Eric Fettman does precisely what he accuses a gay historian of doing: making extravagant claims on the basis of flimsy evidence. Fettman claims that it was ordinary and unremarkable for 19th-century professional men to share a bed for years without anything sexual going on. Oh? Men are quintessentially sexual. You lie in bed with a man nite after nite and something is going to happen. Abe Lincoln hewed fences and built log cabins. He couldn't make a separate bed for himself, or sleep on the floor? He was a lawyer, yet was too poor to afford his own bed?
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Human nature doesn't change from century to century, and men play around with whatever body is beside them at nite, unless a deep loathing forbids. I don't even claim to know whether Lincoln loathed sexual contact with men or craved it. Neither does Fettman. It is simply NOT KNOWABLE, and no one, straight or gay, should claim to know with certitude what in fact we do not and, lacking specific, forthright evidence, cannot know.
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What I do know is that Lincoln was NOT our "most important president", no matter what the fool Larry Kramer might say. Lincoln merely presided over a war that some part of the Nation was certain to survive. But without Washington, there would have been no Union to preserve. (Washington married a fertile, 28-year-old woman with young children but had no children of his own. Was he sterile? or gay? Not knowable.)
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I also know that straight society can't give up a single great man to homosexuals. A recent movie (that I will never see) apparently portrayed Alexander the Great as straight, even tho a History Channel special said plainly that he lay upon the body of his dead "friend" for hours until dragged off it, then wept continuously for three days and was never the same thereafter. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica has conceded that Richard the Lion Heart was homosexual, but you never hear that, do you? The schools teach nothing but straight-washed history, and gay kids are never to have anyone to look up to. We're tired of it. You have enuf straight heroes. Let us have our own, gay heroes. History, like Hollywood, is not all straight.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:03 AM