What is an indisputable fact to someone is someone else's disputable fact.
I told a co-worker once that a new manager we had was gay and he, a
straight guy, refused to believe it. After a few minutes of querying him
as to why he didn't think so, he asked me, "Well how do you know?"
My reply was, "He told me himself." He still didn't believe it and even
after the manager arrived and told this guy himself the guy was still
disbelieving thinking we had made a joke on him. So never underestimate
what people are willing to believe or are willing not to believe. According to
several male porno stars who have more sex with men than I could ever hope
to do, they are straight and just doing it for the money.
Jeff, you certainly heard about the book published in 2004 or '05 entitled
"The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," published by The Free Press,
a Simon & Schuster company, authored by C.A. Tripp. Just as NOW, if
you intimate anyone is gay that isn't a flaming queen, there are people
who just dismiss any notions of these things. And yet, over the years
on shows like Oprah, how many people have come forward about any
number of things that have happened in their families that they say they
knew nothing about? "I had no idea." It's usually because they didn't
want to know.
Even when a teen comes out to their parents how many parents have
said, "No you're not." Or "You're just going through a phase." Or "Are
you sure?" Questions they'd never ask their straight children. People
are always discounting or diminishing gay people's lives. I mean, even
Rock Hudson's wife was saying he wasn't gay years later. Now that's
a woman in denial.
And gay means different things to different people. When you say that to
the right wing fundamentalists, they only talk about it in terms of sex acts
which they define as choice and dirty and whatever. They have absollutely
no conception that a person could be gay and not have sex. That there's
an emotional, spritual, orientational aspect of being a gay person that doesn't
involve sexual activity.
In any case, if you google this subject there's a lot of fascinating articles about it,
most written about the time that book came out, but here's one that was from
several years before the book came out, that is fascinating, concerns the polarizing
figure of Larry Kramer and entertaining to boot.
http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/04/30/lincolnPersonally, I have no idea about Lincoln but I do know that he wrote a poem about
"gay marriage" in his teenage years:
Lincoln's poem about gay marriage. The poem, which he wrote when he was
a teenager, may have been the most explicit of its kind for America in the 1800s. It reads: "I will tell you a Joke about Jewel and Mary
It is neither a Joke nor a Story
For Rubin and Charles have married two girls
But Billy has married a boy
The girlies he had tried on every Side
But none could he get to agree
All was in vain he went home again
And since that is married to Natty
So Billy and Natty agreed very well
And mama's well pleased at the match
The egg it is laid but Natty's afraid
The Shell is So Soft that it never will hatch
But Betsy she said you Cursed bald head
My Suitor you never Can be
Beside your low crotch proclaims you a botch
And that never Can serve for me"
As for the question if any of those films I mentioned will deal with this topic,
I sincerely doubt it; not even Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer.
Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, it was the "sparkling blue eyes" quotation that provoked my own "overactive imagination" comment.
Anyone who wants to know about "the intimate world of Abraham Lincoln" should be watching the series running right now on The American Experience on PBS. It's called "Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided," and it's quite good.
I will charitably ignore the insinuation that I'm willfully ignoring something obvious. As for "wishful thinking," I've seen far too many claims that this or that historical figure was gay on what I consider insufficient or misunderstood evidence. I base that judgment on my own professional training in history and first-hand experience in working with historical evidence during the 12 years of my life that I spent writing history for a living. I was working in the period from roughly the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, and the experience taught me how very difficult it is for people of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to enter into the hearts and minds of people who lived even as recently as 150 years ago.
If someone is purporting a book to be solid scholarship, then to write a sentence like the one about Joshua Speed's "sparkling blue eyes" is irresponsible and bad history. And that's all I have to say on this OT subject.
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