But was Lincoln? Here’s what I’d say are the most persuasive facts. Lincoln never developed deep emotional relations with any women, including his wife. Even the few snippets we have of early romances, or his deeply strained courtship of Mary Todd, suggest a painful attempt to live up to social norms, not a regular heterosexual life. His marriage was a disaster, by all accounts. Why? Well, ask Brookhiser in The New York Times, who tries to exonerate Todd from charges of being cruel and psychopathic as well as corrupt: “Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening—remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent.” Hmmm. Remote, emotionally unavailable, running away to hang with men whenever he could. Ring a bell? Not in Brookhiser’s mind.
Or take this wonderful passage about one of Lincoln’s early crushes, Billy Greene, who subsequently remarked that Lincoln’s “thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.” Brookhiser remarks: “Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing.” Gushing? I’d say. When you also realize that the primary form of gay sex back then was “inter-femoral,” i.e., ejaculating by humping between the thighs, you might get a slightly different idea of what Lincoln’s intimate was talking about. And, yes, they slept together—in a cot-bed. Remember that Lincoln was well over six feet tall. It was a tight fit. As Greene said himself, “when one turned over the other had to do likewise.” So just picture the actual scene: two young men inseparable and spooning each night in bed. Gay? Whatever would give you that idea?
For me, the memoir of Lincoln’s stepmother was also enlightening. Not that she thought her stepson was gay. Nor even that he “was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me.” Merely his reclusiveness, emotional distance, resorting to learning and bookishness, as well as a bawdy, sexually frank side when with peers. Yes, not definitive—many straight kids have similar experiences. But Lincoln was also the classic “best little boy in the world” type in childhood—one of the largest categories of gay male childhood there is.
He slept with his first major love, Joshua Speed, for four years. Yes, this was not as odd as it might seem today. But sleeping with him the very day they met? And doing so for four more years—when an aspiring young lawyer could easily have found lodgings of his own? No one denies that their friendship was intense, that they were often inseparable, and that when Speed finally left town Lincoln had a complete nervous breakdown. (This last, vital fact is omitted from Brookhiser’s review.) Speed’s and Lincoln’s letters detailing their approach to marriage are redolent of white-knuckled panic. Any gay man who has experienced the agony of a lover’s being propelled by social pressure to marry a woman will recognize the emotional power of this moment in Lincoln’s life. (Speed couldn’t actually consummate his own marriage.)
Yes, Lincoln’s fitful, reluctant engagement to Mary Todd had also fallen through. But he had never shown that much interest in her, had been distant and ambivalent in the courtship. But Speed? Inseparable. “Yours forever” as Abe’s letters to Speed always ended. And when Speed left him: “I am now the most miserable man living… whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.” In fact, of course, Lincoln suffered from acute bouts of depression for his entire life. It seems loopy to ignore the possibility that this was related to his being denied a real or meaningful love life. But then if you’re heterosexual and have never experienced such emotional desolation, why would you look in the first place?
What else? Lincoln slept with another man in the White House when his wife was away. To those who say this was normal for nineteenth-century men, I wonder if they could find another example of a president asking a young captain to sleep with him in his bed when his wife was away. They even shared a night shirt, according to a contemporary source. “What stuff” indeed! Lincoln befriended the younger man instantly, kept him in his close confidence, and refused for a while to let his company be reassigned away from the White House. Tripp finds evidence for several other crushes and possible affairs. Previous historians have noticed a “lavender” streak in Lincoln’s life and loves. Tripp’s own readings of the literary evidence do sometimes stretch things, but only because he’s working from the assumption that if Lincoln had been gay, would these actions, events, and relationships make more sense? The reader can make up her own mind. It seems to me that Lincoln’s emotional life makes more sense if one assumes his homosexuality than his heterosexuality. But he was not exclusively either.
As for sex, Tripp is very clear at many points that he has no solid evidence. But what evidence of sex was there at the time, except for children? It would scarcely have been reported. But equally, the standard for men in the past must surely not be that they were always celibate. The absence of acknowledgment of sex doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Lincoln’s extreme comfort with sexual bawdiness does not strike one as coming from someone who practiced extreme self-denial. Masturbation was far more stigmatized than it is today. So in those four years sleeping in the same bed as Speed, when and how did Lincoln ejaculate? It seems highly unlikely to me that in over a thousand nights in the same bed nothing sexual occurred. Lincoln is an icon, but he was also a human being.
The usual suspects have weighed in aggressively to counter these facts. The Weekly Standard, from its sophomoric cover image of a simpering gay caricature of Lincoln to its hiring of a crank to denounce the book as a “hoax” and “fraud,” is a useful exhibit in the degeneration of conservative discourse. But what’s interesting to me is that even if you gloss all Lincoln’s male relationships as homosocial or homoerotic rather than homosexual, they still paint a picture that would offend today’s Republican Establishment. Whatever Lincoln was, he was very at ease expressing love, intimacy, and affection for other men. The last thing he was, was sexually prudish. His early doggerel poem about the progeny that results from anal sex with another man—he has the two men married, no less!—would be regarded by today’s conservatives as worthy of protest to the FCC.
But today’s right-wingers are right about one thing. The truth about Lincoln—his unusual sexuality, his comfort with male-male love and sex—is not a truth today’s Republican leaders want to hear. They are well-advised to attack and suppress it. They are more closely related to the forces Lincoln defeated than those he championed, and his candor, honesty, and brave forging of a homosocial and homoerotic life in plain sight would appall them. The real Lincoln is their greatest rebuke, which is why they will do all they can to obscure the complicated, fascinating truth about the man whose legacy they are intent on betraying.
Life Lesson
February 7, 2005 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
Hillary Rodham Clinton is absolutely right. I’ve waited many years to write that sentence, but, hey, if you live long enough… I’m referring to her superb speech earlier this week on the politics and morality of abortion. There were two very simple premises to Clinton’s argument: a) the right to legal abortion should remain, and b) abortion is always and everywhere a moral tragedy. It seems to me that if we are to reduce abortions to an absolute minimum (and who, exactly, opposes that objective?), then Clinton’s formula is the most practical. Her key sentences: “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.… The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.”
Echoing her husband’s inspired notion that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” the senator from New York seemed to give new emphasis to that last word: “rare.” Hers is, in that respect, a broadly pro-life position. Not in an absolutist, logically impeccable fashion—which would require abolishing all forms of legal abortion immediately—but in a pragmatic, moral sense. In a free society, the ability of a woman to control what happens to her own body will always and should always be weighed in the balance against the right
of an unborn child to life itself. And if she and the Democrats can move the debate away from the question of abortion’s legality toward abortion’s immorality, then they stand a chance of winning that debate in the coming years.
For too long, supporters of abortion rights have foolishly and callously trivialized the moral dimensions of the act of ending human life in the womb. They have insisted that no profound moral cost is involved. They remain seemingly impassive in the face of the horrors of partial-birth abortion. They talk in the abstract language of “reproductive rights” and of a “war against women.” To acknowledge that human life is valuable from conception to death has been, at times, beyond their capacity. They have seemed blind to the fact that, as Naomi Wolf once alluded in this magazine, mothers and children have souls and that, in every abortion, one soul is destroyed and another wounded. And they seem far too dismissive of the fact that the concerns of many pro-life Americans are not rooted in intolerance but in the oldest liberal traditions of the protection of the weak.
All this has undermined the pro-choice movement. Its members seem godless in a faithful culture. They have come to seem indifferent to pain, almost glib in the face of human tragedy. Of course, this may not be true in the hearts and minds of many pro-choice activists. But, in the arena of public debate, it is the cold corner into which their rhetoric has condemned them.
How to change? Clinton’s approach is the right one. Acknowledge up front the pain of abortion and its moral gravity. Defend its legality only as a terrible compromise necessary for the reduction of abortions in general, for the rights of women to control their own wombs, and for the avoidance of unsafe, amateur abortions. And then move to arenas where liberals need have no qualms: aggressive use of contraception and family planning, expansion and encouragement of adoption, and a rhetorical embrace of the “culture of life.” One reason that John Kerry had such a hard time reaching people who have moral qualms about abortion was his record and rhetoric: a relentless defense of abortion rights—even for third-trimester unborn children—with no emphasis on the moral costs of such a callous disregard of human dignity. You cannot have such a record and then hope to convince others that you care about the sanctity of life.
Clinton did one other thing as well. She paid respect to her opponents. She acknowledged the genuine religious convictions of those who oppose all abortion. She recognized how communities of faith have often been the most successful in persuading young women to refrain from teenage sex. She challenged her pro-choice audience by pointing out that “seven percent of American women who do not use contraception account for fifty-three percent of all unintended pregnancies.” She also cited research estimating that fifteen thousand abortions per year are by women who have been sexually assaulted—one of several reasons, she said, that morning-after emergency contraception should be made available over the counter. By focusing on contraception, she appeals to all those who oppose abortion but who do not follow the abstinence-only movement’s rigid restrictions on the surest way to prevent them.
But even this is not enough for the Democrats to move the issue out of its current impasse. The party needs to end its near fatwa on pro-life politicians and spokespeople. Harry Reid and Tim Roemer are a start. The Democrats should learn from President Bush’s canny use of the issue. He is firmly pro-life. And yet he gave several pro-choice politicians key slots at the Republican convention. The new number two at the Republican National Committee, Jo Ann Davidson, is pro-choice. When the Republicans are more obviously tolerant of dissent than Democrats, something has gone awry. One obvious option: find every way to back Pennsylvania’s Robert Casey Jr. in his campaign to wrest a Senate seat from the most extreme and intolerant pro-life absolutist, Rick Santorum. Or take a leaf from Tony Blair’s book. In his cabinet, the thirty-six-year-old education secretary, Ruth Kelly, is adamantly pro-life as a matter of conscience and is even a member of the ultraconservative Catholic group Opus Dei. Her personal views on this do not impact her political position—or Blair’s own support for abortion rights. But her inclusion in the Labour Party shows a recognition that, on such profound moral issues, party lines are inappropriate—and often self-defeating.
In some ways, this does not mean a change of principle. Democrats can still be, and almost certainly should be, for the right to legal abortion. But, instead of beginning their conversation with that right, they should start by acknowledging a wrong. Abortion is always wrong. How can we keep it legal while doing all we can to reduce its damage? Call it a pro-life pro-choice position. And argue for it with moral passion. If you want to win a “values” debate, it helps to advance what Democrats value. And one of those obvious values is the fewer abortions the better. Beyond the polarizing rhetoric, a simple message: saving one precious life at a time.
Superstar
April 17, 2005 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
He was an actor. And his greatest and most innovative skill as pontiff was the creation of drama and symbolism. You only had to observe one of his peripatetic papal visits to see that, as I was lucky enough to do in San Antonio. The modern-looking stage, the vast crowds that this pope knew he could summon anywhere in the world, the carefully planned photo ops—they all created a series of mirrors focusing back on the man himself. He communicated as much by stirring addresses in dozens of languages as by a deeply creased brow, a smile, or a tear. This dramatization of self continued until his death. We have been told that his last gesture was an attempt to bless the huge crowd assembled outside St. Peter’s. He was on stage until the end.
Before him, none of this was imaginable. Karol Wojtyła took the painstakingly acquired, centuries-long mystique of the secluded, sacred papacy and cashed it in across the globe. His superstar presence alone was the overwhelming message—whether to those in Africa who felt excluded from the global church, or to the Poles chafing under Soviet tyranny, or to those Catholics in Central and South America battling poverty, inequality, and the growing force of evangelical Protestantism. Even English Catholics felt something profound when the pope visited Great Britain for the first time since the Reformation. The Church had always understood the importance of pageantry and drama and personality. But Wojtyła actually reinvented the form for a world of mass media.
It took a while to realize that this personalization of the Church—and its identification with one man before all others—was more than drama. Wojtyła leveraged this new stardom to reassert a far older idea of the papacy—as the central, unaccountable force in the Church. The Second Vatican Council had opened authority up, placing the hierarchy on a more equal footing with the lay faithful in understanding the tenets of faith. It had also led to all sorts of chaotic improvisation and confusion. Wojtyła shut this process down—the good alongside the bad. He didn’t reverse the council (it was beyond his will or power). But he ignored and suppressed it in critical areas. National churches were given little leeway. Dissent within the Church was forbidden. The pope silenced even debate of issues that were not of fundamental doctrinal importance, such as the prudential, managerial questions of whether priests could marry or whether women could become priests. These, he asserted, were eternal arrangements that were beyond discussion, even if maintaining them had led to a crisis in the Church’s very existence in some countries.
This man so hostile to intellectual debate was, paradoxically, an intellectual, although an idiosyncratic one. His faith was a strange mixture of esoteric phenomenological reflections and medieval attachments to various saints, miracles, and practices. He made few fundamental changes. But he resolutely appointed loyalists to every position he could, and he elevated the secretive and ultraconservative order of Opus Dei to unheard-of influence. On matters of human sexuality and the “culture of life,” he moved Catholic teaching away from prudential balance to eternal absolutes—that life is equally sacred, whether it is a nanosecond after conception or decades into a persistent vegetative state. The distinctions made by Catholics in the past—between, say, a naturally aborte
d embryo and a third-trimester baby, or between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” means for maintaining life—were downplayed. Why? Perhaps because the pope believed the danger of new technologies required as radical an opposition as possible.
Did he succeed? If, by “success,” we mean the maintenance of the truth in the face of error, then only God knows. If, by “success,” we mean asserting the truths of Christianity against the lies of communism, then the answer is an unequivocal yes. But if, by “success,” we mean winning the argument against secular democracy in the West, the answer must be no. This European pope oversaw an unprecedented collapse of the Church in its European heartland. Under his papacy, vocations for the priesthood barely kept up with population in the developing world and simply collapsed in the West. Protestantism boomed in South America. Mass attendance in North America fell, along with donations. And the quality of the priesthood went from mediocre to terrible. If you judge a successful leader by the caliber of men he inspires to follow him, then the judgment on John Paul II is damning.
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