Honest, Abe was gay … or at least bisexual, according to a convincing mass of evidence presented in a just-published book by late Kinsey researcher C.A. Tripp

The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln * C.A. Tripp * Free Press * $27

Was Lincoln gay? That has been a public question for only a couple of decades, even though the proof that his closest emotional attachments were always with men has been available to every historian who has written about him during the last century and a half. But in the venerable tradition of malting all great men robustly heterosexual, almost every biographer of the great emancipator has ignored, suppressed, or distorted the abundant evidence that Lincoln was at the very least bisexual in his feelings--and probably in his acts.

C.A. Tripp, a psychologist and sex therapist who had been one of Alfred Kinsey's assistants, spent the last 10 years of his life sifting through the vast Lincoln archive to redress the balance. Tripp died in 2003, just after completing this manuscript. The result is a rambling, sometimes infuriating, but always fascinating book that, as (heterosexual) historian Michael B. Chesson writes in an afterword, proves "at the very least, that in his orientation Lincoln was not exclusively heterosexual."

The debate begins with Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, the storekeeper with whom the future president shared a bed for four years. Straight historians have always dismissed this as serious evidence of anything, because so many men shared beds with each other in the 19th century--and Lincoln couldn't afford the $17 needed to secure his own single bed when he moved to Springfield, Ill., on April 15, 1837.

But Tripp provides ample evidence of an intimate relationship between the two men. As soon as Lincoln revealed his poverty, Speed invited him to be his bedmate. Tripp calls this invitation "immediately warm, embracing, and open-ended, more geared to desire than to accommodation" and points out that while bed-sharing by two men was not unusual, when it was "protracted or not explained by circumstance," it "bordered on impropriety," in the words of another Lincoln historian.

The future president also suffered a severe depression three weeks after Speed moved out on him at the beginning of 1841. Other historians have attributed this despondency to Lincoln's temporary breakup with his future wife, but Tripp argues convincingly that Lincoln's words sound much more like those of a lover spurned than those of someone who has just chosen to end a relationship.

"I am now the most miserable man living," Lincoln wrote three weeks after Speed was gone. "Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell.... To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me." Lincoln's letters to Speed were also the only ones that almost always ended "Yours forever" (a phrase Lincoln never used with his wife), and two of Lincoln's secretaries wrote in a biography that "Speed was the only--as he was certainly the last--intimate friend that Lincoln ever had."

Other historians naturally concluded that the subsequent marriages of Lincoln and Speed were enough to prove their heterosexuality. But Tripp suggests that Lincoln's letters to Speed regarding Speed's marriage show something else altogether. In response to Speed's first letter after his wedding night, Lincoln writes back, "I opened the latter [letter] with intense anxiety and trepidation; so much, that although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm." Before the wedding Lincoln had written Speed, "But you say you reasoned yourself into [courting your wife]. What do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it? Did you think ... of courting her the first time you saw or heard of her? What had reason to do with it at that early stage.... I shall be so anxious about you that I want you to write me every mail."

The argument that necessity was the mother of Lincoln's sleeping arrangements with Speed breaks down altogether as Tripp amasses evidence that Lincoln also shared his bed with at least three other men. A contemporary writes that A.Y. Ellis had "come up from Springfield and taken quite a fancy to Lincoln. The two slept together and Lincoln frequently assisted hint in the store." Another young friend, Billy Greene, remarked on Lincoln's "perfect" thighs, and they also shared a bed.

And although it isn't clear whether they ever slept together, Lincoln was clearly besotted with one Elmer Ellsworth, whose friend John Cook writes to him, "[Lincoln] has taken in you a greater interest than I ever knew him to manifest in any one before," while another witness reported, "Lincoln watched the two-hour drill with kindling eyes. He too centered his attention upon the boyish-looking commander. Afterwards he said of Colonel Ellsworth, 'He is the greatest little man I ever met.'" Ellsworth became the first casualty of the Civil War, and when the president learned of his death, he cried openly.