Sandburg was a poet-performer, and I tended to skip his rhapsodic passages, thus missing some key points. Eventually, I came to write my own Lincoln, dealing with the master politician as a counterbalance to the folksy figure so beloved of apolitical chroniclers, particularly in the early part of the 20th century, when the sex life of a Mount Rushmoreite was taboo and speculation was neither encouraged nor pursued by those with tenure rather than truth in mind.
The Second World War changed everything. Over 13 million American males served in Europe, the Pacific, and, most exotic of all, that unknown land the United States of America, which suddenly became a place of sexual marvels unknown to previous generations. But then, in , when much of the war ended, we were abruptly translated from the Land of Oz back to drearyβeven bloodyβKansas, not to mention Indiana, where one Alfred C.
Kinsey was scientifically analyzing our intimations and dreams of Oz as well as who did what sexually and why.
Tripp, who had become interested in the sexuality of our greatest president, but I am now ahead of our story. In , Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. What the Kinseyites and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives.
So, what has all this to do with our greatest president? The young Lincoln had a love affair with a handsome youth and store owner, Joshua Speed, in Springfield, Illinois. They shared a bed for four years, not necessarily, in those frontier days, the sign of a smoking gunβonly messy male housekeeping. Nevertheless, four years is a long time to be fairly uncomfortable. The gun proved to be the letters that passed between them when Joshua went home to Kentucky to marry, while Lincoln was readying himself for marriage in Springfield.
