It was your hero, Honest Abe who spent four years in bed with his boyfriend, Joshua Speed, swapping pillow talk.
Note the secret hand signal.
Conservative Republican W. Scott Thompson.
Was Lincoln Gay?
By W. Scott Thompson
Mr. Thompson is a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
In his early thirties, before either he or his love-object Joshua Speed married, they lived together in cramped circumstances over four full years; not to put too fine a point on it, "the young men slept in the same bed every night," according to a very straight and conventional source. [1] Perhaps we are meant to accept this habit precisely for its openness--since it is not covered up--as necessitated by frontier privation rather than erotic preference: an inference more in the category of the anxious denial of the historian rather than the compelling illogic of the evidence--a memorable avoidance indeed, since it does not even pass the straight-face test.[1] Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (1982), p. 284.
Note that secret hand signal again.
In "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" (1926), Carl Sandberg wrote that their relationship had "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets," which some have taken as a veiled reference to homosexuality. In 1995, just after Bob Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party, "given that the founder was gay." Indeed, Abe has been called the original Log Cabin Republican.
That Sandburg guy sure could write pretty prose, couldn't he?
Larry Kramer, of ACT-UP
Quoting Joshua Speed's letters in reference to Lincoln, Kramer read to his Madison audience: "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.''
One of Speed's letters that Kramer quoted told how the later-to-be U.S. President felt hungry for affection: "Yes, our Abe is like a school girl,'' said Speed.
