Saturday, November 17, 2012

The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln


http://www.theintimateworldofabrahamlincoln.com/Opening%20Page.html

Who was the real Abraham Lincoln? Many of us memorized the words of his Gettysburg address. Americans learned about the social and political problems that confronted him and how he handled them. We know Lincoln by sight as well as we know ourselves. But his private life has been shrouded in mystery. and a very provocative and puzzling private life it is.

Accepted wisdom has been that Lincoln loved one woman, Anne Rutledge, courted another, Mary Owens, and then married disastrously to Mary Todd, with whom he spent as little time as possible. But close analysis presented here for the first time suggests that Lincoln loved none of these women and had sex only with his wife. He actually wrote of concern over his ability to perform in bed with her before their wedding night.

Dr.C.A. Tripp, who has delved into Lincoln's private life more deeply and honestly than anyone before him, lays before us a possibility that Lincoln's relationships with several men in his life were more intimate, and conceivably more sexual than any he had with the women he supposedly loved. For four years, Lincoln slept in the same bed with one man, Joshua Speed, and during his presidency it was well known that another man spent nights in his bedroom with him when his wife was away. A bevy of letters, along with other data, presented in this book leave open the interpretation that Lincoln might have been homosexual.

Dr.C.A. Tripp merely presents the evidence. You the reader are led to peruse it and to decide whether Lincoln's evident love of young men was purely aesthetic, or sexual, or both. The implications of this love on Lincoln's thinking and decision making, on his whole presidency, are also at issue in this very informative and exciting book.

No one could be more qualified to write this book than Dr. Tripp, a sexologist and psychotherapist, who was encouraged to go into psychology by Alfred Kinsey himself. Tripp worked with Kinsey for years and remained a dear friend until Kinsey's death. Dr. Tripp maintained a psychotherapy practice in New York City and taught at New York, Downstate Medical Center. His book, The Homosexual Matrix, was a runaway best seller, and this posthumous masterpiece is even more informative and startling.



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