If the loving heart of the Great Emancipator found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex, it would certainly be a stunning rebuke to the Republican Partys scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes. And a forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published in the new year by Free Press makes a powerful case that Lincoln was a lover of men.
Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor and author of the 1975 best-seller The Homosexual Matrix, which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and natural occurrence.
In his book on Lincoln, Tripp draws on his years with Kinsey, who, he wrote, "confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual component in a persons life from none to entirely homosexual. By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual."
