I was a kid, forty years ago, when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. I
didn't even know I was gay. Well, maybe I wasn't. Although the first
signs of an attraction to phalli might have been my passion for
rockets... I did not learn about the Stonewall Riots, which had just occurred three weeks earlier, until much later.
But I remember
watching the first Moon walk on a black and white television at my best
friend's grandmother's house on July 20th 1969. We were spending the
long summer vacations in our country house in the Jura and we had no
television set. We had woken up very early and had to wait for what
seemed a long, suspenseful, time before the lunar module finally landed.
I was thrilled.
This week The New York Times published
several pages to commemorate the event. I was not surprised by the
comments made by Martin Duberman, after reading his recent memoir:
I was underwhelmed by the whole thing.
I couldn't understand why people were so excited about Armstrong's 'one
small step' comment. To me, it wasn't immortal prose.
By the summer of 1969, I had become very political. I suppose that's
why the Moon shot didn't mean that much. I was preoccupied with the
black struggle, the war on poverty and feminism.
Three weeks before the Moon landing, the bar that I regularly
frequented in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn, was the scene of a
pitched battle between New York's Police Department and the bar's gay
patrons. As luck would have it, I didn't happen to go to the Stonewall
Inn that particular night - though I later went and looked at the
milling crowds and the wreckage.
That seemed momentous. Gays had taken the lessons of the civil rights
and women's movements to heart. The effect of that moment are still
with us, 40 years later.
The current issue of The New Republic features an interesting and controversial paper by Sean Wilentz, the politically involved professor of history at Princeton, (Who Lincoln Was).
He uses Lincoln's bicentennial as an opportunity to evaluate recent
publications and the state of Lincoln scholarship. He is tough with the
books he reviews, in particular with Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln,
by John Stauffer (Twelve, 2008, 448p). I cannot resist quoting
extensively his comments about what he calls the 'speculation about
Lincoln's affection for men':
Stauffer nevertheless devotes the first
part of his book to an examination of what he makes of the parallels.
He departs most vigorously from the standard accounts by pushing hard
what evidence he can muster about Douglass's and Lincoln's sexual lives
and proclivities, and especially about what he imagines were their
homoerotic tendencies.
Douglass lived through an unsatisfying marriage with another ex-slave,
established prolonged extra-marital liaisons with at least two white
women, and finally found connubial bliss late in life with a much
younger woman, a former secretary, who also was white. He evinced no
sexual desires at all for other men. But Stauffer, the eager student of
transgressive self-fashioning and all the rest, is on the lookout, and
he brings up an incident in 1838 that fleetingly appears promising.
Recently escaped from slavery, standing near the Tombs prison in New
York City, and disguised in what looked like a sailors' outfit,
Douglass was approached by a sailor named Stuart. The two struck up a
conversation, in what Stauffer says "seemed almost like a pickup." In
the end, though, Stauffer admits, "the pickup stemmed more from
sympathy than any desire for sex," and he drops the story.
Lincoln is another matter. Since Carl Sandburg wrote of the "streak of
lavender" that he detected in Lincoln, there has been speculation about
Lincoln's affection for men, and Stauffer is determined to give it one
more whirl. He notes an intellectual debt to C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,
a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception, which appeared
in 2003, though he does not endorse Tripp's sensational claim that
Lincoln was "predominantly homosexual." Stauffer favors the more
diffuse argument, adapted from Foucault and now generally accepted in
the academy, that until the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality"
were invented (some say in 1868, others in 1886 or 1892), sexual love
between men was a repertory of acts and not a trait of personality. In
America, so the argument goes, sexuality was much more polymorphous
before the Civil War than after. Yet if Stauffer sees the antebellum
sexual universe as, in his words, "very blurry indeed," he is adamant
about one thing: "Lincoln's soul mate and the love of his life was a
man named Joshua Speed."
Stauffer's rehearsal of the old Speed story illustrates the difference
between a historian and a professor with an agenda. Joshua Speed was a
young storeowner and the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter. Between
1837 and 1841, he roomed with Lincoln above Speed's store in
Springfield. As was then the custom, they shared a bed ("a very large
double-bed," Speed later recalled); and they became, according to
numerous accounts, intimate friends, confessing to each other their
hopes, fears, and ambitions, while musing aloud and gossiping about
politics and (especially) literature. Stauffer works hard to suggest
that what he calls this "romantic friendship" included loving sexual
contact. As evidence, he presents a mish-mash of strained analogies and
literary references (including, inevitably, Ishmael and Queequeg) as
somehow telling. He notes that "male-male sex was also common in the
military." He dismisses as "rhetorical gymnastics" David Herbert
Donald's detailed denial of homoeroticism in Lincoln's and Speed's
friendship. And so he concludes that "there is no reason to suppose
that [Lincoln] didn't also have carnal relations with Joshua Speed."
The trouble is there is no reason to suppose that they did. Speed's
letters to Lincoln during the years in question, Stauffer records,
"have sadly been lost"; but Lincoln's letters to Speed betray no signs
of any passion or romance, let alone a sexual bond, apart from some
pledges of undying friendship. (Lincoln did, as Stauffer notes, close
one letter to Speed "Yours forever"--but Donald pointed out that
Lincoln used the same phrase in letters to his law partner and an
Illinois congressman.) As Stauffer does not bring Lincoln's sexuality
to bear either on his relations to Douglass or on any other later
aspect of his life, including his marriage, it is difficult to see why
the Speed story arises at all, especially given how fragmentary the
evidence is. It is also difficult to understand why Stauffer would
devote so much time and space to the imputation of a profound
homoeroticism that, by his own admission, cannot be proved, at least
with the available documentation.
You may want to read Stauffer's book...
2009.07.19
