MOSCOW, February 12, 2005 – Lincoln’s birthday – Was he gay?
Also my father’s birthday. He wasn’t gay. And he would die – if he hadn’t already – if he knew his youngest son was.
Being gay wasn’t fashionable when I was growing up – as it isn’t in Russia still. Boys and young men go to incredible lengths to keep anyone from finding out here – as we did in America in the ’50s and in many places unfortunately still do.
[To wit: I recently saw the film, “The Latter Days,” a heart-wrenching account of an earnest Mormon teenager who couldn’t keep his feelings for other boys a secret. The cruel, inhuman experience to which this “Christian” church subjected him was nothing less than medieval and barbaric. And it’s today. And it’s commonplace!]
In Lincoln’s time, apparently people were so busy surviving on the frontier that homosexuality wasn’t even an issue. There was probably a hell of a lot of it among the rugged, young, handsome and horny cowboys who spent hours – nay, weeks and months -- at a time alone together. Their flowing sap had to go somewhere, and there were no frontier babes to pour it into for miles – maybe hundreds of miles -- around. So I suspect they poured it onto and into each other. I think, as in “Secret of Humpback Mountain,” “pardner” probably had a special meaning known only to a lot of these “pardners” themselves.
And because of the social realities – not enough beds being among the chiefest -- it was probably also not uncommon in frontier towns. There’s no question but what young men often slept together – and they probably jerked off together and poked each other, but it must have been so common that nothing was thought of it.
So historians have generally ignored the fact that when 22-year-old Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois, his room – as well as bed- -- mate was his English coach, Billy Greene. Not only did they share a bed, but it was so narrow that ''when one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told friends. Greene also described young Lincoln’s physique in oddly admiring terms: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being’s could be.''
And six years later, when Lincoln moved to Springfield, he met Joshua Speed, with whom Lincoln also shared a bed for four years and who two early biographers call ''the only…intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.” “More important than the sleeping arrangements,” writes Richard Brookhiser in a review of a newly-published book on the subject, “was the tone of their friendship.” Several of Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's wedding in 1842 were signed 'Yours forever.’''
The book’s author, C.A. Tripp, a prominent gay author and one-time researcher with the Kinsey sex research team, concluded that Lincoln probably reached puberty at age nine, and since Kinsey had concluded that boys who reach puberty very early “become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience,” then most likely this also applied to Lincoln. Tripp, who incidentally died before the book was published, also attributed Lincoln’s subsequent irreverence to his assumed early sexual precocity, with which the fundamental religion of the day was not compatible.
''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he was in no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.''
To which Brookhiser responded skeptically: “One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp.”
In recalling my own journey into puberty and my subsequent inability – despite my deep fundamental religious convictions at the time that anything having to do with sex was monstrously evil and the work of the devil himself -- to give up my exhilarating new pastime even for Jesus and the keys to heaven, I would have to side with Tripp. The threat of hell itself was not enough to keep my hands off my delightful new plaything for more than a few hours at a time.
So I dug into my memoirs, Sucker for Life, and sent BB -- my Seattle author/artist buddy who had e-mailed me the NY Times reviews in the first place – the recollections of my first orgasm and my subsequent preoccupation with my wondrous new discovery.
It was the summer of 1946, and my mother, younger sister Nadine, and I had taken a Trailways bus pilgrimage from Orlando, Fla., to my older sister Evelyn’s home in Klamath Falls, Ore.
“On the trip,” I wrote in my memoirs,
One afternoon at Evelyn’s when Nadine and I were alone and I was finding the bulge particularly relentless, I unbottoned my pants enough so that Nadine, if she would take just one quick look, could see it, and we would let happen whatever would. But she never even glanced at my crotch, and remained completely oblivious of my raging hormones.
Another afternoon, I was left alone to baby sit [my nephew] Steve, whom I adored. He was a crawling tot, and I decided to take out my dick and let it rub over his naked bottom as he was crawling, though he couldn’t see it. It was a weird sensation. That night his mother, my sister Evelyn, was having a bridge party, and let me go to bed with Steve until [her husband] Gene came home and she finished her bridge game, at which time I would go back to my bed, wherever that was.
So I went to bed with Stevie and continued my exploration of the afternoon. This time I actively rubbed my cock all over his legs, and it felt so bizarre, like nothing I had ever felt before. I could feel the sensation of his naked leg against the tumescent glans pushing out of the protective foreskin. I was experiencing thrilling sensations I had never known, but at the same, it was strangely numb. I kept rubbing it against Stevie's leg. Without warning, I felt an electric surge and my body was suddenly completely out of my control. It was doing things I didn't even know it could do. I became aware of an odd sticky substance in my hand.
It scared the hell out of me, and I was paralyzed with fright. I suddenly realized this must be the white stuff that the kids at school had been talking about. I had just had my first ejaculation! This frightened me even more. What would Gene say when he came home, crawled under the sheets and found a glob of white stuff? I finally managed to overcome my excitement and agitation and to tame my cock down to a state where it could pass unprojected from my pajamas to the bathroom -- trailing, of course, through the living room, where Evelyn et al were playing bridge.
They insisted on chatting up this panicked little 12-plus-year-old who was pretending that he had not just experienced his first ejaculation; but I finally succeeded in extricating myself and getting to the bathroom, where I could explore more fully just what had happened. It looked the same -- maybe a little red, but no blood and not seriously damaged. I managed to wash myself off and get back to bed.
Gene was a very stern -- almost tyrannical -- father, and I knew that if he found out, all hell would break loose. So I just hoped for the best. Nothing was ever said, so I suspect that whatever minute amount of cum found its way to the sheet -- it was probably mostly in my hand -- was sufficiently dried before anyone else ever got into bed.
I have often worried that this might have in some way affected Steve's psychological development. But I'm convinced that it would not have, because he was only a few months old. I didn't touch any part of him but his legs; he never saw my dick, and in the dark he could not have seen the trauma of erupting ejaculate. And I'm sure that the subsequent tragedy of his parent's divorce and his mother’s Evelyn's stormy departure -- in essence, abandonment -- had much more traumatic effect than my rubbing my unseen dick over his legs in the dark.
In any case, from that moment of shock, pain, fear, and ecstasy, I never ceased to be aware of -- and curious about -- this newfound talent and couldn't wait to try it again -- and again and again.
And so I did. When we got back to [my other sister] Pauletta's (Iowa farm), where I once again attempted to survive the boiling Iowa summer sun by eliminating all clothes except a pair of short pants, I could look down and see the tiny sprouts of dark hair around my nipples. And just looking at them would give me another hard on and I would have to again get to the outhouse ASAP, where I would also discover some shadowy silk threads around the top of my by then again-throbbing cock. I probably spent more time there than in the house.
It reminds me of the joke my cousin Alton used to crack about his neighboring farm boy Cedric: "He spends so much time jerking off in the outhouse, every time he smells shit, he gets a hard on."
That's only a slight exaggeration of my state in those confusing, exciting, puzzling days after I first discovered the triumph of orgasm. My voice also started changing, and I started getting pimples. My inevitable adolescence had at age 12+ at last arrived.
BB’s reaction surprised me a bit, I must confess:
If your story is published while you’re still among the living, you might want to consider discretion. Honesty is one thing, opening your veins in public another. I could see the time when some zealous cop type could walk up to you and slap on the cuffs. And I'm not just talking about such backwards places like California either….
It’s no doubt good advice, but Holy blue blazes: A 12-year-old naïve, curious kid who didn’t even know what an orgasm was, branded a pervert and a criminal because he touched his unseen dick to the skin of a 10-month-old baby, even though the tot couldn’t see it?
These Americans are indeed a strange and psychologically disturbed lot. I guess I’d better stay in the Evil Empire where, though the government is rotten, the people are not so divorced from their human reality.
This day years ago:
2004-2-12: Chapt. #44 - Cold day for birthdays, good year for love
