Was Abraham Lincoln Gay? A History of Intense Identifications

In Adam Loeb’s 2008 play Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party, a man is put on trial in Lincoln’s nineteenth-century New Salem for asking the scandalous question, “Is Abe Lincoln gay?”  If the question no longer scandalizes in relation to the presidency, it apparently still does so in relation to historiography, as witnessed by the attacks on C.A. Tripp’s 2004 The Intimate Life of Abraham Lincoln, which suggested the Lincoln was a 9 on the Kinsey Scale of Male Sexuality (on which a score of 10 signifies exclusive homosexuality).   In this paper, I will trace some of the historiographic questions emerging around Lincoln’s sexuality and some of the responses to that methodological conundrum.  I will suggest that the problem lies not in deciding whether or not Lincoln did it with guys, but rather what “it” he did and what “its” significance might be for our understanding of nineteenth-century culture and politics.  To do this, I will investigate some recent revisions of queer theory away from sexual acts or identities and towards desires, temporalities, and identifications.  Moving beyond Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s sanitizing formulation of “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” I will suggest that there is something about intense male intimacy that signifies both an earliness to sexuality and a social force far more disruptive than sexuality “itself.”  I will suggest that if it is anachronistic or impossible to decide if Lincoln was “gay,” it may be a good deal easier to decide if he was queer.  And I will suggest, furthermore, that Lincoln’s queerness—his struggle to find narrative form for the intense and atemporal intimacy he felt with Joshua Speed—helps explain Lincoln’s emergent opposition to chattal slavery.