Was Abraham Lincoln gay?

Given the idolatry with which Americans worship the man widely seen as their greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, and the obsessive place that identity politics now occupies in the public spaces of the US, it was probably inevitable that the sexuality of American civil war winning ‘honest Abe’ would come under revisionist scrutiny sooner or later. And now it has happened.

A current documentary film Lover of Men and a hit Broadway comedy Oh Mary! both suggest that America’s first Republican party president, who won the American civil war and emancipated America’s black slave population, was gay. So what does the evidence say? There is no direct proof that Lincoln ever enjoyed any physical sexual relations with other men. But there is plenty of evidence that he shared his bed with other men – though this was a more common occurrence in the past. Lincoln shared a bed with men both in his youth and as late as the American civil war in 1861-65, when he was a married man.