden of Eden," he says. "Why do we imagine that people were these naive asexual beings before the 20th century? Lincoln had a lot of sex."
Kramer doesn't pretend to be a Lincoln scholar or even an objective researcher. ("I have read all the biographies, and they are full of shit," he spits, and derides Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald as "some dried old heterosexual prune at Harvard.") He's an unabashed gay rabble-rouser, beating the bushes of history to find gay heroes. But if he really does have the new primary sources he claims to, even the staunchest defenders of Lincoln's heterosexuality may be forced to reconsider. Kramer claims to have a trump card, a smoking gun: a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary, as well as a stash of letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his love affair with Lincoln. The secret pages, which were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived, now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa.
No sooner has Kramer mentioned the discovery and location of the papers than he grumbles, "That's already more than I wish I had said." Kramer is ambivalent about airing the entire subject. Even the reading, he explains, was a spur-of-the-moment stopgap measure to save him the trouble of writing another speech for a second appearance at the conference. "I didn't know there were any reporters there," he says, "and I didn't let anyone tape it."
Although Kramer refuses to share any portions of these documents, the Capital Times in Madison reported some of the juicier quotes from the reading: "He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug," Speed reportedly wrote. Addressing his dear friend as "Linc," Speed allegedly described the young politician as a man who couldn't get enough hugging and kissing: "Yes, our Abe is like a school girl." Kramer also attested that Speed recounted conversations in which the two men wondered whether other men, too, had relationships like theirs.
Whether these quotes prove that Lincoln was gay is debatable -- although, of course, Kramer may possess others that are more explicit. But he goes further: He not only claims that honest, rail-splitting, nation-uniting Abe was a proto-bossy bottom, but that there existed a whole 19th century gay frontier subculture. For example, he says there was an underground travel agency that arranged for small groups of man-loving men to travel into the wilderness for nature appreciation and other earthy pleasures. Both Lincoln and Speed, Kramer says, frequented these camping trips while living in Springfield. In one circular, which Kramer shared by phone, a man named "Dapper Dan from Kansas" invited "fellow travelers" on a "holiday journey" to sleep outdoors. The passage he read was certainly suggestive but hardly explicit.
Repeating a claim long circulated in the gay community, if not in Hamilton scholarship, Kramer also claims that Alexander Hamilton was "essentially a cock-tease."
