December 18, 2004

Abraham Lincoln was Gay - a woolly woofter.

And a drubk.

posted by Clockwork Orang Pendek 20 years ago
  • What a homo.
  • Hmpf. No pictures of Lincoln's perfect thighs or David V. Derickson (the bodyguard) to be found.
  • And a slavemaster. Maybe he was just really into SM...
  • Skirk: Lincoln never owned slaves. But he may have been gay, or gay-ish, at certain points in his life. Carl Sandberg intimated as much in his legendary biography. A better article about the issue is at the LA Weekly: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/49/news-ireland.php. And Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was almost certainly gay--you can google up the evidence if interested. Modern gay rights advocates don't claim Buchana because he was pro-slavery and generally vile.
  • is gay-ish like being sort of pregnant?
  • I wonder how difficult it was for homosexuals to hook up back then. Surely just about everybody was closeted, yes? How would Lincoln have discovered, for instance, that Derickson was also gay? Did he say that the stove-pipe hat was "fabulous?"
  • MCT, Lincoln would have known Derickson was gay because his cock would have tasted like shit. *crickets* Hey, I thought this room played blue.
  • This review of a book about gay life in 19th century Britain had a nice quote about the situation back then:
    "Nineteenth-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained."
  • I thought Lincoln was gay because he had a beard. *cough*
  • I wonder how difficult it was for homosexuals to hook up back then. As the article says, homosexuality hadn't yet been fully formulated as a concept, or as a vice. In fact, homosexual relationships were somewhat easier to come by than they would be in the later half of the 19th century. Around the 1830's, the Molly Houses were flourishing in London, and gay relationships in high society were tolerated as (somewhat) open secrets. A puritan backlash followed, which endured for just over a century, but even then the rules were (as always) somewhat different for the upper echelons of society. Money and influence could create an awful lot of blind eyes; so all Abe would have needed was a reasonably functioning gaydar and the power to enforce his own privacy. Aditionally, when you bear in mind that the power structures of society were still divided along gender lines, it would have been hard for an outsider to distinguish between a homosexual realtionship and a homosocial one.
  • And here I thought that it was only James Buchanan who had a lot of homosexuality rumors running around the internets.
  • wow, homosexuality didn't find its way into print until 1892? christ. what about all the ancient greeks and romans and all their many queer liaisons? all those trysts were never recorded, or spoken of in romantic poetry?
  • "wow, homosexuality didn't find its way into print until 1892? christ. what about all the ancient greeks and romans and all their many queer liaisons? all those trysts were never recorded, or spoken of in romantic poetry?" I interpreted that as the actual word homosexual wasn't put into print until then... but that could just be me.
  • Yes, Fabala's right. Before the 1890s, people had what we would define as homosexual relationships. However, the word itself didn't exist, and the concept was probably different. For instance, I doubt there was the same type of pressure to put yourself into a category or box of sexual identity as there is now. I think Foucault talks about this in his _History of Sexuality_, but I'm too tired (and migrane-y) to look it up right now.
  • Boy, I would just about dissolve in a puddle of glee if something came out about George W having a little boy on boy slap and tickle with a frat brother or something. That'd just about make last November seem ok.
  • What, and people are surprised? Has no-one seen that Electric 6 video?
  • The way the Republicans go after gay people, I'm not surprised that there are rumors of hanky-panky with the pokey bits all the way to the "top". Legislating hatred is the only way to make the dirty, sinful feelings go away.
  • Damn, Finnegan beat me to it.
  • Thanks for the video! At last, Lincoln's thighs.