As a schoolboy I read most of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg was a poet-performer, and I tended to skip his rhapsodic passages, thus missing some key points. Even so, I was sufficiently drawn to his Lincoln … well, to be precise, there is no Sandburg Lincoln, only a sort of grab bag of anecdotes, a do-it-yourself folklore Lincoln, using material that, with time’s passage, has been more and more rejected by those scholar squirrels who are always in attendance upon the Lincoln brigade’s stern academic icon-dusters. 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 1945, when much of the war ended, we were abruptly translated from the Land of Oz back to dreary—even bloody—Kansas, 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. Among Kinsey’s researchers was C. A. Tripp, who had become interested in the sexuality of our greatest president, but I am now ahead of our story.

In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He also wrote me a note of appreciation for my “work in the field”: The City and the Pillar, a novel about a star-crossed love affair between two “normal” young male athletes with which I had shocked America … well, the New York Times, by making the point that their affair was a perfectly natural business, despite so many popular superstitions derived from our various Bronze Age religions. At about that time I met Tripp, whose posthumous The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln has at last been published by Free Press.

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 gun—only 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. Each youth betrays considerable anxiety about the wedding night ahead. Can they hack it? To Sandburg’s credit he picked up on this (who could not after reading the letters?), but, first time around, I skipped his poetical comments on Lincoln’s “streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets.” Sandburg was a typical American of his time and place; he knew that any male with sexual feelings for another male was a maiden trapped inside a male body. Even the great Mae West, our first commanding sexologist, was convinced that fairies were simply women, obliged, through no fault of their own, to inhabit crude male bodies: Plangently Doctor Mae mourned her lost sisters.

Predictably, most Lincoln authorities prefer to ignore the implications of the Lincoln-Speed letters. But not Jonathan Ned Katz; in 2001 this relentless scholar wrote a study of their “love affair” as an example of sex between men before the invention of homosexuality; a word and generic concept that dates back only to the late 19th century, while “heterosexuality,” previously popularly known as “just sex,” is now the name for a new admirable team whose first appearance in public print was in a 1924 edition of, I fear, the New York Times. But more to the point, Tripp notes that although Lincoln was plainly bisexual, as demonstrated by the four children that he had with his wife, there is practically no other compelling record of his heterosexuality. There are no girlfriends in youth. Ann Rutledge (the great love that ended in her tragic death, which he forever mourned) proves to have been an invention of his law partner William Herndon, who, perhaps suspecting that the man he had practiced law with for 16 years had remained “uncomfortable” with women all his life and so needed some beefing up in the boy-girl department. Yet all evidence suggests that Lincoln’s stepmother got it right when after Lincoln’s death she said, “He was not very fond of girls.” Nevertheless, Herndon feverishly “researched” and embellished the Ann Rutledge story for years, but a generation or two of scholar squirrels have successfully shot that story down. Later, during his presidency, when most incumbents express affection—and more—for women not their wives, Lincoln was already a marble statue to Family Values. Now we know that he was never unenthralled by those May violets.

I knew C. A. Tripp through Dr. Kinsey, whose famous report was actually published some months after my novel. In due course, Kinsey and I met, and he took, as they say, my history for his research. This involved encoded questions about sexual activities with some trick questions in order to catch liars. During all this, Kinsey, a seriously gray man, was like a friendly bank manager in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Overnight, Kinsey became a national hero to many, the devil to others. It is interesting now that we have entered a new America ruled by Moral Values; faith-inspired attacks are being made on Kinsey’s findings so long after the fact.

Tripp is described by his publisher as a “psychologist, therapist, and sex-researcher” (for Kinsey). His ground-breaking book The Homosexual Matrix (1975) firmly “discovered” that homosexuality is inborn, not acquired. What Tripp learned from Kinsey and associates is a way of gauging the hetero-homo balance in men. “Kinsey’s figures on the pervasiveness of the homosexual experiences of men dazzled the ever inquisitive Tripp,” as historian Jean Baker writes in her introduction to his study of Lincoln. More to the point were Kinsey’s investigations into why some men were more responsive than others to same-sexuality and how these responses tend to vary throughout life’s stages. One finding that Tripp uses in evaluating Lincoln: Kinsey’s research showed that those males who entered puberty early were more apt to seek homosexual outlets if only because girls were out of reach. They were also less apt, as they grew up, to have sexual hang-ups of the sort late bloomers did because society has more time to indoctrinate a teenager than a nine-year-old. Much remarked upon in Lincoln’s rustic world was his sudden spurt of growth at about nine years old, some four years before the average of other males. Also, his fascination with sex stories whose obscenity alarmed even him—he was an early stand-up comic and, as such, was appreciated in the stag world of the law. Descriptions of his performances (and the stories told) even suggest a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome. Certainly, anal sex was a common denominator to his tales. Later in life when someone suggested he publish his funny stories, he was shocked: he compared them to open privies. Incidentally, the one thing that the Kinsey report, Tripp’s The Homosexual Matrix, and my The City and the Pillar had in common, aside from the unwelcome candor about our human estate, was the hysteria we created at The New York Times. The three books were not only attacked in the paper but the Times refused to advertise Kinsey or me once the contents of our infernal books were known; also, in my case, seven novels subsequent to the proscribed book were not reviewed in the daily Times, and never would be, the daily reviewer (Orville Prescott) proudly told my publisher, E. P. Dutton. Now, in the 56 years since 1948, The City and the Pillar has never been out of print in English or in a number of other languages.

Tripp has interesting “new” material on Lincoln’s encounters as a young man in New Salem, Illinois (where Lincoln lived from 1831-37); he reports on “contacts” with merchant A.Y. Ellis and fellow lawyer Henry Whitney, the last observing that Lincoln seemed always to be courting him: Whitney also reported that Lincoln said that sexual contact was a “harp of a thousand strings.” So what form did these contacts take? One hint is given by Billy Greene, who shared a bed and a grammar teacher (not together) with Lincoln in New Salem around 1831. Greene described Lincoln’s muscular figure as attractive to him, commenting in particular on his powerful thighs, which suggests a form of sexuality much indulged in by citizens of classical Athens: since any citizen would lose citizenship if anally penetrated by a man, “femoral intercourse” was a useful substitute; that is, orgasm, mutual or otherwise, between firm thighs.

What then did researcher Tripp discover over the last decades about Lincoln’s lavender streak and those soft May violets? The answer is a great deal of circumstantial detail, of which some is incontrovertible except perhaps to the eye of faith, which, as we all know, is most selective and ingenious when it comes to the ignoring of evidence.

Jean Baker’s introduction to Tripp’s Lincoln is balanced. She notes that as late as the 1980s more than 60 percent of all Americans found homosexuality an unacceptable “lifestyle,” plainly the result of fierce lifelong indoctrination. Tripp finds homosexual (and heterosexual) behavior common to all mammals and apt to be practiced given sufficient opportunity, energy, desire. Baker notes that Tripp was “dazzled” by Kinsey’s finding that more than one-third of Kinsey’s sample males had engaged in a homosexual act during their lifetime even though only a slim 4 to 6 percent identified themselves as exclusively homosexual. Baker occasionally falls into the semantic trap of using adjectives like homo/heterosexual as nouns to describe an entire person when these adjectives can only describe specific sexual acts and never an actual human being; hence the difficulties in pigeonholing Lincoln, who, like almost every man of his time and place, duly married, had children, and conformed while yielding to his homosexual inclinations only when inevitable, as in the long affair with Joshua Speed. The most moving part of their letters comes after Speed goes home to Kentucky to marry, and Lincoln steels himself to do the same in Springfield with Mary Todd. Each is terrified of the prospective wedding night. Lincoln is like a good basketball coach reassuring a timid player while confessing to his own anxieties on that score. It is hard not to suspect that Lincoln was, as far as women were concerned, a virgin on his wedding night. Speed proved to be nonfunctional on that night and, apparently, all subsequent nights despite much boasting of powerful passions fulfilled. Tripp notes that Lincoln has no problems with penetration on the grounds that: “tops don’t.” (We give Dr. Tripp his idiosyncrasies).

Tripp has investigated male sexual partners for Lincoln from early youth to his affair with the captain of his personal military guard, David V. Derickson of the Pennsylvania Bucktails’ Company K. This, according to Baker, “is one of at least five verifiable cases of Lincoln’s sexual activity with other males.” This guard usually escorted the president from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home in a part of town where he could escape the equatorial summer heat of riparian Washington. Presumably the affair began on September 8, 1862, when Lincoln was at the Soldiers’ Home (Mrs. Lincoln was safely in New York City, seriously shopping). Lincoln sent for the newly assigned Derickson, to get to know him. Derickson, we are told, was five feet nine, deep-set eyes, prominent nose, thick black hair. At 44, he was nine years younger than Lincoln. At the start of their affair he was the father of nine children by two wives; a grown son also served in Company K during the idyll at the Soldiers’ Home. Others have noted that when they shared a bed, Derickson wore one of the president’s nightshirts. Although the Washington press was not as prurient then as now, it was also wartime, which could well have intimidated gossipers, if not Virginia Woodbury Fox, wife of the assistant secretary of the navy. The Foxes were friends of Lincoln; Mrs. Fox also kept a diary about high life in Washington. Entry for November 16, 1862: “Tish [Letitia McKean] says, ‘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!” The final epithet can mean “people will say anything.” Or as Governor Richards of Texas said in reference to a question about her divorce: “You know what men are like!” Quite a different emphasis. So what did these two fathers whose combined progeny numbered 13 boys actually do? Tripp draws a great deal not only from surviving commentaries from Lincoln’s youth but also from Kinsey’s findings on what sort of experience or simply sexual development predisposes some males to be actively attracted to other males. Happily, Freud is nowhere consulted.

In Tripp’s reconstruction of the intimate Lincoln, the fascinating discovery is not the many details about Lincoln’s homosexual side as the fact that he had, marriage to one side, so very little heterosexual side. Although William Herndon arouses some alarm in many scholars with his huge Ann Rutledge romantic tragedy, he does indeed have other tales to tell.

According to Herndon, “About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease [syphilis]. Lincoln told me this…. About the year 1836-37 Lincoln moved to Springfield … at this time I suppose that the disease hung to him and not wishing to trust our physicians, he wrote a note to Doctor Drake … ” He was treated by him in Cincinnati: presumably with mercury. Was he cured? By 1840 he was engaged to the well-born Mary Todd. Lincoln was a rising man in the political world of Illinois and so must have a wife and a family. But suddenly he broke off the engagement. Took to his bed. Wrote a poem called “Suicide,” which was published in the Springfield newspaper, later to be secretly cut out of the file copy. Herndon’s commentary on all this is cryptic. He suggests that the early deaths of two of Lincoln’s sons and Tad’s disability in speaking, and then Mary Todd’s headaches, breakdowns, madness, details of which seem to conform to the *Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy’*s description of paresis-syphilis—although we have since learned that an autopsy was performed on her head (odd, since even in 1882 the whole body would have been examined). Anyway, there may be a record at Walter Reed Hospital or there may not be. More to the point at hand, why did Tripp not count the Beardstown girl in Lincoln’s heteroscore? And the whore in a Springfield boardinghouse whom Lincoln visited? She wanted three dollars. He had less. He asked for credit; then, according to Herndon, she simply charged him nothing.

So here we are; history, too. The magisterial Professor David Herbert Donald disagrees with Tripp’s interpretation of Lincoln’s intimate life, but he also rejects Herndon’s version on a key point. Since Professor Donald wrote a superb book called Lincoln’s Herndon, he is turning, as it were, on one of his own characters. Professor Donald is our foremost authority on Lincoln and so backed by much of the history establishment. Tripp is a maverick with new information and a different synthesis. Neither Donald nor Tripp nor, indeed, Herndon’s ghost can prove his case. Lincoln’s ghost is no doubt ready to chat—with, I suspect, a story, possibly obscene.

Some years ago at Harvard, Professor Donald and I were answering an audience’s questions apropos of the Massey lectures that I was giving. One urgent professor wanted to discuss Lincoln’s homosexuality, which I had ignored in my study of his presidency and Professor Donald tended to discredit. He and I were also in agreement that, true or false, what did sex have to do with his conduct of the Civil War, the emancipation of slaves?

I have now read Professor Donald’s We Are Lincoln Men, and though he does not agree with Tripp’s conclusions, their professional relations seem to have been amiable. Tripp is quick to acknowledge an occasional debt to Donald’s work, which might explain the absence of the Beardstown girl in Tripp’s study. Professor Donald is a pre-Kinseyan and so does not endorse the possibility of genital contact between Lincoln and Speed, and, later, between Lincoln and Bucktail Captain Derickson. Here is Professor Donald on Beardstown: “Equally controversial, and equally unprovable, is another intimate confession Lincoln allegedly made to Herndon. Late in life, Herndon told his literary collaborator, Weik, that “Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis about the year 1835-36.” (Which means that mere boy Lincoln was 26 or 27, by which time Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world … ) “For this story, which Herndon wrote more than fifty years after Lincoln’s alleged escapade and more than twenty years after his death, there is no confirmatory evidence.” (In so delicate a matter, is there apt to be any?) “Lincoln never told it to anyone else.” (How on earth do we know?) “Not even to Joshua Speed, with whom he was sharing a bed at this time.” (I should think not particularly to Speed, whose bed might have been contaminated by Lincoln’s disease, particularly if, like so many men of his day, he suffered from syphilophobia, which, Donald suggests, might have been the origin of Lincoln’s story to Herndon about his own alleged syphilis, which, if he did tell him such a story, might have been the result of a common fear among relatively inexperienced males at a time when syphilis, like AIDS today, could be a killer.) Donald even quotes another historian, Charles B. Stozier, who thinks that Lincoln’s confession to Herndon—if true—revealed more about his sexual confusion and ignorance than about the state of his health. (About what, then, is he confused? Of what is he ignorant?) Are we then to believe that a brilliant lawyer nearing 30 knows next to nothing about heterosexuality in a town where girls are available for three dollars?

Since Donald rejects Herndon’s story, Tripp doubtless feels free to ignore the Beardstown girl, too. This buttresses his case that Lincoln was not fond of girls. Donald’s rejection of Herndon in this matter is no doubt due to a certain reluctance to admit that so great a man could have had syphilis or trafficked with a three-dollar whore. Since none of us has much to go on beyond what Herndon says Lincoln said, why should anyone think that Herndon was making up a story that casts no glory, rather the reverse, on his hero? Ann Rutledge is his one great untruth, which does make the young Lincoln sound like a totally normal youth heartbroken to have lost his first love. This was a familiar 19th-century dodge of the lifelong bachelor trying to explain why he had never found Miss Right. President Buchanan had some success in this line.

Although I did once agree with Professor Donald that Lincoln’s sex life sheds no particular light on his public life, I am now intrigued by some of the generalities Dr. Kinsey made about males who go early into puberty. Precocious sexually, they are apt to be precocious psychologically. Lincoln’s understanding of the adult world began early, and this gave him not only a sense of the broad picture but inclined him to empathy for others unlike himself. He had also avoided the hang-ups of those indoctrinated in their teens with the folklore of the time which condemned masturbation and same-sexuality as evils, while Lincoln knew firsthand that they were not. From that single insight it was no great step to recognize that the enslavement of one race by another was, despite St. Paul’s complaisance, a true evil.

Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off. Finally, as the Civil War got more and more bloody, he began to adjure Heaven and the Almighty though not any particular creed. On this point Tripp makes much of Lincoln’s preference for ethics over morality. The first word comes from the Latin for “customs” and the second from the Greek for “customs,” but there is a world of difference between the two words. Morality, with which Lincoln had little to do, is religious-based, which means that in the name of religion, say, homosexuality could be proscribed as immoral—and was—while ethics tends to deal with law, cause and effect, logic, empiricism. Tripp writes, “Since boyhood Lincoln displayed a marked capacity to see the big picture in life and to not be swerved aside by smaller (moral) considerations.” This already sounds much like ethics, based on widely shared values and poles apart from the petty differences honored by opposite sides of the (proverbial) railroad tracks.

Over the years, Herndon canvassed many of Lincoln’s friends and acquaintances about Lincoln’s character and beliefs. The lawyer Leonard Swett’s reply was dated January 17, 1866. After describing a masterful handling of a cabinet crisis that saved Lincoln’s administration, Swett sums up: “One great public mistake of his character as generally received and acquiesced in—he is considered by the people of this country as a frank, guileless, unsophisticated man. There never was a greater mistake. Beneath a smooth surface of candor and an apparent declaration of all his thoughts and feelings, he exercised the most exalted tact and the wisest discrimination. He handled and moved man remotely as we do pieces upon a chessboard. He retained through life, all the friends he ever had, and he made the wrath of his enemies to praise him. This was not by cunning, or intrigue in the low acceptation of the term, but by far seeing, reason and discernment. He always told enough only, of his plans and purposes, to induce the belief that he had communicated all; yet he reserved enough, in fact, to have communicated nothing. He told all that was unimportant with a gushing frankness; yet no man ever kept his real purposes more closely, or penetrated the future further with his deep designs.”

Finally, without this great ethical Lincoln there would be no United States and despite our current divisions, we should be forever grateful not only to him, but of course to his Creator, who, on our behalf, brought him to an early puberty; thus, making our restored Union God’s country.

One of America’s pre-eminent historians and novelists, Gore Vidal is the author of Lincoln: A Novel, among many other titles.