Gay-Braham Lincoln

Check out this artist's interpretation from Salon:



This is what Abraham Lincoln would look like if he was gay. And if he lived in modern times. And if he did a little modeling on the side for Abercrombie and Fitch.

It's attached to their article about the recent non-fiction book by C.A. Tripp ("The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln") positing that Honest Abe was maybe not so honest about the whole "attracted to Mary Todd" thing. Okay, innuendo aside, Tripp argues that Lincoln was bisexual, but mainly attracted to men, and that his marriage to the loopy Mary Todd Lincoln was, therefore, mainly one of convenience. She was crazy, so that wasn't really all that convenient, but marrying a nutbag has always been more acceptable to Americans than marrying another dude.

According to Salon, most of the "evidence" in Tripp's book is gossip and suggestion. They complain that there is no "smoking gun" proving that Lincoln ever had a love affair with a man. Although, how could you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that two people in the 1850's had an affair? I mean, there is a diary from a man claiming to have had sex with Lincoln, but many scholars say it's fraudulent. It took a minute of posing perfectly still to have a photograph taken in those days...you couldn't really catch two people having sex with a camera on the sly. Short of a used condom with Lincoln DNA in there, I don't see what more evidence Salon is hoping to uncover that would convince them one way or the other.

The weird thing about all this is that it matters at all. Historians like the late C.A. Tripp (who died last year at the age of 84) are spending years and years researching minutae like this for a good reason, I suppose, but I'll be damned if I can think one. It's interesting mostly as a conversation piece. Like, if I was having a dinner party this week (not that I've ever had a dinner party), I guess at one point I might bring up Lincoln's sexuality if no one could think of anything to say. But I'm not sure this is worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money or anything. I mainly wanted to write about it as an excuse to run that goofy picture.