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:
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':
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