ADDED: The link goes to an article in The Guardian which has the title "Were Lincoln and Nixon gay? The ‘history’ book that is dividing America" and, right under that, this set of pictures:
The caption under that is: "Abraham Lincoln, left and Richard Nixon. 'It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,' says author Larry Kramer of his book." One gets the sense that Kramer is playing an imaginative game of hypothesizing that this or that historical figure was gay. He says:
"Most histories have been written by straight people. There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning.It’s ridiculous to think we haven’t been here for ever."Of course, he's right about that. There were gay people who hid it, so why not speculate about which ones were gay? What evidence is there? Lincoln and Nixon look so grim in those photographs. Maybe it was the stress and pain of denying and hiding their true sexuality.
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69 comments:
"Kramer also claims that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln not because he was unhappy that the South was losing the civil war, but because Lincoln had spurned him."
Ok... gonna give this one a miss.
Did he forget to mention FDR and JFK from the laundry list?
I am Laslo.
Lies told by gay people are still lies.
Love the Guardian headline: "dividing America" -- hardly. And his research method of looking at pictures to identify who's gay by "gaydar"? Oh, and the idea that the lack of a cure for AIDS is due to the anti-gay animus of scientists? No.
Maybe Larry Kramer neglected to research this.
I am Laslo.
I'm guessing that when the second installment of this tour-de-force comes out, I'll find out that I'm gay too.
Kramer was gay? That would complicate Costanza's "I drive them to lesbianism, he reels them back in" plot.
If it was secret, then how did Larry Kramer find out 200 years later?
"The book, which has been labelled as a novel to avoid legal complications..."
But will be presented in college courses everywhere as fact.
I am Laslo.
I hypothesized that Melville had repressed homosexual inclinations (unreciprocated) towards Nathaniel Hawthorne in paper I wrote in my master's program in 1989. Melville was despicable towards his wife and son, too.
An Althouse sentence from a previous post:
" You have to sell intentionally, painfully bad. It's not easy."
I am Laslo.
What about the Lone Ranger and Tonto? and Charlie Brown and Linus? and Harry and Sally? waitaminute...
How can a book practically no one has heard of be dividing America?
Some will latch on to the smallest thing in an attempt to associate themselves as part of the mainstream. It's hard for them to handle the fact that homosexuality is a very small part of the population 3-5%.
How come we don't get great gays anymore.
"Lies told by gay people are still lies."
It's not a lie if you believe it.
Does being a lesbian trapped in a mans body count as being gay?
PB, it's an essay written by the marketeers for the book.
The marketeers are usually better writers than the journalists, and they have inside knowledge. They compose press releases, and tell the journalists (who hold the keys to responsible journalism) that they'll give them exclusive access.
Then crap like this appears in a major newspaper, and people believe it.
I'm reading a biography of John Wilkes Booth and the author seems to have missed this important item.
This seems to be another example of gays' determination to make everyone enthusiastic about their situation.
If you look at old portraits in museums, you would think that about 90% of the people were both gay and constipated.
At least he boiled his 4000+ pages down to 1600 (assuming 800 for part 2). On behalf of trees everywhere, the Lorax would be proud.
It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,..
That kind of sums it up.
"Whether it is absolutely accurate or not"
Is the "not" meant to apply to "absolutely" or "true"?
I believe truth is a key element of history.
Most histories have been written by straight people.
How does he know this, if gay people were so good at hiding it?
Does being a lesbian trapped in a mans body count as being gay?
I was just telling my students this week that I have been saying this as a joke for 30 years, since I was their age, but I can't anymore because people take me seriously now.
1) The article notes that the book has little evidence to back its claims.
2) "Gay" was not an identity, as opposed behavior, until relatively recently. The California ruling that overturned Proposition 8 cited this. Even if you can prove that a historical figure had homosexual relationships, they doesn't mean they'd have identified as "gay".
There are millions of people all over the world today who have sex with men and reject the "gay" identity. In America they are disproportionately ethnic minorities.
“It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,' says author Larry Kramer of his book.”
Just more pap from the Gay Borg.
I mean, gays used to have Lincoln, Washington and Hamilton and now who do they have?
A few clothing designers.
There's been a huge decline in strength of character.
Is it the water?
"Maybe it was the stress and pain of denying and hiding their true sexuality"
That would mean that, from Larry Kramer's grimaced smile in the photo in the article, Kramer is straight. Uncomfortably conformist straight.
I think that's how it works.
I am Laslo.
Gahrie said...
Does being a lesbian trapped in a mans body count as being gay?
I was just telling my students this week that I have been saying this as a joke for 30 years, since I was their age, but I can't anymore because people take me seriously now.
Predestination is the movie for you.
The nonsense about using 'gaydar' to discover that e.g. Alexander Hamilton was homosexual (he very definitely wasn't 'gay', which is a cultural political etc artefact of the current barbarian age) is absolute, utter intellectual trash-- but perhaps that bit of idiocy is a reviewer's or journalist's, not Kramer's; barely skimmed at the Guardian-- which, in a gesture toward keeping her dignity, perhaps, at least relegated the notice to the gender identities politics section and kept it out of the books section.
One thing I do know with near-absolute certainty is that there are hundreds of orders for the book accumulating from so-called institutions of higher learning and the good professors who teach there.
Oh the things one can occupy oneself with as one awaits residence in the eternal Lake of Fire!
We need a movement to establish some intellectual rigor in this country.
For many millennia the Gay lifestyle itself was seen as one big lie.
The activists in the War on Straights wants to rewrite that thought as Heterosexuality is one big lie.
To the victor goes the History re-writing job.
An activist says 'It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,'
Maybe being an activist means having to believe your own lies.
Sexual restraint has consequences that are mostly positive. Libertines of both straight or gay orientation soon blur the lines.
Political power being an aphrodisiac attracted Bill Clinton among many in the 1960s.
The Judeo-Christian issue is not with gayness itself. It is a Sexual Purity issue whether among straights with self control issues or with gays.
According to an exhaustive survey by the CDC in 2014, a mere 1.6% of Americans are gay. Bisexuals are 0.7% of the US pop.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr077.pdf
That number may seem a bit "low" for activists like Larry Kramer, who live, breath gay rights, but that's the science, and you don't want to deny science, do ya?
Hitler was clearly gay.
The one president who was quite likely gay is James Buchanan, as was his veep Rufus King. Not a pair that anyone wants to claim these days.
Oops, King was Franklin Pierce's veep.
To be honest, I don't want to think about Nixon's sex life AT ALL. Yuck. Yuck. A book I would not want to read.
It's a great pairing of photos. Abe looks like he is sitting in judgment of Nixon. Everyone else is. Why not Abe?
While we're speculating, why not ask which presidents were atheists, humanists or agnostics, and which were among the circumcised?
Couple more possibilities
11 US Presidents Who Might've Been Gay
And how ‘bout presidential dogs that were gay? What's the story there. I was never certain about Barney always being toted around... ya know?.
Might be a good rad, but does not have the same rigid historical scholarship as "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter".
If it was secret, then how did Larry Kramer find out 200 years later?
It is a terrible and distressing burden having the psychic ability to communicate with the dead ...
A psychic ability to communicate with the living would be good for a blogger.
How did he overlook the gay walk of Marion Morrison?
We have almost certainly had a gay president, but it wasn't Washington or Lincoln or Nixon. It was James Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, and the only president whose term of office is remotely close to Barack Obama's for ineptitude. His term of office included the Panic of 1857, Bleeding Kansas, rampant corruption, and, in his last months, secession of Southern states and the attack on Fort Sumter.
Buchanan never married, but for a number of years shared rooms at a boarding house with politician William King in what they described as a "communion." President Andrew Jackson openly referred to Buchanan as "Miss Nancy."
I can understand that modern gays would like to point to important and highly successful figures of the past as being like them, but they'll have to settle for the most inept president in American history.
What's interesting, is that Kramer isn't gay.
'It may look like fiction, but to me, it’s not,
And this is what post modernism has brought it
What Big Mike said. How come the gays are so eager to claim Abraham Lincoln and so ixnay on James Buchanan........There's Alexander and Frederick so gay leaders can be successful world historical figures, but lots of those really crazy Roman emperors were gay. The record is mixed to poor so we shouldn't go out of our way to elect an openly gay president.
How does he know this, if gay people were so good at hiding it?
Bingo. Thesis demolished.
Next?
"they'll have to settle for the most inept president in American history."
Probably both of them although we may have to wait until after 2017 to find out.
I don't know why, but my mind went right to Team America World Police
Someone should write a book hypothesizing that Larry Kramer is not actually gay, just posing as gay because it's fashionable, and sells books.
"Kramer also claims that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln not because he was unhappy that the South was losing the civil war, but because Lincoln had spurned him."
What,the Onion is branching into fake history now?
One thing about that photograph of Lincoln. That's the Matthew Brady Photograph from February 9th, 1864.
Brady was photographing a father who had buried his son not two years ago, and whose wife was rather mentally unstable. He was also photographing a president who was looking at potentially getting thrown out of office in the election that year (Lincoln went so far as to write a pledge of support for a potential incoming administration in a sealed envelope). Finally, Lincoln had just appointed Grant to command of the armies. Knowing full well that Grant would fight, and also rack up heavy casualties in what had been an already incredibly bloody war where more than once the telegram had awoken him with news of disasters where thousands had died. This was coming on the heels of a rather poor track record of picking commanders up to that point.
Over and above the normal stresses of the presidency, Lincoln had every reason to be grim in that photograph. Great man, great President, but if you look at Lincoln photographs, you can see what kind of a toll the office had on him.
Perhaps the stressed, weathered look on Lincoln's face was due to the stress he experienced during the Civil War. It is apparent in they way aged so quickly.
Even if he was gay (Steve Dahl, Chicago DJ would call him Gaybraham Lincoln) it probably wasn't his biggest stress.
Perhaps transsexual, but not gay. Their frequently sullen countenance could not be remotely perceived as gay.
I've read before that Lincoln was gay. It was based on him sharing a bed at a boarding house with another man. It seems like a practical thing to do before central heating, but I'm almost sure neither man said, "no homo" first, so make of that what you will.
Nixon once said: "We're all Keynesians now."
Keynes was gay.
There, I just wrote the chapter on Nixon.
I think that meets the standard for scholarship nowadays.
I always wished that Larry Kramer would be more secretly gay.
If he's going to out famous political figures, couldn't he start with Hillary Clinton?
Lincoln was as queer as a $5 bill.
One gets the sense that Kramer is playing an imaginative game of hypothesizing that this or that historical figure was gay.
Hmmm...what do you imagine Obama and Raul Castro are doing right now?
Yes, let's just claim that random people were gay. That will make everything totally awesome now.
"There has never been any history book written where the gay people have been in the history from the beginning"
I'd say that depends on where and when you begin your history, and how precisely you define gay.
Men have been performing sexual acts with men everywhere and forever, but the social constructs they built around that were often quite different from our modern idea of gayness.
I used to have a lot of gay friends, and the most annoying kind are the ones who insist that everyone is gay. I grew up and stopped hanging out in those circles. I guess Prof. Althouse is still doing the things that I gave up years ago.
If everyone is gay, AIDS-inducing sexual practices of the sort that have killed 650,000 Americans to date, are perfectly normal.
Most histories have been written by straight people
Nixon wrote his own memoirs.
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