Sweet Irony

Was Abe Lincoln gay? A new book by C.A. Tripp (a former researcher for Alfred Kinsey) alleges that the founder of the Republican Party claims that he was.

‘He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me,’ his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, once told a friend.

It also includes a diary excerpt by one upper-class Washington woman who wrote of Derickson: ‘There is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!’

Scholars have long debated Lincoln’s sexuality, and as early as the 1920s were making veiled references to his relationship with Speed. However, critics say that in the pioneer days men sleeping together in rough circumstances was not uncommon.

The book is called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.