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The Intimate Life of Abraham Lincoln
By C.A. Tripp
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The publication of C.A. Tripp's long awaited psycho-biography, The Intimate Life of Abraham Lincoln, has garnered a flurry of mainstream media notices that­ both pro and con­ display a long-standing cultural obsession: who's queer and how can we know? Everyone is interested in the sex lives of the rich and famous and even the historically famous so why not just let it all hang out, as they used to say in the 1960s, and to great effect.

But the politics of these historical outings is complicated. Who gets outed? Who gets to stay in their historical closet? Who gets to do the outing? And who cares­ and why?

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For a very long time the mainstream media­ and western culture in general­ never wanted to hear who was gay because, well, they were deeply wedded to the idea of complete invisibility for all aspects of homosexuality. And to a large degree, they still feel that way: the best homo is still the hidden homo.

The very idea of discovering­ uncovering­ who was queer in the past was an invention of the early sexologists who wanted to figure out what made gay gay and how it fit into history. In 1897, in his ground-breaking book Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis listed famous historical homosexuals: Sappho, Michelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Walk Whitman. Ellis, a simpatico heterosexual, wanted to show that there were great homosexuals in the past. This began a tradition­ a genre, really­ of gay people making lists and writing biographies of all of the great queer giants of history.

To a large degree these lists­ sometimes even growing into books­ were meant to elevate homosexuality into a higher sphere and make queers feel better about being considered the scum of the earth: if Shakespeare were gay how bad could it be? The history of these lists and books is fascinating. They were particularly popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Douglas Plummer's 1963 Queer People, published in England, dropped names like they were hairpins. The master-volume of these books was Noel I. Gard's Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History. Here was a 750-page, cloth-bound, near-encyclopedia of famous homosexuals that was moderately well researched and competently written. Skipping eagerly through history, it covers a wide range of people­ Pindar, Saladin, Leo X, Charles XII of Sweden, Wild Bill Hickock, and Ernst Rohm­ and even has something of a sense of humor: Jesus, aside from being tinged with lavender (John, the "beloved disciple" is "the object of Jesus's unceasing special attention") is described as a "Jewish religious reformer." Clocking in at over 300 gay guys­ both the famous and really obscure­ this is the klondike of historical faggotry.

Feeding fantasies

Paperback originals with a pseudo-scientific psychological bent were extremely popular in the early 1960s when small publishing companies that specialized in semi-exploitative titles discovered that there was some money to be made from a gay readership. Because it was not yet possible to publish soft-core porn­ that would not really happen until 1965 or 1966­ they relied in "educational" titles. Books like the 1961 The "Third Sex," which reprinted articles from Sexology magazine, or the 1966 Casebook: Homophile, by Robert Leslie, are great example of pre-Stonewall publications that tout famous homosexuals. William Howard Kavy's The Gay Geniuses: Psychiatric and Literary Studies of Famous Homosexuals­ published a year earlier­ was so famous that it was a standard item on gay men's bookshelves (or probably more likely hidden behind some other books). The best of these is, without doubt, the anonymously edited Intimate Diaries of Homosexual Geniuses. Published in 1967, it is totally gay: a complete forgery, overtly ridiculous, it gives passages from the private, and unpublished diaries and letters of such figures as Plato, Oscar Wilde, Leonardo DaVinci, Caligula, Horatio Alger, Shakespeare, and Herman Melville. The writing is execrable and the very idea absurd­ "As soon as I lay next to him it was he who reached out for my stiff flesh first," 'Shakespeare' writes of a boy actor who has been cast as Juliet. "'Romeo, Romeo,' he whispered."

Intimate Diaries of Homosexual Geniuses is fabulous because it does what these books are supposed to do­ it provides us with sexualized fantasies about historical figures that we can use in reconstructing what we see has a trans-historical queer presence that, at the heart of the matter, makes us feel less alone in the world.

There is, of course, a huge difference between and the Noel I. Gard collection of semi-factual biographies, the Intimate Diaries of Homosexual Geniuses and Tripp's psycho-sexual analysis of Lincoln, but the lure of these far gay readers is all the same. The problem­ if there is a problem­ is that none of these books, no matter how well-researched or written, can do the other job to which they are called: convincing the heterosexual world that gay people are human, that homosexuality is a perfectly ordinary human experience, and that hatred of homosexuality and homosexuals is ugly and pointless.

Shadows still

It's illuminating that at the same moment Tripp's The Intimate Life of Abraham Lincoln has been in the news, the media coverage of Susan Sontag's death has been abysmal. Almost everyone, well everyone in New York anyway, knew that Sontag had, over the past four decades, been involved with talented, famous women: Irene Maria Fornes, Lucinda Childs, Annie Leibovitz. Even Sontag herself called it an "open secret," but the minute she dies most media outlets find no need to mention it in their obituaries. Here the mainstream media had the perfectly easy chance of showing that homosexuality was­ and had been­ clearly evident in the life of a noted American. But rather then plainly reporting the simple facts of life, they­ once again­ decided that homosexuality is better left unspoken.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com