HONEST, ABE?

Gore Vidal ponders the question asked by every visitor to Springfield: "Was Lincoln Bisexual?"

[C. A. Tripp psychologist, therapist, and sex-researcher for Alfred Kinsey and author of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln] notes that although Lincoln was plainly bisexual, as demonstrated by the four children that he had with his wife, there is practically no other compelling record of his heterosexuality. There are no girlfriends in youth.

Ann Rutledge (the great love that ended in her tragic death, which he forever mourned) proves to have been an invention of his law partner William Herndon, who, perhaps suspecting that the man he had practiced law with for 16 years had remained "uncomfortable" with women all his life and so needed some beefing up in the boy-girl department. Yet all evidence suggests that Lincoln's stepmother got it right when after Lincoln's death she said, "He was not very fond of girls."

"A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- indeed.