It also will cause no small amount of angst amongst far right Republicans if their party’s principal founder on the national level loved another man and slept with him for years. Indeed, if Joshua Speed (pictured at right, above) was in fact the “love of his life” for Lincoln, many anti-gay stereotypes are destroyed or at least seriously undermined.

Saw this on the Bilerico Project and thought it was very worth a comment! Some question if it matters, but I think it does. The more real people, who we can look back on history and see what they accomplished, and who were gay or lesbian (or would be labeled as such by today’s standards) the more we can refute the horrific claims of the anti-gay crusaders.

I haven’t looked at the C. A. Tripp’s book, where he asserts that Lincoln was a closeted homosexual, and I know there are historians who will disagree. But this is exactly the type of historical research that must continue to disprove the status quo and the re-witten history of the homophobes.

I probably have a few regrets in my life, but one of them is that I didn’t complete my graduate school work in Religious Studies. I was very moved by the detailed and scholarly research of John Boswell, who did tremendous work about the issue of Homosexuality and the Church. Unfortunately, he died too young, and no one has really picked up and furthered his work as it deserved.

Queer history will always have a chorus of historians chanting against it, but only if we keep digging and doing better and more thorough research, will we ever give voice to our past.

via Historians’ Changing View of President Lincoln’s Sexuality | The Bilerico Project.