Was Abe Lincoln a fag?

I have to say this New York Times piece kind of made me want to puke. These people (ALL of them, it seems, except maybe Carl Sandburg) do not seem to understand the historicity of sexual categories. I'm especially disappointed in Jean Baker, who is a good historian and should know better than to make that absurd claim about Lincoln's being "on the margins of tradition," with his sexuality somehow pertaining to the Emancipation Proclamation. That is complete crap.

The Harvard emeritus professor just doesn't know what he's talking about. At all. It's kind of breathtaking. The fact that Lincoln "alluded openly" to his relationship with Speed says little one way or the other about whether they were boinking (and, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg pointed out 30 years ago, the were-they-boinking question tells us more about the present day than it does about the 19th century). Rather, Lincoln's openness testifies to the fact that romantic friendships between men were not, in his day, subjected to the kind of scrutiny that today we expect as routine. That's why there are so many photographs of men holding hands without embarrassment, up until the 1930s; homo entrepreneurs have lately turned some of these photos into greeting cards, which is fine with me, but that doesn't particularly mean that the persons in question "were gay." And while an erotic preference for men could help explain his marital difficulties (along with other factors), I think it's unwise to regard those difficulties in and of themselves as evidence of his "homosexuality."

The history of the censorship of Sandburg's biography is interesting to learn about, but beyond that, there's really nothing new in this article. I'll be very interested to see the Tripp book and how it's received by the public. Gay historians have written about Lincoln's intimacies a number of times in the past, but never with this high a profile.

I'm skeptical, though, of Larry Kramer's notion that we can win over the hearts and minds of the public by proving that a homo signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As my friend Moon just reminded me yesterday, Harvey Milk, also wanting to show that gays "do good things," publicized the fact that the guy who saved President Ford from an assassin's bullet in San Francisco in 1975 was gay, which led to his being outed on the front page of papers all over America. And while being outed caused tremendous personal difficulties for the poor guy, it's not clear that the public, in the end, thought any better of gay people for it.

In other news, check out Mark Morford's latest column, Canada Goes To Hell. "Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal health care? What's next, free porn and candy?"