The hatchet-job performed by Philip Nobile in the Weekly Standard on C.A. Tripp’s “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln” might be perceived as an attack on the whole idea of Honest Abe’s at least complicated sexual orientation. Readers who are interested in the intellectual honesty of Mr Nobile should read this essay of his from 2001, when he is full of spleen against what he regards as the “homophobia” of established Lincoln scholars in denying the same-sex loves in Lincoln’s life. He says in correspondence in the 2001 essay that he was writing his own book on the subject entitled, “A Harp of a Thousand Strings: The Queer Lincoln Theory.” That vital fact – a blaring conflict of interest – was never disclosed in the Standard. In the 2001 essay, moreover, Nobile states his own view quite clearly:
Incidentally, I do not argue that Lincoln was bisexual, but rather that bi-sexuality is a better explanation than the standard all-heterosexual one.
Later in the same piece, he writes:
I am neither gay nor an advocate of Lincoln’s homosexuality. But I do believe that bisexuality (he was bisexual by definition) is the best explanation for Lincoln’s sex life.
So the Weekly Standard’s reviewer was a strong proponent of the view that Lincoln was bisexual. He had his own book in the works on the subject. Tripp beat him to the punch – and is now dead so cannot challenge Nobile’s account of the editorial process. Isn’t this a conflict of interest that the Standard should have disclosed? Isn’t it relevant background for understanding Nobile’s own motives for trashing a book by a scholar whose exhaustive research on the subject may have made Nobile’s own book largely redundant?
A HOAX AND A FRAUD: Weirder still are the inconsistencies between Nobile’s Standard piece and his previous essay. In the Standard, he argues that “the Gay Lincoln Theory fails any historical test.” His previous book title was “A Harp of a Thousand Strings: The Queer Lincoln Theory.” In the Standard, Nobile trashes Tripp in part because he allegedly “papered over holes in his story with inventions (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon never noticed the homosexuality because he was an extreme heterosexual and thus afflicted with ‘heterosexual bias’).” In his previous piece, when he was peddling his own book, he complains that Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt “seems to be following the het line of all Lincoln scholars, with the exception of Thomas Lowry, who refuse to examine Lincoln’s passionate preference for male company (though Sandburg referred to Lincoln’s “streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets” in connection with Joshua Speed).” The “het line”? That’s more accusatory of Lincoln scholars than anything Tripp wrote. In the Standard, Nobile writes, against Tripp, that
Tripp was cavalier about the negative reaction from historians–ascribing their rejection of the theory to their unwillingness to admit homosexuality in their hero. He said that Donald told him that he would not believe Lincoln was gay even if Lincoln said so. Tripp was even convinced that another doubtful biographer was timid because he was a nervous closet case–until the man introduced him to his fiancée.
Yet his 2001 essay was titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Publish: Homophobia in Lincoln Studies?” So he trashes Tripp for the exact same thing he argued only a few years ago.
THERE’S MORE: In the Standard, Nobile argues
One of the biggest roadblocks to the Gay Lincoln Theory is the fact that neither friends nor enemies ever connected the man to homosexual thoughts, words, or deeds. Would not a secret of that magnitude have leaked out somehow, sometime? Tripp had Lincoln boinking four bosom buddies during his prairie years, but there was not a whiff of this supposed hanky-panky anywhere in the record, not even in Herndon’s exhaustive history of Lincoln’s frontier contemporaries.
Yet in his previous essay, Nobile makes exactly the opposite point. In a letter to Borritt, Nobile specifically disowns the idea that the views of Lincoln’s contemporaries or even Lincoln himself are salient:
[R]eferring to Lincoln’s subjective state of mind regarding the possible homosexual nature of the overnights with Derickson, you wrote: ‘There is no evidence that [the homosexual dimension occurred] to Lincoln.’ This observation is true, but beside the point. At issue is not whether Lincoln perceived his feelings as homosexual, but whether he had such feelings and may have acted on them. The midnight rendezvous with Derickson are the best evidence that he did.
He also writes:
Of course, it is impossible to know what “most people” in Lincoln’s day might have thought about this matter. In any case, popular perception is irrelevant to historical truth, whatever it turns out to be. Fortunately, we know exactly how one Lincoln insider reacted when she heard the Derickson rumor. “What stuff!,” exclaimed Elizabeth Woodbury Fox, wife of Lincoln’s naval aide, in her diary of November 16, 1862.
In the Standard, Nobile argues that Lincoln’s early doggerel poem about boy-boy marriage suggests nothing:
In his mid-1990s draft, Tripp regarded the verse as another smoking gun: “viewed through the prism of sex research, the poem is an open and shut case, a virtual certification of Lincoln’s own engagement in homosexuality,” he wrote at the time. David Donald criticized Tripp’s forced interpretation in his 1996 letter: “The person who tells a joke about ‘fags’ or ‘gays’ or ‘butch’ women may reveal a lack of taste but that does not necessarily indicate homosexual leanings.” Under pressure from Donald and me, the simple equation of the poem and homosexuality was dropped.
In an email to Oxford University Press, however, Nobile made a strong case for his own book, insisting on the importance of the Derickson affair as evidence of Lincoln’s bisexuality. Then he adds, to bolster his case: “Incidentally, did you know that Lincoln wrote a boy-sex poem when he was 20?”
WILL THE STANDARD CORRECT? Is there a resolution to these contradictions? The best gloss is that Tripp believed that Lincoln was a 5 on the Kinsey scale and Nobile apparently thought he was more of a 3 or 4. Both believed Lincoln was bisexual to varying degrees. Even in the Standard, in a paragraph buried near the end of a piece calling the gay Lincoln theory a “fraud” and a “hoax,” Nobile concludes:
The Gay Lincoln Theory, for all its jagged edges, may be a more satisfying explanation for the president’s weird inner life than the Utterly Straight Lincoln Theory. “I have heard [Lincoln] say over and over again about sexual contact: ‘It is a harp of a thousand strings,'” Henry Whitney told William Herndon in 1865. Leaving aside Tripp’s bad faith, it is not utterly beyond imagining that Lincoln may have played a few extra strings on that harp.
Are we really to believe that the vituperation in Nobile’s piece is compatible with a simple difference of opinion over a nuance? Given the evidence in front of us, I’d say that the real bad faith in this instance is Nobile’s, not Tripp’s. The Standard piece is a work of character assassination against a rigorous scholar who cannot defend himself, in the service of a political agenda that is indeed homophobic. Maybe the Standard’s editors were unaware of Nobile’s rival book and past attacks on the “het-line” of homophobic Lincoln scholarship. Well, they are aware now. They need to apologize for this lacuna and correct the record.
The Dish 