Commentary on President
Abraham Lincoln's sexuality has been documented since the early 20th century. Attention to the sexuality of public figures has been heightened since the gay rights movement in the late 20th century. In his 1926 biography of Lincoln,
Carl Sandburg alluded to the early relationship of Lincoln and his friend
Joshua Fry Speed as having "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets". "Streak of
lavender" was period slang for an
effeminate man and later connoted homosexuality. Sandburg did not elaborate on this comment. Historian and psychoanalyst Charles B. Strozier believes that it is unlikely for Sandburg to have used that phrase with homosexual implications, suggesting that he instead used the term to note "Speed's and Lincoln's softer, more vulnerable sides, which shielded their vigorous masculinity". In 1999, playwright and activist
Larry Kramer claimed that he had uncovered previously unknown documents while conducting research for his work-in-progress,
The American People: A History. Some were allegedly found hidden in the floorboards of the old store once shared by Lincoln and Joshua Speed. According to Kramer, the unseen documents reportedly provided explicit details of a relationship between Lincoln and Speed, and they currently reside in a private collection in
Davenport, Iowa. Kramer never produced these documents, and their authenticity has been called into question by historians such as
Gabor Boritt, who wrote, "Almost certainly this is a hoax."
C. A. Tripp also expressed his skepticism over Kramer's discovery, writing, "Seeing is believing, should that diary ever show up; the passages claimed for it have not the slightest Lincolnian ring." In 2005, C. A. Tripp's book,
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, was posthumously published. Tripp was a sex researcher, a protégé of
Alfred Kinsey, and was gay. He began writing
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln with
Philip Nobile, but they had a falling out. Nobile later accused Tripp's book of being fraudulent and distorted.
Time magazine addressed the book as part of a cover article by Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of ''Lincoln's Melancholy: How
Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness''. Shenk dismissed Tripp's conclusions, saying that arguments for Lincoln's homosexuality were "based on a tortured misreading of conventional 19th century sleeping arrangements". But historian Michael B. Chesson said that Tripp's work was significant, commenting that "any open-minded reader who has reached this point may well have a reasonable doubt about the nature of Lincoln's sexuality". In 2009, Charles Morris critically analyzed the academic and popular responses to Tripp's book, arguing that much of the negative response by the "Lincoln Establishment" reveals as much rhetorical and political partisanship as that of Tripp's defenders. In an earlier 2007 essay, Morris argues that in the wake of playwright Larry Kramer's "outing" of Lincoln, the Lincoln Establishment engaged in "mnemonicide", or the assassination of a threatening counter-memory. He put in this category what he called the methodologically flawed but widely appropriated case against the "gay Lincoln thesis" by David Herbert Donald in his book,
We Are Lincoln Men. Lincoln's stepmother,
Sarah Bush Lincoln, commented that he "never took much interest in the girls". However some accounts of Lincoln's contemporaries suggest that he had a strong but controlled passion for women. Lincoln was allegedly devastated over the 1835 death of
Ann Rutledge. While some historians have questioned whether he had a romantic relationship with her, historian
John Y. Simon reviewed the historiography of the subject and concluded that "Available evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Lincoln so loved Ann that her death plunged him into severe depression. More than a century and a half after her death, when significant new evidence cannot be expected, she should take her proper place in Lincoln biography." In her book
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin argues: Critics of the hypothesis that Lincoln was homosexual emphasize that Lincoln married and had four children.
Douglas L. Wilson writes that Lincoln as a young man displayed robustly
heterosexual behavior, including telling stories to his friends of his interactions with women. Lincoln wrote a poem that described a marriage between two men, which included the lines: This poem was included in the first edition of the 1889 biography of Lincoln by his friend and colleague
William Herndon. It was expurgated from subsequent editions until 1942, when the editor Paul Angle restored it. Tripp states that Lincoln's awareness of homosexuality and openness in penning this "bawdy poem" "was unique for the time period" and that "any ... nineteen or twenty year-old heterosexual male [would not have been able to write the poem]."
Lewis Gannett notes that the poem was "a satirical poem, written to embarrass someone against whom Lincoln held a grudge". == Marriage with Mary Todd Lincoln ==